Climate Citizens Assemblies – An instrument for climate justice and inclusive decision-making?
Climate change adaptation and mitigation are among the most pressing challenges facing all living beings today. Addressing the causes and consequences of the climate crisis requires systemic change with lasting, transformative effects, and goes far beyond individual action. Public policies can play a critical role in enabling such change and shaping more resilient, regenerative and thriving futures.
Climate Citizens’ Assemblies (CCAs)
One promising approach to systemic change and future-making in response to the challenges posed by the climate crisis, are Climate Citizens’ Assemblies (CCAs), of which there has been a steady increase in recent years. As participatory democratic instruments, CCAs offer extraordinary emancipatory and transformative potential.
CCAs bring together a diverse group of citizens, selected by a stratified lottery process that mirrors key demographic characteristics (age, gender, geography, and more), to learn about climate issues, deliberate collectively, and produce joint recommendations.
Our research
– A social‑ecological design lens
While most scholarship primarily assesses CCAs through political science or public policy lenses. We go a step further by viewing CCAs through a social-ecological design lens — both analytically and operationally. This means we consider not only policy outputs, but also the relationships, practices and ideas that shape the future-making processes within CCAs and to what extent the consideration of climate-justice and just transition influence their processes and outcomes.
Our guiding questions:
- Which imaginaries of the future shape CCA deliberations?
- How do the principles of climate justice and a just transition influence the processes and outcomes?
- Where are the emancipatory and transformative potentials of CCAs still untapped?
- What if CCAs were not just a consultative mechanism?
Toward transformative emancipatory climate governance — from consultation to commoning and emancipation:
What if Climate Citizens’ Assemblies (CCAs) were not just tools for public consultation, but emancipatory spaces for reimagining society itself — spaces to share knowledge, make decisions and care for communities and environments together?
By attending to relational dynamics and future‑shaping imaginaries, we aim to illuminate how CCAs can transcend the role of policy advice and become living laboratories of social‑ecological transformation—democratic infrastructures in which climate justice, diversity, and inclusion are practiced, not merely promised.
Our approach
– Research design and methodology
To explore the transformative and relational potential of Climate Citizens’ Assemblies, we draw on anthropological methods—including participant observation, interviews, and surveys with citizens, facilitators, and stakeholders. These allow us to trace not only what happens within assemblies but also how people experience, navigate, and make meaning of these participatory processes.
Our focus lies on the knowledge, relationships, and practices that emerge during CCAs—what participants learn, how they interact, and what forms of collective agency may arise.
Grounded in this empirical knowledge, we develop eco-social design tools and data visualisations that can inform future assemblies. These tools aim to support more inclusive, imaginative, and just processes in climate governance.