The Scope of Climate Assemblies: Lessons from the Climate Assembly UK

Stephen Elstub, Jayne Carrick, David M. Farrell and Patricia Mockler
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Stephen Elstub: Department of Politics, School of Geography, Politics and Sociology, Newcastle University, Newcastle NE1 7RU, UK
Jayne Carrick: Department of Politics, School of Geography, Politics and Sociology, Newcastle University, Newcastle NE1 7RU, UK
David M. Farrell: School of Politics and International Relations, University College Dublin, D04 V1W8 Dublin, Ireland
Patricia Mockler: Department of Political Studies, Queens University, Kingston, ON K7L 3N6, Canada

Sustainability, 2021, vol. 13, issue 20, 1-17

Abstract: In recent times we have seen a spate of climate assemblies across Europe as the climate emergency gains increasing prominence in the political agenda and as the citizens’ assembly approach to public engagement gains popularity. However, there has been little empirical research on how the scope of citizens’ assemblies affects the internal logic of the assembly process and its impacts on external policy actors. This is a significant oversight given the power of agenda setting. It is also of particular importance for climate assemblies given the exceptional scale and complexity of climate change, as well as the need for co-ordination across all policy areas and types of governance to address it. In this paper, we start to address this gap through an in-depth case analysis of the Climate Assembly UK. We adopt a mixed methods approach, combining surveys of the assembly members and witnesses, interviews with the assembly members, organisers, MPs, parliamentary staff, and government civil servants, and non-participant observation of the process. We find that attempts to adapt the assembly’s scope to the scale of the climate change issue compromised assembly member learning, the co-ordination of the resulting recommendations, assembly member endorsement of the recommendations, and the extent of their impact on parliament and government. We argue that more democratization in setting the agenda could help combat these issues.

Keywords: citizens’ assemblies; climate change; decarbonization; agenda setting; deliberative democracy; mini-publics; environmental politics (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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