By Ines Omann*
Addressing the climate crisis requires deep and rapid social and economic transformations that will have significant impacts on citizens’ lives and behaviours. There is a growing recognition that such transformations need to engage the public directly (Averchenkova 2024).
Climate assemblies in the form of so-called “mini-publics” are a mode of involving the public in which a lot of hope is put these days. The OECD talks about a “deliberative wave” of citizens’ assemblies. At the peak of that wave are climate assemblies. Since the French Citizens’ Convention for the Climate began its work in October 2019, over 170 climate assemblies have taken place across Europe, of which more than a dozen at the national level, including Austria (see below), France, Germany, Scotland, UK, Denmark, Spain, and, currently, Sweden and the Netherlands (Smith, 2024).
Experience to date shows that climate assemblies can indeed be an effective tool for public participation, while at the same time making citizens more climate aware and politically confident and strengthening participatory democracy. They offer a great opportunity for civil society to advance public and political debate on climate action towards better quality and more robust and more legitimate climate policies, and can potentially help increase public acceptance, break political deadlocks and minimise social backlash against urgently needed climate policies. However, although hopes are high, expectations have, for various reasons, not always been met. Below, I give an overview of the Austrian climate assembly — which I co-coordinated for the Austrian Ministry for Climate Action — and reflect on its associated hopes, expectations and outcomes. But first, a brief description of what makes up a climate assembly.
What is a climate assembly?
A Climate Assembly is a form of deliberative public participation with three important key features: a) the random selection of participants amongst the local population, usually aiming for representativeness, through a democratic lottery and sortition process in terms of socioeconomic, gender, spatial and sometimes political characteristics; b) a facilitated learning and deliberation process amongst these participants on a topic connected to climate policy; and c) the decision on recommendations as an outcome.
Climate assemblies can take different shapes. Besides taking place at the national or sub-national level, one can differentiate between ad hoc and permanent assemblies, as well as between mixed and pure citizens’ assemblies. Ad hoc assemblies are usually concerned with one specific topic or remit and are called into life on specific occasions. Permanent assemblies (e.g., in Brussels, Milan, East-Belgium) are recurrent in a specific location and institutionally embedded into local democratic structures on the longer term. Each cycle of a permanent climate assembly can be concerned with a specific and new topic, or the topic of one cycle can be built upon the outcomes of the previous cycle.
Usually, the participants of climate assemblies all stem from the local population and hold no other stakes. Yet sometimes, it can make sense to implement mixed climate assemblies, where citizens, policy makers (politicians, civil servants), and other stakeholders, such as local entrepreneurs, NGOs, initiatives and unions participate together. The sessions of a mixed climate assembly can either take place with everyone together, as in the case of Ravensburg (Germany) or the Dutch municipal concept ‘G1000 – The whole system in one room’, or they can follow a sequential design, as in Erlangen (Germany), where citizens and stakeholders sometimes meet all together and sometimes deliberate separately.
The Austrian Climate Assembly
The first national Austrian Climate Assembly (Klimarat) was conducted from January to June 2022 (six in-person weekends). It had a clear aim: provide policy recommendation that support reaching climate neutrality by 2040. The Klimarat was organized in response to one of the demands of a citizens’ initiative on climate protection (Klimavolksbegehren) in 2020. In 2021, the parliament handed over the responsibility of organising a climate assembly to the Ministry for Climate Action.
The governance structure of the Klimarat was quite comprehensive with a core team, a facilitation and organisations team (with about 30 persons), a scientific advisory board, a stakeholder advisory board, a communication team and civil society engagement officers.
Statistics Austria was allocated the task of recruiting 100 participants by random stratified sampling through a two-stage civic lottery. The criteria applied were age, gender, education, urban/rural, region, income-level and having lived in Austria for at least five years.
The Klimarat process itself was organised with a mixture of scientific input, group and plenary discussions, market places and evening talks with experts from ministry and media, and also included non-verbal exercises to foster team building and support creativity.
Recommendations were developed in five thematic fields (two groups were organised per team): mobility, housing, energy, production and consumption, and food and land use. Two transversal themes were also identified — global responsibility and social justice — which were considered by all groups.
In weekend 4, the Assembly engaged with the Stakeholder Advisory Board and with politicians from all parties represented in the parliament, which was an important step in the process, while also a reality check that led to some frustration among the participants.
Recommendations were first developed and decided in the working group, then in the workstream and finally in the plenary. The decision making was done via systemic consensus, meaning that only those recommendations against which no strong resistance existed, were accepted. Where this was the case, the recommendation was discussed and eventually reformulated, until there was no longer a veto. In the end, 93 recommendations were approved. These were then summarised in a public report, which was handed over to the government soon after the last weekend.
Evaluation
One of the success factors of the Klimarat was the communication and press work. A professional communication team worked closely with the core team of the Klimarat to ensure publicity and transparency. Amongst others they organised press conferences and got in contact with journalists throughout the process. Participants who wanted to be put in contact with media got a special training.
The organisers held the view that involving the public in the process would increase legitimacy of the process and the social acceptance of the implementation of (radical) recommendations. However, there are not many climate assemblies that have done this successfully. In the Klimarat, an online consultation using the Pol.is platform was opened in the middle of the process. The interested public was able to rate 100 statements formulated by the Assembly and to add their own ideas. Around 6,000 people participated. The results were then discussed by the Assembly.
A scientific evaluation team accompanied the Klimarat with observations, interviews and surveys. The results showed that the expectations of the organisers and the commissioners to inform and empower the citizens, to offer a safe space where deliberation and serious conversation would happen, and to support the development of strong recommendations were fulfilled (Buzogany et al. 2022, Praprotnik et al. 2022). One could say the experiment of applying a new democratic instrument was a success.
Nevertheless, there remains a shale aftertaste. On the one hand, there was weak political support during the process (only one political party pro-actively supported the Klimarat; the bigger partner in the government even sabotaged it). On the other hand, very few concrete steps have been taken on the national level to follow up on the recommendations, despite the final results being widely reported across different media formats and following the publication of the Assembly’s final report. Even a spontaneous rally in support of the climate assembly took place, organised by Fridays For Future. One of the few responses was a report by seven ministries, commenting on each of the recommendations and the promise that further work is taking place as part of the preparation for the government’s updated National Energy and Climate Plan.
Luckily, the participants got active themselves by founding an association and pushing — quite successfully — for the implementation of the results on municipal, regional and federal state levels. Further sub-national climate assemblies are planned in Austria as a result.
Conclusions
The first wave of climate assemblies provides evidence that citizens are willing and able to come to robust policy recommendations on complex and controversial aspects of climate policy, often more radical solutions that politicians would suggest.
However, although they have had some notable impacts on climate policy, public debate and assembly members’ attitudes and behaviours, this novel democratic institution has not been institutionalised and embedded within our political systems. How this can be done should be the priority focus of further research and experimentation with citizens’ assemblies.
(Photocredits: Klimarat – Karo Pernegger)
*I write this hot topic in my roles as coordinator and moderator of past citizens’ assemblies and as a board member of KNOCA (the Knowledge Network on Climate Assemblies). KNOCA is a European-based network, currently funded by the European Climate Foundation, that aims to improve the commissioning, design, implementation, impact and evaluation of climate assemblies using evidence, knowledge exchange and dialogue. Find out more at https://knoca.eu/.