Citizens’ Assemblies Can Lead to More Ambitious Climate Policy Decisions, but It’s Been Rare. Evidence from Over Four-Hundred-Fifty Recommendations in Five Countries

Citizens’ assemblies on climate change issues are proliferating across Europe as governments grapple with contentious policy decisions and fail to meet emission reduction targets. Citizens’ assemblies are comprised of roughly 80 to 160 randomly selected lay citizens that hear balanced evidence and intensely deliberate an issue across several sessions before presenting their policy recommendations. Scholars, activists, and politicians contend that citizens’ assemblies can drive climate policymaking arguing they are more ambitious than governments and provide opportunities to legitimize or pressure policy change. Critics, however, question their impact on policy decisions. This pioneering study is the first to systematically examine these assertions, evaluating the ambition of assembly recommendations in comparison to government plans, assessing their causal impact on collective decisions, and exploring factors explaining impact across over four-hundred-fifty recommendations from five national and one state-level assembly in five Western-European countries. Utilizing a robust counterfactual process tracing approach and combining data from documents, expert interviews, and expert surveys, we analyze the causal impact for each recommendation while considering existing government plans. We find that citizens’ assemblies have consistently proposed more ambitious climate policy compared to government action at the time. We further find that some recommendations had causal impact on policy decisions – mostly by substantially adding to policy, creating momentum, and encouraging policymakers, but also by breaking deadlocks, introducing novel ideas, and stopping plans. However, such impacts are rare, and strongly vary between cases with only two cases showing any impact. High shares of, arguably, redundant recommendations raise questions about efficient assembly design. At the case level, we find several contextual inhibiting and facilitating factors of policy impact. In Germany, for example, impact was hindered by a lack of formalized ties to legislative or executive institutions and late timing amid aims to influence coalition negotiations after an election. The French assembly was most impactful, with impact facilitated by mutually reinforcing conditions such as high willingness of adoption from the outset, strong prior promises of impact, a remit to draft legislation, salient engagement of political leaders, high public expectations, attention and scrutiny, and multiple follow-up meetings. We suggest interpreting such factors as operational dimensions to determine the authority levels given to assemblies (Fung 2006). While the French assembly would qualify as process of co-governance, all other cases were constructed to be advisory – including Berlin’s assembly which also had some policy impact. The policy impact of assembly recommendations is not fully explained by the case-level. We thus investigate explanatory factors at the recommendation-level such as costliness or climate-effectiveness. We expect to report the corresponding results at the conference.