Integrating Citizen Climate Deliberations for Impact: A New Analysis Framework

• In Event: Reimagining Climate Governance: Are Climate Assemblies Reshaping Climate Policy?

Abstract

Attention is increasingly turning towards whether the recent wave of citizens’ assemblies on climate across Europe have had an impact. However, there remains a lack of conceptual clarity around the range of potential impacts such initiatives can produce. In addition, the debates have been premised on an assumption that it is the design format of a citizen assembly that produces an impact and is missing a consideration of how an assembly’s integration into the political system may largely determine its impacts (Boswell, Dean and Smith, 2023). This paper proposes a new framework for examining the relationship between integration and impact. It outlines three levels of integration and three levels of impact (polity, political and policy), mapping the different types within these levels and the ways that different forms of integration are likely to produce different kinds of impacts. The framework provides a much richer picture of the value (or lack thereof) of climate assemblies, what they might be expected to achieve in improving climate governance, and how to achieve this.

Authors

• Rikki Dean, Goethe University Frankfurt

• Paulina Pospieszna, Adam Mickiewicz University of Poznan

• Jean-Benoit Pilet, Universite Libre de Bruxelles

• Brigitte Geissel, Goethe University of Frankfurt