A Deliberative Global Citizens’ Assembly in Global Climate Governance: Exploring Legitimate Linkages to the UNFCCC-Process

Governments around the world are not on track to collectively meet the agreed climate targets. This is not due to a failure of democracy as some critics assume. Rather a deepening of democracy along deliberative lines is needed in order to shape the necessary global transformations in an effective and socially just manner. As civil society actors around the world are rising up to demand climate action, there is no formal process to connect this emerging public sphere in a balanced way to the negotiations of the UNFCCC-framework. The “Deliberative Global Citizens’ Assembly” is one approach of democratizing global climate politics that bears this potential. Obviously, such a project poses a lot of practical challenges. I argue that these can in principle be overcome to the extent that the process can contribute to improving the criteria of inclusion, deliberative quality and impact by ordinary citizens subject to decision-making in the realm of global climate governance. Following the systemic turn in (international) deliberative theory, these improvements cannot be assessed in isolation, but in light of their contribution to the democratic legitimacy of the system as a whole. Accordingly, the main part of this paper explores the functions that such an assembly can legitimately fulfil at the global level and shows how it can be linked to the negotiations of the UNFCCC-process.