The Politics of Climate Assemblies: How Effective Design for Policy Impact Depends on Context

Researchers study the policy impact of minipublics and climate assemblies, and the factors moderating their impacts, often with the aim to design more effective processes in the future. Elstub et al., for instance, found that a large scope—a high number of issues to be covered by the assembly—has reduced the direct policy impact of the Climate Assembly UK, because it had public officials doubting whether all participants had sufficient time to work on the issues. Others point out that minipublics often have low policy impact, if they are not closely coupled with conventional decision-making structures, i.e., initiated bottom-up instead of top-down. However, past research has been criticized for formulating overly simplistic theories that do not capture important variances occurring in practice, such as the diversity of actors that have initiated past minipublics. We observe that context variables have received little systematic attention, particularly those describing the political context. There are hardly any discussions on what different constellations of actors, their political agendas and strategies, and their conflicts and alliances mean for the prospects of minipublics. This is striking, considering that it is often argued, quite simplistically, that minipublics (and CAs) can have political effects like breaking deadlocks or reducing influences of lobby groups, (only) because they are not elected, more representative, hear experts, and deliberate. This neglection of political context paired with little attention given to important differences of how minipublics can be integrated with conventional decision-making may have led to beliefs about the (in)effectiveness of minipublic designs that are too simplistic. With this paper, we begin to address these shortcomings. Our aim is to contribute to building more nuanced and useful scientific theory explaining the (lack of) policy impact of minipublics, in order to design more effective processes in the future. We do so by highlighting the relevance of context. We focus on a distinct dimension of context that, despite its importance, has received little attention in the study of minipublic impact: politics. We demonstrate its importance by analyzing how different contexts of climate politics determine which impact mechanisms are (im)plausible and which challenges minipublics are likely to face. We then point to design choices targeting these challenges. This suggests that the effectiveness of several design choices are likely to be dependent on the political context while others, especially those ensuring process integrity, may be important across contexts. We build our thought experimental analyses on archetypical scenarios of climate politics.