A ‘Quantum Leap in Ambition’: What Public Deliberation on the Climate Crisis Can Teach Us About Policy Trade-Offs

Climate Assemblies, Citizens’ Juries and a related suite of deliberative approaches are increasingly popular models for engaging citizens with discussions around climate action, providing a meaningful opportunity to shape decisions directly affecting people’s lives. Across Europe, deliberative processes are already informing national policy choices in countries including Brussels, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland and the UK, among others, along with a proliferation of hundreds more local cases. While the format and focus of these processes come in all shapes and sizes, one shared characteristic of deliberation on the climate crisis is that the priorities and recommendations arising from them are often considerably more ambitious than the agendas set by policymakers themselves (Smith, 2024). In this paper, we reflect on the nature of the recommendations arising from deliberative processes, what they tell us about what really matters to people, how participants identify and weigh-up their preferences, and – crucially – what they can tell us about how we can be bolder and think more ambitiously about policy commitments to mitigate climate change and adapt to its effects. We will present new empirical data from two examples of deliberative processes that we ran in 2022-23 and 2024, looking at climate change mitigation and adaptation at the local level. This includes a series of day-long Deliberative Mini Publics in five capital cities focused on urban transport reform (2022-23), each with a group of 30 randomly selected members of the public in Berlin, Dublin, London, Warsaw and Yerevan; along with a recent set of four deliberative workshops (2024) with a group of 27 residents from the London boroughs of Lambeth, Southwark and Tower Hamlets, designed to weigh up potential policies for living well with climate change. In our analysis we will discuss how publics identify and discuss the principles on which policies are prioritised, how they weigh up the trade-offs between different policies, and ascertain relevant drivers and obstacles to successfully enacting these policies. Moreover, we discuss evidence on how the bold ambitions arising from deliberative processes are translated into action (or in many cases, aren’t), closing with reflection on what these processes can add to how we think about transitioning to carbon-neutral societies and economies, and the value they can bring in taking the public along with you.