CLIMATE & ENVIRONMENT

Breaking Through the Climate Gridlock with Citizen Power

Why climate advocates are increasingly turning to citizens’ assemblies to remedy governments’ sluggishness on climate change.

Climate change protesters holding a picket sign that reads: Stop Denying, Earth is Dying. — Shayna Douglas (unsplash)

Nearly thirty years ago, the international community formally recognized the urgency of the threat posed by climate change through the adoption of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). Yet, based on the current trajectory of global greenhouse gas emissions, we are barreling towards an increase in temperature that far exceeds the 1.5 to two degrees Celsius after which dangerous destabilization of the climate system is possible.

This decades-long gridlock on ambitious climate action has led climate advocates and concerned citizens to search for alternative methods to jumpstart action on climate change. Increasingly, climate activists – including Extinction Rebellion – have been turning to one method in particular: citizens’ assemblies. In this explainer, the Climate Litigation Accelerator (CLX) provides an introduction to this emerging trend.

What Is a Citizens’ Assembly?

Drawing inspiration from examples of participatory democracy in Ancient Greece, citizens’ assemblies are a form of “deliberative mini-publics.” They are usually convened to consider major public policy issues, like electoral reform. Though citizens’ assemblies vary in the details of their institutional design, they tend to share certain core features.

For example, citizens are generally chosen to participate through a random selection process. Citizens’ assemblies work because they’re assumed to be representative of the public at large and not systematically biased towards a particular viewpoint or segment of society. That’s why this step is critical in the assembly design process.

Once in session, a citizens’ assembly typically begins with a series of activities intended to educate the participants on the issue – or issues – for which the assembly was convened. The educational component is followed by activities intended to provide a space for discussion with fellow citizen participants and deliberation of the issue. This can take place in a variety of forms, including small group discussions and plenary sessions.

The educational efforts and deliberation activities culminate in a final decision rendered by the citizens’ assembly. The nature of that decision depends on the issue under review, but generally the citizens’ assembly will adopt a series of policy proposals or positions on the issue and on sub-topics of the issue.

Citizens Assemblies: Pros and Cons

Advocates of citizens’ assemblies offer a number of justifications for using citizens’ assemblies to shape public policy. One of the most significant is that these assemblies are thought to help break persistent gridlock on major issues within the political system. Advocates for citizens’ assemblies also argue that they enhance the democratic legitimacy of policy choices that involve significant trade-offs and facilitate buy-in for those tough policy choices.

Over the past several decades, there has also been a movement towards incorporating greater public participation in democratic governance. Citizens’ assemblies are one mechanism to do just that, and the evidence demonstrates that citizens’ assemblies are effective tools to increase public engagement. Citizens’ assemblies can also help combat distrust in political institutions, which can endanger the conditions necessary for democracy to thrive.

Skeptics have urged more caution when considering whether to advance citizens’ assemblies. In particular, some observers have argued that citizens’ assemblies may incentivize elected policymakers to “outsource” tough decision-making to these assemblies. There is also no guarantee of a good or appropriate outcome, which is a source of concern for some skeptics. Indeed, given the rising tide of populism and polarization, the assemblies may be unable to reach a consensus or may advance suboptimal policies.

Can Citizen Assemblies Jumpstart More Ambitious Action on Climate Change?

For many climate advocates, citizens’ assemblies are seen as a key tool in the fight to secure more ambitious action on climate change. For them, the issue is ripe for deliberation by a citizens’ assembly because of the longstanding gridlock that has stymied progress on the issue and because a citizens’ assembly adds legitimacy to the major trade-offs associated with policymaking on climate change.

Some have also argued that citizens’ assemblies are well-positioned to consider long-term problems – which climate change undoubtedly is – “because citizens need not worry about the short-term incentives of electoral cycles, giving them more freedom than elected politicians.”

Climate Citizen Assemblies: A Growing Trend

In spring 2020, British citizens met over six weekends for the U.K. Climate Assembly, where they considered what the United Kingdom should do to reach net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. Ultimately, assembly members adopted a set of recommendations which were released in their final report. It remains to be seen how the government will respond to the Assembly’s findings and whether they will be incorporated into the U.K.’s climate policies.

In 2019 and 2020, French citizens had the opportunity to participate in Convention Citoyenne Pour le Climat, a national citizens’ assembly on climate change. The assembly was tasked with coming up with a series of policy measures, consistent with social justice, that would allow a forty percent reduction in global greenhouse gas emissions by 2030. The assembly’s report was released in 2020; though the ultimate impact of the assembly’s recommendations will become more apparent in the future, French president Emmanuel Macron has indicated that at least some of the assembly’s proposals will be incorporated into French policy.

What’s Next?

Climate advocates are taking citizens’ assemblies, which have historically operated within national boundaries, to the next level. In the fall of 2021, a global citizens’ assembly on climate change will be held in the lead up to COP26, aiming to jumpstart the COP process that has thus far failed to secure the emission reduction commitments necessary to limit global warming to well below two degrees Celsius. CLX will be closely documenting these developments. If citizens at the global assembly can find a path to ambitious climate action, so can global leaders.

March 2, 2021. César Rodríguez-Garavito and Jackie Gallant, The Earth Rights Research & Action program (TERRA Law).

INEQUALITIES

In Markets We Cannot Trust: What the Texas Storm Reveals about Privatized Services

Millions of people in Texas went without power and heat during a brutal winter storm. This avoidable catastrophe was the result of trusting the market and private interests to deliver the public good.

Country Road Illuminated By Traffic in the Night With Stars on Clear Sky — PorqueNoStudios (iStock)

“I’m cold and huddled under blankets,” my mom texted me last week, on her second day without power. She is one of millions in Texas, the largest energy-producer in the United States, who went days without electricity or heat during the recent winter storm that killed 30 people. While local politicians moved quickly to falsely pin the blame on renewable energy, the breakdown in Texas demonstrates the folly of relying on private actors and markets to prepare for climate change, to look after the public good, and to guarantee basic rights.

The Texas power system is built on a “total trust in markets” and the suffering last week is a consequence of that misplaced faith. In 1999, the state deregulated its electricity system to a patchwork of private companies, and it now relies on “nearly unaccountable and toothless” regulatory agencies and voluntary guidelines.

The deregulated private companies predictably chose to prioritize short-term profit over investments in the system. They did not winterize the power grid—ignoring the advice of federal authorities and the lessons of a similar 2011 storm—and neglected to maintain a reserve margin for demand surges, unlike every other power system in North America.

The fallout has been unimaginable. More than 4.2 million households lost power in temperatures as low as 4 degrees Fahrenheit. Although the full death toll won’t be known for weeks, at least 30 people died in Texas, including six experiencing homelessness. Hundreds more were poisoned by their efforts to keep warm, such as running generators indoors. People slept in their cars. Clinics shuttered. People of color and low-income individuals were disproportionately affected, with predominantly Black and Latinx neighborhoods among the first to lose power.

Meanwhile, the deregulated market means some companies will receive an appalling windfall from the storm. Sky-high demand for energy during the cold weather drove prices through the roof, and now people who did not lose power face outrageous energy bills. “My savings is gone,” remarked one Dallas resident who now faces a nearly $17,000 bill. In the city of Denton, the rate per megawatt hour jumped from less than $24 to $2,400. The city will pay over $207 million for four days of power which is more than it spends in a typical year.

However, despite its obvious failures, ideological commitment to the market remains on full display. Before the lights were even back on, politicians were lying about the cause of the outages and exploring how further deregulation could “help.”

This anemic vision of government, which is hardly shared by all Texans but too often dominates policymaking at the state level, can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Sensible policies that guarantee basic rights but might diminish profit—such as regulation, planning, taxation, and public provision—are routinely written off as extreme because the government has successfully been recast as primarily a facilitator of markets. Capital-friendly decisions are conveniently, if erroneously, peddled as “win-win” and protective of individual freedoms. Neoliberalism has been internalized by the body politic.

Unfortunately, the market alone will never deliver equitable and reliable access to essential services. It cannot, on its own, guarantee the fulfillment of basic rights. Instead, running public services as an investment risks marginalizing their non-commercial purposes. This is why human rights activists, experts, and monitoring bodies routinely raise concerns about the risks of relying on the private sector to provide critical services. Running public services for a profit without robust regulation can lead to inequitable access, high costs, exclusion, and poor maintenance, while wasting taxpayer money and thwarting accountability.

As others have written, this crisis should serve as a “profound warning” in the context of climate change, which will lead to more frequent extreme weather events. Roads, water systems, power grids, housing, and other essential infrastructure desperately need upgrades. Texas shows us that continuing to rely on profit-focused companies to make those changes will leave many stranded. However, it doesn’t have to be this way. Around the world, energy systems are increasingly brought back under public control through a process called remunicipalization, in part due to private actors’ repeated failures to transition to renewable energy.

As people in Texas stood for hours in lines to enter bare grocery stores for the second time in less than a year, my sister wrote to me: “I now feel acutely aware of the fact that I will not be taken care of in a disaster. People will not turn on your lights, people will not give you heat when it’s freezing, people will not make sure you have good drinking water, and people will not make sure you don’t die of a horrible illness.” If markets continue to be allowed to stand in for government, she will be right.

February 23, 2021. Rebecca Riddell, Human Rights and Privatization Project at the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice at NYU School of Law.