Climate Reassemblies

Climate assemblies (CAs) are increasingly used to engage the public in climate policy making. Research and practice tends to focus on design and execution with less attention paid to what happens afterwards. Organisers and commissioners often neglect to consider what they will do with the resultant recommendations and if / how they will continue to engage with the newly motivated and knowledgeable participants. This is an important oversight, as the lack of follow-up action reduces CAs’ potential impact and threatens their legitimacy. A case in point is the South Yorkshire Citizens’ Assembly on Climate (SYCAC). In late 2023, one hundred citizens of South Yorkshire came together over four weekends to learn and deliberate on climate action. They produced 33 recommendations. However, one year later they have still not been published due to the commissioner’s failure to consider and plan for ‘what next?’. Climate ReAssemblies addresses this question. Drawing on the work of the Culture and Climate Change public engagement series (Tyszczuk) that has sought to innovate models of climate research (Scenarios (2016–2017), Narratives (2013–2014), and Recordings (2010–2011)), we tested the use of novel and creative arts-based methods to improve climate assembly follow-up. We worked with a small group of citizen researchers, some of whom had participated or presented at SYCAC, to create scenarios based on the recommendations from the assembly. This approach challenged the status quo by taking the ‘what next’ question out of the sole purview of policy makers and elites. It proposed a methodology for meaningful engagement that invited citizens to co-produce visions for climate action, which value their lived experiences and knowledge of where they live. The aim was to inspire hope and action in the face of seemingly insurmountable, global climate issues. The scenarios were made into animations and included in an interactive documentary (iDoc) that was co-created with the participants. The iDoc provides a digital archive of artifacts created during the co-production process, including participant interviews, photographs, and audio recordings from the workshops. Through the lens of deliberative democratic theory, we analysed qualitative data collected from recordings of workshops, researcher’s field notes and interview transcripts, to assess how the process of co-creating the iDoc generated new ideas for implementing climate assembly recommendations and facilitates post assembly citizen engagement. The results indicate that the method enabled participants to visualise implementation of abstract recommendations into ‘real life’. However, the focus on the recommendations highlighted concerns that the value of a CA is reduced to the output (recommendations), which ignores the value of the deliberative process. The participants recognised the need to improve the inclusivity of CAs beyond the chosen few (assembly members) in the ‘bubble’ of the CA and emphasised the appetite for wider citizen engagement beyond policy makers and elites during follow on processes. The results provide useful insights for commissioners and delivery organisations designing CA follow up, as well as academics, around the use of innovative art-based methods in democratic innovations and climate policy making.