Event details

The PIIRS Fung Global Fellows Program and the Center for the Study of Democratic Politics proudly co-host:

Deliberative Climate Politics: From citizens’ assemblies to responsive democratic systems?

WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 26 | 4:30PM LOUIS A. SIMPSON INTERNATIONAL BLDG, ROOM A71

Are citizens’ assemblies a solution to solve two pressing crises: democratic dissatisfaction and climate emergency? The Citizens’ Convention for Climate, and the Great National Debate in France, or the Conference on the Future of Europe, were attempts presented as new initiatives. Recently, many climate assemblies are or have been organized at the national level, in the UK, Ireland, Germany, Spain, Denmark, the Netherlands, etc. These large-scale processes bring together randomly selected ordinary citizens tasked to provide public policy recommendations, after hearing experts and stakeholders, and deliberating among themselves.

What are the promises, limitations, and risks of these democratic experimentations? Is there a deliberative specificity for climate policies, where non-elected representatives might be more concerned about long-term sustainability rather than re-election? These innovations, called mini-publics, indicate how difficult it is to reach high deliberative quality, considering moral pluralism, uncertainty, and the requirement of argumentation among different communicational capacities. Beyond citizens’ assemblies themselves, we must critically examine a possible necessity to move from deliberation in mini-publics to a true deliberative system, both pluralist and responsive.

Chair: Deborah Yashar, Donald E. Stokes Professor of Public and International Affairs; Professor of Politics and International Affairs, Princeton School of Public and International Affairs; Director, Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies, Princeton University

Speakers: Bernard Reber, Senior Research Director, French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), Sciences Po Paris Dimitri Courant, Postdoctoral research associate and Fung Global Fellow, PIIRS, Princeton University

Discussant: Christopher H. Achen, Roger Williams Straus Professor of Social Sciences, Emeritus; Professor of Politics, Emeritus, Princeton University

THIS TALK IS OPEN TO THE PUBLIC.

Talk also available via Zoom webinar, please register here if you are unable to join the talk in-person: https://bit.ly/3eHrxGL.
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