Local government and democratic innovations: reflections on the case of citizen assemblies on climate change

Abstract

Local and national authorities are implementing citizen assemblies to address climate change. This represents a potentially crucial point in the development of citizen assemblies, and offers a new setting in which to explore unresolved questions in the literature about the relationship between deliberative minipublics and the wider public sphere and decision-making authorities. This article considers the significance of this recent development and the prospects that citizen assemblies present for sustained, meaningful democratic engagement. The authors focus on how these events are connected to the wider public sphere and institutions of decision-making and argue that these cases reveal normative and practical challenges crucial to understanding the sustainability and success of these events. Traditional approaches to analysing deliberative processes may be limited in their capacity to navigate these challenges; the authors outline potential approaches that may provide insight into these questions.