In Budapest, Washington State, Paris - and Camden - Climate Assemblies are expressing voices, shifting priorities and setting policy

Citizens Assemblies are part of a huge and broad attempt to improve the input of the public into policy making processes (see the many we have gathered under the tag of Democratic Innovation in this blog). But there are some patterns emerging about the topics and formats where they best catch the urgency of the moment - and one that’s clearly working is the climate crisis.

In the UK, there is a government-initiated climate assembly that’s ongoing at the moment (its interim report urged government policies to integrate climate concerns into its post-COVID economic response).

In France, the Climate Convention has just concluded, with its sponsor President Macron taking on all but three of the convention’s recommendations - and actively considering their top request, which is for the French legislature to consider formulating a law of “ecocide”, confirmed by referendum. This Twitter thread by Alexander Hurst is an excellent brief narrative of the process.

But we were struck this week by news of climate assemblies happening under political regimes that, at least from their current top-down executives, would seem enemies of the participation of the people in climate policy. Municipal and city ambition seems to be the key.

For example, in Budapest, Hungary, they are preparing to set up a climate assembly in partnership with Budapest City Council. Hungary has become a byword for intolerance and repression in recent years, as perpetrated by the ruling party Fidesz and its Prime Minister, Orban.

But the Mayor of Budapest, Gergely Karácsony, defeated Fidesz in last year’s municipal elections and has already declared a climate emergency for the city. In this Hungarian language interview (English Google translate version on PDF here), Dem Net’s Miklós Zsófia explains their ambitions.

Sweeping across the globe, to Trump’s America, we found this week a lively commitment to a climate assembly from the State of Washington, as described by local legislators and in other press reports. As one of the reports says:

Citizens’ Assemblies are not well known in the United States. However, the use of deliberative democracy in public forums was actually invented here in the 1970s. The Jefferson Center began to design and regularly operate Citizens’ juries in 1971. Stanford professor James Fishkin’s Deliberative polling techniques have been used since the 1990s to understand what conclusions the public might reach about a topic if they had the opportunity to become fully informed and engaged.

A Citizens’ Assembly process, if carried out correctly, can break through the standoff of opposing interests. Mirroring the origins of the democratic process from ancient Greece, the Assembly participants are chosen by lot, and serve only once. The makeup of an assembly should perfectly reflect the population of the larger public, effectively creating a mini-version of the state, country, or city from which it is convened. The random selection process ensures a representative population. 

Climate Assembly Washington hopes that by directly engaging Washington residents, the assembly will generate actionable and exciting solutions for lawmakers. The group itself will step aside at the point where a neutral organization, experienced in managing a project as timely and delicate as a climate assembly, will take on the work of coordinating the project. The group advocates for a process, not an outcome, as it is appropriate for the citizens of the state to determine the best steps forward.

And down to A/UK’s doorstep, we were delighted to see that the London district of Camden had not only completed their climate assembly, but in June approved a “five year programme of activities to ensure a carbon-free borough”. The flagship policies of which are “increasing the number of segregated cycle routes, requiring all new major developments to be zero carbon and switching the Council’s energy supplies to 100% renewable sources” - directly inspired by the assembly process.

Finally, here’s a survey from the Carnegie Europe site, canvassing experts on what they think about citizen assemblies being a spur to climate actions… It’s a varied response.