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Integrating citizen deliberation into climate governance: lessons on robust design from six climate assemblies

Integrating citizen deliberation into climate governance: lessons on robust design from six climate assemblies
Integrating citizen deliberation into climate governance: lessons on robust design from six climate assemblies
Recent years have seen a ‘wave’ of national climate assemblies, which bring together randomly-selected citizens to deliberate and make recommendations on aspects of the climate crisis. Assessments of the legitimacy of these interventions and their capacity to improve climate governance have focused on their internal design characteristics, but the fundamental question of how they are integrated into complex constellations of political and policy institutions is underexplored. This article constructs a framework for understanding their integrative design characteristics, drawing on recent work on ‘robust governance’. The framework is used to explore the connection of six national-level climate assemblies with political institutions, public debate and civil society. Our findings highlight immense variety in the integrative design of these climate assemblies. This variety challenges the view of assemblies as a standardised object with predictable effects on legitimacy and governance capacity, whilst also refining deliberative systems theory’s highly abstracted conceptions of integration and impact.
0033-3298
182-200
Boswell, John
34bad0df-3d4d-40ce-948f-65871e3d783c
Dean, Rikki
1838dcba-3de8-4b0d-96fc-53f66e9d4f83
Smith, Graham
1dd95321-f164-444e-8a9b-83e3c606ea4c
Boswell, John
34bad0df-3d4d-40ce-948f-65871e3d783c
Dean, Rikki
1838dcba-3de8-4b0d-96fc-53f66e9d4f83
Smith, Graham
1dd95321-f164-444e-8a9b-83e3c606ea4c

Boswell, John, Dean, Rikki and Smith, Graham (2023) Integrating citizen deliberation into climate governance: lessons on robust design from six climate assemblies. Public Administration, 101 (1), 182-200. (doi:10.1111/padm.12883).

Record type: Article

Abstract

Recent years have seen a ‘wave’ of national climate assemblies, which bring together randomly-selected citizens to deliberate and make recommendations on aspects of the climate crisis. Assessments of the legitimacy of these interventions and their capacity to improve climate governance have focused on their internal design characteristics, but the fundamental question of how they are integrated into complex constellations of political and policy institutions is underexplored. This article constructs a framework for understanding their integrative design characteristics, drawing on recent work on ‘robust governance’. The framework is used to explore the connection of six national-level climate assemblies with political institutions, public debate and civil society. Our findings highlight immense variety in the integrative design of these climate assemblies. This variety challenges the view of assemblies as a standardised object with predictable effects on legitimacy and governance capacity, whilst also refining deliberative systems theory’s highly abstracted conceptions of integration and impact.

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Robust_governance_and_climate_change_Resubmission_FINAL_1_ - Accepted Manuscript
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Accepted/In Press date: 3 July 2022
e-pub ahead of print date: 1 August 2022
Published date: 1 March 2023

Identifiers

Local EPrints ID: 468287
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/468287
ISSN: 0033-3298
PURE UUID: 93115ab1-4287-4168-9f54-b80697c5d221
ORCID for John Boswell: ORCID iD orcid.org/0000-0002-3018-8791

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Date deposited: 09 Aug 2022 16:50
Last modified: 18 Sep 2024 04:01

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Contributors

Author: John Boswell ORCID iD
Author: Rikki Dean
Author: Graham Smith

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