Evaluation of Climate Assembly UK Stephen Elstub, David M. Farrell, Jayne Carrick and Patricia Mockler (2021)

Executive Summary Overview

This report provides an evaluation of Climate Assembly UK (CAUK). This was a citizens’ assembly commissioned by six select committees from the House of Commons: Business Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS); Environmental Audit; Housing, Communities and Local Government, Science and Technology; Transport; and Treasury. It was tasked with providing recommendations on how the UK can achieve the Government’s legally binding target of achieving Net-Zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.

CAUK was comprised of 108 randomly selected members of the public from across the UK. These assembly members were guided through a process of learning, deliberation, and voting by a team of external experts, advocates, and facilitators.

The assembly was held over three in-person weekends in a hotel in Birmingham and (due to the coronavirus pandemic) three online weekends, between 24 January and 17 May 2020.

Our evaluation was commissioned by the UK Parliament in autumn 2019. It assesses the extent to which CAUK promoted norms of deliberative democracy and met established standards of citizens’ assemblies. By ‘deliberation’ we mean an inclusive approach to decision-making in which participants justify what they want with reasons and listen to each other’s justifications respectfully and with an open mind.

We also assessed the relationship CAUK had to parliament, climate policy, the media, and the public. To achieve these aims, we adopted a mixed method approach that utilised surveys, interviews, non-participant observation and content analysis.

Our overriding conclusion is that CAUK was a highly valuable process that enabled a diverse group of UK citizens to engage in parliamentary scrutiny of government on climate policy in an informed and meaningful manner.

The case demonstrates a significant step forward in the UK Parliament’s public engagement strategy and based on our evidence, they should seek to establish more citizens’ assemblies in the future to feed into the scrutiny work of their select committee system.

Authors

Stephen Elstub, David M. Farrell, Jayne Carrick and Patricia Mockler

Paper

• Evaluation of Climate Assembly UK

Comments

There is an interesting finding noted on page seven that says:

4. Hybrid In-Person and Online Assemblies: the quality of deliberation in the online sessions of CAUK was superior to the in-person sessions. This does indicate that it is perhaps not necessary for an entire assembly to be conducted in-person. There could be a combination of in-person and online sessions. This could reduce the costs of assemblies too, or enable them to be longer.