Boundaries of a climate assembly: regulations and transgressions: The case of the French Citizens' Climate Convention

This paper studies the relationship between the assembly of 150 citizens chosen by lot and other protagonists of civil society and public authorities during the Citizens' Climate Convention held in France from October 2019 to June 2020. The Convention gave rise to interactions that went far beyond discussions between randomly selected citizens involving climate experts, economic experts, legal experts, members of the governance committee, researchers, activists, journalists, elected officials and interested citizens. By inviting those selected by lot to intervene outside the discussion sessions, in the media, at private meetings or public events, the governance committee has kept the model of closed deliberation away. However, the imperatives of good deliberation required control over the intervention of external actors. This tension led to a continuous shift of the boundaries between what can be considered inside and outside the Convention. This contribution aims to highlight the construction and displacement of these boundaries, particularly focusing on the transgression attempts by selected citizens and by external actors seeking to gain access to the deliberative process. Therefore, it contributes to the literature on deliberative systems, by showing that the different arenas cannot be analysed as independent spaces. The paper is based on an ethnographic study carried out by three researchers who observed the entire process, as well as spaces of discussion outside the Convention. We also conducted fifteen interviews with citizens, four with members of the governance committee, three with experts in support of citizens and ten with actors who had taken part in the experience from the outside, in order to capture their profiles, evolution and motivations, and to collect information on the interactions that we were not observable.