Citizens’ Assemblies Can Be a Tool to Build for Our Democracy and Climate
By Catherine Fraser
Faith in government and democracy is near an all-time low — with only about 20% of Americans saying they trust the government most of the time.
This lower faith in government, as many have mapped, has everything to do with the decline of civil society and social fabrics across the U.S., which has spawned rising polarization and social isolation since the 1960s. And neoliberal politics have done little to remedy deep-seated and mounting economic inequality, which, experts note, has fueled the rise of Donald Trump.
Of the many dangers foreshadowed by Trump’s return, one particularly alarming threat is his plan to torpedo progress made on an issue where we cannot afford any setbacks: climate change.
In workshops and focus groups across the country, Data for Progress has consistently found widespread distrust of all levels of government, especially when it comes to the rollout of climate technologies and policy. From California to the Gulf Coast and western Pennsylvania, these efforts to understand community attitudes toward the local deployment of climate infrastructure projects have demonstrated that many Americans don’t feel that the government is working for them, with few able to name a trusted local institution or actor.
In this context, Dr. Holly Jean Buck has called for a renewed commitment to conversation and public engagement — particularly regarding building climate infrastructure.
Today, climate infrastructure projects face local opposition from communities of all kinds, jeopardizing our climate goals and the rapid buildout of the climate technologies — like renewable energy and carbon dioxide removal — that we need to decarbonize. Projects can face opposition from local communities due to a wide range of concerns, with apprehension around environmental impacts, property values, and lack of Tribal and community consultation having stalled and stopped new development projects across the country.
Climate justice in technology deployment requires decarbonizing at the pace and scale needed while addressing persistent global inequalities, ensuring restorative justice, and advancing democracy. To that end, a just transition requires first asking communities what they envision for their futures — and if and how climate technologies and policy can be a means to a more equitable end.
Citizens’ assemblies can do just that.
While citizens’ assemblies date to ancient Athens, they have been used all over the world, particularly in Europe. Much like jury duty, citizens’ assemblies bring together a random, representative sample of people from a given community to learn about and deliberate on a given issue, and ultimately craft and deliver a series of recommendations for government officials to implement. Participants are compensated, often by government or philanthropic funds, with experts providing technical knowledge and education during different stages of an assembly.
By selecting a random and representative cross section of a population, citizens’ assemblies can enable inclusive participation in democracy. In contrast, community meetings or regulatory hearings are often inaccessible to a broad swath of the population, who may work multiple jobs or on weekends, lack child care, face a language barrier, or be otherwise disenfranchised.
In Oregon and California, Health Democracy convened citizens’ assemblies to determine the future use of a local fairground, evaluate state ballot measures, and consider a raise for local government officials.
Citizens’ assemblies have led to positive outcomes, like decreased polarization and increased belief in people’s ability to influence government decisions. They’ve also led to ambitious policy agendas, with a 2017 citizens’ assembly in Ireland recommending (and ultimately leading to) the legalization of abortion. In France, 150 citizens were tasked with crafting recommendations to reduce the country’s carbon emissions by 40% by 2030 compared with 1990 levels. The citizens’ assembly offered a number of recommendations, from mandating recycling to banning new airports in France and lowering the national speed limit. Though French President Emmanuel Macron ultimately went back on his initial promise to recommend all of the assembly’s recommendations to Parliament, France’s experience demonstrates the ability of ordinary citizens to craft bold and forward-thinking policy.
Across the climate movement, many extol the importance of building social license for decarbonization and earning community consent for new climate infrastructure projects. Citizens’ assemblies can be one tool for earning such consent through deliberative democracy.
Too often, climate action focuses on individual solutions — driving less, switching to a more plant-based diet — rather than collective ones. Small changes and nudges won’t fix a planet-sized problem that requires building an unprecedented amount of climate infrastructure. Instead, municipalities, states, and other governments can bring together small publics to envision equitable climate action, a self-determined and dignified phaseout of and transition away from fossil fuels, and local deployment of renewable energy technologies.
For example, the state of California could bring together citizens to lay out a vision for equity-based climate infrastructure development and siting, identifying which communities should host new technologies to ensure that the same communities that have historically borne the brunt of industrial harms aren’t forced to shoulder them once again. Or, a county in Texas could assemble fossil fuel workers and environmental justice advocates to plan the future of fossil fuel infrastructure, carbon capture and removal technologies, and a managed transition for workers and frontline communities.
With election postmortems continuing to roll in, one thing is clear: American society is deeply polarized and frayed. Over the last two years, however, Data for Progress has assembled more than a dozen workshops with Americans from all over the country — in red states and blue states, wealthy and low-income communities, heavily industrialized and highly privileged places, urban and rural areas — to talk about climate infrastructure and their collective vision for their community’s future.
While not citizens’ assemblies, our workshops can create similar circumstances, where a group of perfect strangers comes together for conversation, often leading to people leaving with some newfound common understanding. I’ve been continually struck by how such settings — where people can openly share their opinions and experiences, and listen to others do the same — can remind us of our common humanity and decency.
With federal climate policy likely largely out of reach for the next four years, citizens’ assemblies can help us build at the state and local level for our climate and democracy. Assemblies can be fora for crafting a bottom-up approach to climate policy and development that this moment requires. We need to collectively imagine and build the structures to meet the crises we face — and fashion a public vision to root out systemic economic inequality, foster faith in democracy, and meet the planetary emergency of our time.
Catherine Fraser (@catherinefraser.info) is the Senior Climate and Energy Program Associate at Data for Progress.