The Austrian Climate Citizen Assembly: A participatory-deliberative experience par excellence?

Electoral democratic systems have not delivered adequate answers to the climate crisis, mainly due to special interests within the competitive party system and the myopia characteristic for representative democracy. Inspired by participatory and deliberative democratic theory climate citizen assemblies (CCA) have been considered a possible solution to some of the weaknesses of representative democracies and have recently flourished around Europe. This paper represents an assessment of the Austrian CCA with a focus on the process dimension. ‘Process’ implies internal dynamics and interactions between participants and comprises first the communicative dimension, which refers to the deliberative attitudes of participants and organizers. Which forms of communication and knowledge integration develop in different modes of democratic decision-making? Second, the integrity design dimension comprises elements and methods that enable quality deliberation and result in sound public judgement. In this paper we label the process dimension as the participatory-deliberative experience and ask how successful it was in terms of neutrality, clarity, quality of judgements, knowledge integration, respect and free decision-making. The assessment therefore strikes at the heart of considerations about democratic and more accountable decision-making processes in the climate crisis.