1. General Introduction
As the global community confronts the multifaceted challenges of climate change, the need for innovative and inclusive decision-making becomes ever more pressing. Within the ambit of the CLIMAS Horizon project, this methodological guide offers a comprehensive approach to setting up and facilitating Climate Assemblies. Our primary contribution lies in shifting the focus from broad issues to specific policy dilemmas in a more balanced process. By doing so, we aim to foster deliberations that are both deeper and more targeted, ensuring they are rooted in a value-based approach. This guide provides a detailed framework on how to design all the assembly phases to achieve this specific deliberative focus, ensuring that participants’ contributions can have a meaningful impact on climate action. Before delving deeper, one might ask: What exactly is a Climate Assembly? Why is it deemed valuable, and how can its effectiveness be enhanced?
1.1. What is a Climate Citizens’ Assembly?
Citizens' assemblies are an attempt to involve everyday people in political decision-making and are one of the most popular practical expressions of deliberative democracy today.1 Deliberative democracy is an inclusive form of governance in which decision-making is achieved through discussion and dialogue, with the aim of developing and moving individual preferences towards a collective agreement (Dryzek, 2001, p. 1). Climate Assemblies are therefore an attempt to address the challenge of climate change using a deliberative democracy approach.
Citizens’ Assemblies bring together a group of individuals, recruited through random and stratified selection to broadly reflect the wider population with respect to key demographics. The assembly deliberates on the basis of the value-based and experiential knowledge of the participants and the information provided by different perspectives from knowledge holders, which leads to the production of a set of recommendations with the aim to inform decision making.
1.2. Why a Climate Assembly?
Climate Assemblies are a response to a double crisis: On the one hand the crisis of Western democracy and classical political representation, and on the other hand the climate crisis. Some civil society groups, experts, and political leaders argue that short election cycles do not allow political representatives to address the long-term challenge of climate change.3 In contrast, a group of citizens selected by lottery could approach it with intrinsic surplus value by creating a strong social mandate, focusing on long-term solutions, co-designing actionable plans, building public trust, and ensuring social justice through a socially-inclusive approach (Howarth et al., 2020, p. 1112-1113). In this spirit, and building, in particular, on the experience of the Irish Citizens' Assembly, the Extinction Rebellion movement in the UK and around the world began to call for the use of Citizens' Assemblies to politically address climate change, thus increasing the demand for these assembly formats. The European Climate Foundation and many governments have also stepped up to the plate, and have promoted and financed the implementation of various climate assemblies across Europe. In reality, both public bodies and civil society institutions have established climate assemblies at different levels of governance, triggered by a variety of factors (KNOCA, 2022) and with a variety of outcomes.
1.3. How to improve Climate Assemblies?
Climate Assemblies have become a revitalising force for climate action and democratic innovation at the local, national, and global level. However, it is not entirely clear what the real impact of their recommendations on public policy has been (Thorman & Capstick, 2022). Are the recommendations lacking in specificity or depth? Do governments base their acceptance or rejection of recommendations depending on their own agendas? Do the benefits of implementing the recommendations take account of the associated trade-offs? Do they lack adequate technical detail? Is the assembly perceived as being monopolised by a particular political group or section of society, thereby generating suspicion among other groups? The methodology presented here is an attempt to address some of the problems related to these questions through a practical and specific approach.
First, we believe that a problem that cuts across the vast majority of Climate Assemblies is related to the fact that climate change is not one single issue, but is composed of multiple issues. Mitigating and adapting to climate change will require society to make significant changes to the socio-economic system on which it is based. It is necessary to change the way we live, eat, move, use energy, etc. In this context, an assembly process with a limited duration may not have the necessary bandwidth to delve into such complexity with the required depth.
Second, what does it mean to discuss an issue in depth? As we will see in the following chapters, our assumption is that the most effective way for citizens to delve deeper into an issue or topic is to focus on the policy or value-based dilemmas associated with it.
1.4. The Keys to The Methodology
This methodology guide is based on the hypothesis that the potential impact of Climate Assemblies' recommendations on public policy could be significantly increased by improving the design of the assembly process itself, including both agenda setting and follow-up. Building on the OECD's good practice principles for deliberative processes (OECD, 2020, p. 130-147),8 this guide seeks to develop the principle of integrity through the concept of balance and the principle of purpose through the policy dilemma approach. It also proposes that assemblies should be permanently institutionalised to tackle the long-term challenges of climate change by breaking them down into manageable tasks.
1.4.1. Balanced Diversity
In discussions around the management and coordination of Citizens’ Assemblies, 'independence' and 'neutrality' are often emphasised.9 While independence remains important and will be highlighted in chapter 3, especially regarding the role of an independent organisation experienced in delivering such processes, it is not the sole factor to consider. The commissioners who activate the assembly inherently have political affiliations. This makes it difficult to abstain from influencing key aspects of the assembly’s design.10 They cannot merely entrust the neutrality of the process to contracted managers or operators with a clientelist relationship. Moreover, the pretence of neutrality can inadvertently strip the process of its democratic essence by removing conflicts and debates.11 In contrast, this guide elevates 'balance' as the main core aspect, applied to the governance of the process, the content provision, and the body of participating citizens. We propose this shift towards balance as a more tangible and actionable principle.
Achieving balance in governance could be contemplated through the inclusion of stakeholders, which would ostensibly enrich the process with a variety of perspectives and values. However, there are challenges to this approach. Direct stakeholder involvement without a clear objective framework could introduce bias and undermine the perceived legitimacy of the assembly. This leads to the pivotal question of who decides how and to what extent stakeholder perspectives should be taken into account.
In practice, this methodology proposes political parties as the above-mentioned objective framework that can be seen as legitimate by the general public and interest groups. The diversity of values held by different parties serves as a good enough proxy for the distribution of values in society, allowing a wider range of stakeholder perspectives to be mapped. Consequently, the basis of process balance is achieved through the formation of a broad oversight group that includes representatives of all political parties, reflecting the composition of Parliament, with party representation based on the number of seats they hold. The oversight group, once constituted, nominates experts representing different stakeholders perspectives relevant to the political dilemma at hand. Ideally, this list of experts should be approved by randomly selected citizens.12 The content group will be entrusted with curating a tapestry of information that is as rich and multifaceted as the societal debate itself. By weaving together these varied strands of perspectives, the content provided to the Assembly will embody the balance we seek, with the selection of experts being a transparent process that enhances the group’s legitimacy and the Assembly’s integrity.
Similarly, for the body of participating citizens, balance is operationalized through a combination of random selection and careful stratification. Existing academic attitude surveys serve as a foundational element in this process, providing an additional criteria regarding the policy dilemma under consideration. The assembly thus becomes a microcosm of society, both in demographic composition and in the diversity of perspectives, achieving a nuanced form of balance.
By seeking balance in these specific ways, this guide offers a pragmatic and democratic blueprint for setting up and facilitating citizens' assemblies. This approach embraces the complexities and diversities inherent in society across all phases of the assembly.
1.4.2. From Issues or Topics to Policy Dilemmas
Focusing the deliberation on a topic or issue in isolation presents two distinct but related challenges. The first is the risk of falling into an ‘epistemic trap’.13 In this scenario, discussions veer toward technical nuances and evidence-based solutions, leaving little to no space to consider the valuebased trade-offs that are often the cornerstone of political debates. This focus on technicalities may set citizens up for a task that is typically the domain of experts, which may lead to frustration and missed opportunities for meaningful citizen deliberation.
The second challenge arises when generic questions are posed for deliberation. These questions often result in wish lists14 that overlap with existing or planned policies, making it challenging for citizens to distinguish any new contributions. This is exacerbated by the fact that complexities of policy nuances are not easily grasped. Like the epistemic trap, this approach also lacks the time or space for considering the value-based trade-offs involved, which could be a basis for rejecting these proposals.
In short, the topic-based approach may lead to either overly technical discussions or overly broad wish lists, both of which lack the potential for significant policy impact. The key contribution of randomly selected citizens in the deliberations does not arise from their individual expertise or competences, but rather from their diverse value-based perspectives15 and collective ability to reach agreement on policy issues. Thus, the objective should not be to turn lay citizens into experts, which will not happen in the limited time available for deliberation. Instead, the focus should be on creating a setting where their diverse perspectives are guided by a value-based approach, offering a pathway to navigate through the complexities of a political dilemma while minimising the technical aspects. This dilemma approach to deliberation will also help to keep a balanced perspective throughout the process.
1.4.3. Tackling Manageable Tasks in a Permanent Process
To avoid the creation of wish lists, it is important that the task of the Assembly is both specific and manageable, not made up of multiple dilemmas. Addressing the issues in depth sidesteps recommendations that may not be actionable, thereby making a meaningful difference to other political processes. In this way, it is proposed to break down the challenges of climate change into parts and avoid treating the issue in a generic way. Not all countries or regions face the same challenges. While some countries have a lot of solar radiation, others have a lot of wind. While in some countries the main threat is drought, in others it is flooding. This approach allows different regions to focus on different dilemmas and not replicate the same processes, complementing and enriching a global and more coherent deliberation with many assemblies in different places focusing on different challenges. There is no need for a region with a similar dilemma and social reality to replicate the same process, it can simply address a new mandate and learn from the recommendations of previous assemblies in neighbouring cities, regions, or countries.
With this in mind, we propose a continuous process to address each issue in a differentiated manner. Because of the climate emergency, some people might think that societies should address all issues as soon as possible. In practice, given the limited resources available for holding citizens' assemblies, the frequency of repetition of each deliberative process for each theme could vary according to the challenges of each place. This pragmatic approach will allow our societies to adapt and address the most relevant and urgent challenges at any given time with Assemblies, while dealing with the rest through classical decision-making processes.
1.5. How Do We Create This Methodology?
The initial draft of our methodology is based on our experience as mini-public practitioners. The experience of Deliberativa, the partner leading this guide, draws on local processes such as the Barcelona Youth Forum or the Madrid City Observatory, regional processes such as the Besaya Citizens' Jury, the Valencia Mental Health Assembly or the Gipuzkoa Climate Assembly, global processes such as the Global Assembly on Climate Emergency and European processes such as the Conference on the Future of Europe or the Citizens' Panels of the European Commission, the latter shared with another organisation of the consortium: Ifok. This second Ifok partner also has extensive experience in Germany in local, regional and national processes and is continuously contributing to the revision and improvement of the methodology.
The initial draft of the methodology aims to be implemented in the three processes led by the different partners of the consortium: The Generalitat de Catalunya leading the Catalan Climate Change Assembly, Green Liberty leading the Riga Assembly and Ifok leading the Edermunde Climate Assembly. In all these processes, Deliberativa will play a supporting role, with particular attention to the Catalan Assembly.
It is important to recognise that this methodology is very detailed and exhaustive and its implementation will depend on the political will and resources available in each scenario.
While the main driver of the methodology, the dilemma-based approach, will cut across all three cases, we expect that not all other elements of the methodology can be developed in the same way. In a distributed manner, more specific aspects of the methodology may be tested in one assembly but perhaps not in the other, and vice versa. The aim of these tests will be to calibrate the initial proposal in a kind of virtuous circle in order to generate a final proposal in 2025.
In addition, other climate or similar assemblies in which Deliberativa and Ifok are involved during these years will also serve to test and develop different parts of the methodology. In 2023 this will be the case of the design of the Permanent Assembly of the Basque Country, which Deliberativa is developing together with other actors and the Basque Government, or the National Citizens' Assembly on Nutrition in the German Bundestag, led by Ifok and other external partners to the consortium. Both cases will be informally added as learning cases that will also feed into this guide.
By 2024, it is possible that the Climate Assembly of the island of La Palma will also join the series of experiences.
2. Political and Budgetary Feasibility
Any Citizens’ Assembly that aspires to a strong follow-up in policy-making needs to be established by the appropriate authority, i.e. a public decision-making power. Ideally, in order to maximise the impact of the assembly, this public authority, institution, or organisation, hereinafter the commissioner,16should be the one to establish the assembly process.
Establishing such an assembly requires a major commitment. The aim of this chapter is to understand the extent of this commitment and to help the commissioner decide whether it is feasible to activate the Citizens' Assembly process.
Firstly, we consider the question of permanence, followed by the political feasibility assessment, addressing not only the commitment to the outcome in the form of citizens’ recommendations, but also the role assigned to the commissioner, who will have an important voice in the process but will not control it. We then consider the question of budget feasibility: The commissioner needs to be aware of the scale of the effort, both in terms of external work packages to be contracted and internal services to be taken on. It is the commissioner who has to take responsibility for putting in place the resources, both financial and human, to enable the assembly to take place. Finally, we consider the possibility of activating an assembly that is not established by a public decision-making body.
2.1. Assessing Permanence
We noted in the previous chapter that making assemblies permanent is a key aspect of the innovation proposed in this guide. Thinking about permanence from the outset will be very useful for any commissioner who has led Citizens' Assembly projects in the past or who is very clear about what they want. For a commissioner who is approaching a Citizens' Assembly process for the first time and is not yet clear about how it works and what is wanted, a more pragmatic approach would be to treat the first assembly cycle as a pilot. In the latter case, a pilot assembly provides an opportunity to understand the mechanics and benefits of a Citizens' Assembly. Once the pilot is complete, the commissioner can evaluate it and decide whether to set up a permanent structure to look at other issues.
While this guide places emphasis on the establishment of a permanent process, it is equally equipped to guide those considering a one-time assembly or pilot assembly. Commissioners can effectively utilise the principles and guidelines presented here without the commitment to permanence.
2.2. Political Feasibility Assessment
In the absence of specific ad hoc legislation, the proposals and final decisions of the Citizens' Assembly will be called 'recommendations' and will not be binding. The commissioner will have the final say. However, the commissioner might want to consider that part of the decision-making power is delegated to the citizens participating in the assembly. Thinking and acting as if the process was binding, even if it is not and is based on the political commitment of the elected official, will help to make it more rigorous and effective. In this way we can define the first commitments to be made:
- At the end of the process, the members of the assembly will recommend what measures or legislation should be implemented to tackle the policy dilemma. It must be also assumed that, as a commissioner, it will be its duty to do all it can to implement these recommendations and, if it does not, to explain why.
Accepting the importance of these recommendations entails concern about how citizens arrive at them and how their implementation is followed up. The function of overseeing the good execution of the process implies accepting the governance of it.
- The process will be governed by giving centrality to a group of citizens who will participate in a Citizens' Council.17 This council, being deliberative in nature, will consist of citizens chosen through a democratic lottery and its members will rotate periodically. Its role will be to set the agenda and oversee the functioning of the Assembly, as opposed to the role of the Citizens' Assembly,18 which will deal with a specific policy dilemma. This citizen body will work closely with the oversight group, which will prepare, together with the project team, the information and facilitation for the decision making of this body. These key actors are defined in the next chapter.
In practice, setting up a Citizens' Council means running two citizens' bodies in parallel.19 Given the leap in complexity and cost this entails, we consider it wise to activate this second body after the first assembly pilot, once the commissioner has taken the step towards permanence.
The oversight body will be able to take final decisions provisionally until the Council is established.
As a consequence of this last commitment, the commissioner must accept that they will not have direct guidance over the assembly process. Instead, they will be part of a larger balanced group, from now on the oversight group, that will help to inform and oversee the work of the Citizens' Council and the project team to maintain balance. This includes the agenda setting that will define the policy dilemma that will create the mandate for the Citizens’ Assembly.
2.3. Budget Feasibility Assessment
A commissioner approaching the idea of a Citizens' Assembly for the first time is usually inclined to underestimate the scale of the project. It is therefore very important to understand beforehand the costs and the commitment of human resources required by their own administration in order to be able to assess its feasibility.
Here are some outlines to understand the scale of the effort for the first Assembly cycle, excluding the Council. This will be a 12-18 month single cycle process involving a dedicated project team of 23 people working almost full-time. Another team of about 6-8 people will work part-time, coordinated by the project team, and a large team of staff will be mobilised for the Assembly sessions, which could involve more than 30 people. Between 24 and 100 citizens will need to be informed, facilitated, fed, and accommodated during the Assembly sessions. Assembly working time is crucial: Whereas a minimum of 30-40 hours20 is usually recommended for generalist assemblies, the dilemma-based method proposed here requires around 55 hours.21 These hours are spread over about 4 to 6 weekends during 3 to 4 months.
Figure 1 shows a tree map of the different budget packages for a 55 hour assembly with 100 members. The core players are the team working throughout the year. The work of the operators will be more concentrated during the Assembly events. Logistics includes all costs related to the organisation of session events: Venues, catering, travel, accommodation, internet, sound equipment, projectors, screens, materials, etc. Facilitation includes the people who present, moderate, and facilitate the citizens' work. Recruitment includes sorting, contacting by letter and telephone, stipends for citizens, stratification and management of citizens. The project team coordinates all the work and supports the oversight and the content group. The content group prepares the content to be shared with citizens for informed and balanced deliberation. The communication team is responsible for communicating the process to the wider public.
Figure 1 - Permanent Citizens’
Assembly Budget
We will consider two cost scenarios, the local one, where it is not necessary to pay for long travel and accommodation for participants, and the non-local one, where it is necessary to include these costs. Figures 2 and 3 show some estimates for monolingual meetings with 55 hours of deliberation:
Figure 2 - Estimates for 55 Hours of Deliberation in Non-Local Assembly
Figure 3 - Estimates for 55 Hours of Deliberation in Local Assembly
2.3.1. Size of the Assembly
An assembly typically ranges from a minimum of 24 to 32 members to as many as 200 members with sufficient resources. It is an attempt to represent22 As with any representative sample, the larger the sample, the more representative it will be. Ideally, larger assemblies could be held to improve representativeness, but the reality is that as the number of participants increases, the complexity and cost of the process increases strikingly. In figure 4 we show how the budget increases exponentially with the number of participants:
Figure 4 - Exponential Budget Increase Relative to Participant Numbers
This non-linear increase in the budget is due to the growing complexity of the event sessions, while the budget of the core players remains largely unchanged.
The budget of the core players and the number of hours of assembly work, which are crucial for the quality of the process, should not be limited by the ambition to have a very large assembly. A small assembly guarantees a simpler process in which its deliberations can be more in-depth and agreements can be more effective, compensating for the less representative nature of the sample. In practice, we are looking for a reflection of the demographics of the population, which can actually have political representativeness, not a statistical one.
2.3.2. Are Costs Reduced by Internalising Services?
It is possible to find specialised staff within the administration, or even use existing framework contracts to internalise costs. It is important to identify these services or staff and engage them at the right time. This strategy can reduce direct costs by around 25%. See figures 5, 6, and 7 for details.
If training of administrative staff is required, it is important to remember that this will always be more expensive as it requires the time of external consultants. However, this will lead to mediumterm savings on similar projects in the future. Commissioners intending to institutionalise23 deliberative practices should engage in progressive training of their staff.
Figure 5 - The Path towards Institutionalisation
Figure 6 - Budget Estimation for Local Assembly with 25% Indirect Costs Reduction
Figure 7 - Cost Reduction Strategies in Administration and Their Impact
2.3.3. Feasibility of a Permanent Assembly Budget
Those commissioners who are willing and motivated to make the process permanent should also assess the feasibility of a permanent budget flow, which will inevitably be required. The costs should cover one assembly for each cycle of deliberation. Each assembly will have different citizen participants and address different dilemmas.
The Citizens’ Council should become active in a permanent process. This second body could increase the cost of each cycle by 10-20% due to the events of the Council, with a minimum of 24 persons, as shown in figure 9.
Figure 8 - Budget for Permanent Citizens' Assembly with Council Involvement
Figure 9 - Budget Estimates for Non-Local Assembly and Council Involvement
Each cycle, the commissioner will be able to internalise, systematise, and streamline implementation. In short, the cost of the process will be significantly reduced within a few years. Although there is not much experience of institutionalisation, the experts who have contributed to this guide suggest that after a few cycles, costs could be reduced and internalised, cutting out-ofpocket expenditure by around 25 to 35%. Another way to reduce costs could be to repeat cycles less frequently, for example twice a year instead of annually.
2.3.4. Navigating Financial Constraints
These budgets are based on experience in European countries and are indicative. For those local authorities who are looking for the cheapest price and still find that the figures are out of their budget: It is important to understand that the design should not go below 55 hours and 24 citizen members, and that all packages are essential for a quality deliberation. It is still possible to get the project off the ground if the commissioner has motivated and available staff. When we explore possible strategies to meet this challenge, several key approaches stand out:
- Shift to indirect costs: The commissioner will need to strengthen its internal team or make better use of existing supplier contracts. The costs will not disappear but making them indirect can facilitate the internal justification of the project.
- Seek external funding: Consider the possibility of obtaining funding from organisations that are willing to support the initiative without directly influencing its course.
- Form strategic collaborations: Partnering with institutions such as universities can be beneficial. For example, a scholar could take on the role of 'evaluator' as part of their academic journey.
- Engage volunteers, interns and experts: Harnessing the enthusiasm of volunteers, students, or experts who are passionate about the subject can be a cost-effective way to strengthen the team. Local government or educational institutions may have resources or programmes to facilitate this strategy.
By adopting these approaches and with a proactive leadership of the project team, commissioners could more effectively address the financial challenges.
2.4. An Assembly that is Not Established by a Public Decision-Making Body?
Although not common, there are cases of assemblies that are not activated by a commissioner. It could be a community, a university, a private foundation, or any other body that has no decisionmaking power over the public sector. It is always possible to activate an Assembly in this way, however, as has been seen, it is often the case that such processes have great difficulty in passing on their recommendations to a commissioner. Budgetary feasibility can be assessed in the same way as if one were a commissioner, but this is not the case for political feasibility.
First of all, the most advisable strategy is to convince a commissioner to hold the Assembly. If funds are available, it is more likely that a commissioner will be able to accept the political commitment.
In this case, this methodology will be followed and the organisation that has convinced a commissioner will have to provide funding without seeking to influence the process. Providing funds should not imply becoming the project team of the Assembly, although this decision could be taken by the oversight group if it considers that it has the independence and professional experience to do so.
If a commissioner does not agree to hold the Assembly, it may still be interesting to run the process in such a way that both the commissioner and other political parties can participate informally or as observers. The Assembly becomes a living example that can help political forces gain confidence in these deliberative processes and consider establishing their own assembly in the future. In this case, the organisation activating the process should behave like a commissioner in providing funds, but should not have a seat on the oversight group, which should be given equally to the different political parties or, failing that, to like-minded stakeholders nominated by them.
Past cases show that even when the Assembly is held by a commissioner, it is difficult to achieve adequate impact of the recommendations.27 It is possible that a well-designed process, following a good methodology, can have more impact than a poorly designed Assembly held by a commissioner.28 If stakeholders and public opinion perceive the process as legitimate and intelligent, there is nothing to stop the recommendations being implemented. Thus, an Assembly, ‘from the outside’, can also serve to show how best to use or design these kinds of processes.
