Climate citizens’ assemblies have been lauded as a potential solution to overcome political gridlock in electoral institutions and accelerate climate mitigation policies. Whether the recent proliferation of European climate assemblies has actually influenced climate policy is a question largely unexplored. This study examines Ireland’s response to the climate portion of its 2016-2018 Citizens’ Assembly by analysing the subsequent Joint Oireachtas Committee on Climate Action (JOCCA), which was the specialised Parliamentary committee created to discuss the assembly’s climate recommendations. Using Ireland's climate assembly as a case study, we conduct empirical analysis via thematic coding to systematically examine JOCCA’s twenty one public sessions. We find that committee members deliberated on the assembly recommendations in a variety of ways. Some of our findings echoed existing literature – for example, Parliamentarians’ consideration of recommendations was openly conditional. While they were willing to engage with new ideas, they stopped short of endorsing recommendations that challenged their beliefs. Parliamentarians therefore used the assembly as a democratic mandate to support their policy preferences, emphasising assembly recommendations when it was convenient and ignoring (or critiquing) them otherwise. Other findings, however, were completely new. We found that Parliamentarians viewed themselves as the intermediaries between assembly recommendations and the realities of policy implementation. Parliamentarians repeatedly discussed recommendations’ logistics and implementation, reflecting the different organisational mandates of citizens’ assemblies and legislative bodies. Moreover, Parliamentarians interpreted recommendations through a heavily localist lens, reflecting larger features of Irish governance. These various forms of engagement explain discrepancies in the committee’s response to the assembly’s recommendations. Our findings transcend simple binaries of success/failure and policy uptake/cherry-picking, reflecting the need for more nuanced theories of assembly impact. We use these findings to shed light on the Irish climate policy making process and update both theoretical frameworks on citizens assembly’s policy impacts and normative expectations around citizens’ assemblies.
