World wide views on global warming: evaluation of a public debate

Abstract

On 26 September 2009 a public debate was held simultaneously in 38 different countries about global warming, in preparation for the climate negotiations that were to be held in December 2009 in Copenhagen (the COP15). This was the first time that an international public debate of this size was organised. In this experiment – on initiative of the Danish Minister of the Environment (host of COP15) – an effort was made to include popular voices from all over the world in the political debate on climate policy. Such a debate needs close scrutiny in order to develop lessons for new steps in global citizen participation. In this paper we want to sketch some of these lessons. We will first briefly argue that a public debate regarding global warming is necessary because of the different dimensions of uncertainty and controversy that surround this topic; global warming is a paradigmatic case of a so-called unstructured problem. Next, we will set out a number of criteria for the evaluation of debates about unstructured problems, such as ‘inclusivity’ and ‘the absence of power differences’. Finally, we will evaluate the debate. In the debate form that was used, resembling that of the ‘deliberative poll’, information has to be offered in a structured manner and this leaves little room to stimulate an interaction between experts and lay people. For example, open expert controversy could have been emphasised more. This evaluation should gives us an indication of what needs to be improved in future exercises with public debate.