When asked for successful examples of citizens’ assemblies, experts point to Ireland’s decisions to legalize abortion in early pregnancy and allow marriage for same-sex couples. In the aftermath of the 2008 economic crisis, a newly elected government promised to put citizens at the heart of constitutional reform and convened groups of Irish citizens to deliberate on key issues, first together with politicians. After hearing from experts—from constitutional lawyers and psychologists to Catholic bishops—and deliberating with each other, a group of politicians and citizens voted 79% in favor of putting marriage equality on the ballot. In a later, citizens-only assembly, 87% voted to amend the country’s Eighth Amendment, which banned abortion in nearly all circumstances. In two separate referendums in 2015 and 2018, voters decided in favor of marriage equality and legalizing abortion.

The Irish experience inspired governments across Europe. At least 10 countries now have a climate assembly. Collectively, they’ve demonstrated that a random sample of the public can meaningfully engage with complex policy issues and form a consensus opinion. Sometimes, “having gone through this learning experience and deliberation on climate change, [citizens] come out as arguing for actually more ambitious solutions than what politicians thought would be politically feasible,” said Alina Averchenkova of London School of Economics, who is part of a knowledge network on European climate assemblies. 

Citizens don’t shy away from solutions that politicians might be afraid of touching, like the Scottish climate assembly which emphasized the need to reduce meat and dairy consumption, or the French assembly which recommended banning domestic flights on routes with good train connections. “Citizens’ assemblies have a huge potential to make climate policy-making better quality,” Averchenkova said, “and also to potentially improve [public] acceptance of climate policies.” 

Yet governments have varied in how they’ve handled assembly recommendations—handing them over to referendums, or adopting most, some, or none of them. The U.K., for instance, only loosely used some of the recommendations from a 2020 assembly to frame its Sixth Carbon Budget. In contrast, Averchenkova has found that France adopted more than half of 100 recommendations from a 2019 climate assembly—although the government’s response was widely criticized as President Macron had initially promised to adopt the recommendations without filter. Still, it significantly shaped French climate policy and generated extensive public debate, said political scientist Stephen Elstub of Newcastle University.

Deliberating over divisive issues with people of different political views may seem less productive in the U.S., where polarization has reached an all-time high. But citizens’ assemblies actually excel at overcoming polarization. In the U.S., a 2019 experiment called “America in One Room” assembled 523 citizens to discuss policy proposals on divisive issues like immigration and healthcare. They found that once people contemplated evidence-based arguments for and against specific policies and exchanged viewpoints, they become less guarded and more open to compromises. 

“There’s no question that people who participate in citizens’ assemblies and deliberative mini-publics depolarize,” said Cristina Lafont, a professor of political philosophy at Northwestern University.

Renirie has seen this happen repeatedly in city-level citizens’ assemblies facilitated by Healthy Democracy, which have tackled questions around housing codes, how much city council members should be paid, and how to use the land on city-owned fairgrounds. However, she is cautious about applying the concept at larger scales in the U.S. It will be easier for the public to trust and understand a new political process if it’s first established locally, and harder for them to argue the process is rigged. “I think once the general public has seen this work on a local level hundreds and thousands of times—that’s my dream—this will just be a commonplace routine function of government. Then I think it’ll be even more possible to utilize it at the national scale.”

The Washington climate assembly was, in a sense, a test of whether assemblies can work at state levels. But it was also piloting a model where an assembly was initiated and funded not by a government authority but a nonprofit—People’s Voices on Climate, although it didn’t play a major role in shaping how hearings and deliberations were designed, facilitated, or run.

Throughout the assembly, Scovel and 76 other Washingtonians came up with more than 100 wide-ranging recommendations—from incentivizing the placement of EV chargers in local and tribal communities to introducing carbon pricing and reinvesting the revenue into reducing transportation emissions. “I think I’m most proud of the fact that 80 people could come together to a consensus and there was very little if any conflict,” said Scovel, adding that around 20 participants had initially reported to not believe in human-caused climate change.

But while Scovel found the process well-executed, transparent, unbiased, some other participants disagree. “I feel like the range of the topics we discussed and the context of them were definitely trying to promote and push a rather liberal agenda,” said Darrin Hill, an attorney from Olympia. 

Hill felt the presentations placed too much emphasis on solutions like community gardens and too little on the role of existing low-emission energy sources like nuclear power or hydropower from dams (although the assembly did recommend to carefully consider new nuclear power technologies). “To be perfectly honest, I felt that this assembly was pretty politically fringe, at least for American politics, and I think it lacked the credibility necessary to gain a footing,” he added. 

Washington state did pass some ambitious climate policies during and after the assembly, but it’s hard to say whether the recommendations had any influence on them, said Johanna Lundahl, a program manager at People’s Voices on Climate. The timing wasn’t ideal. As the assembly concluded, legislators were already busy in session. The climate assembly sparked other initiatives in the state—to use the climate assembly model as an educational tool in schools, and to encourage state agencies to use assembly-type models to better engage their communities.

Hill’s impression reflects a broader concern around citizens’ assemblies: that they are by design manipulated spaces, vulnerable to influence by governments or activist groups—which is why it’s important they’re organized by nonpartisan organizations. Another general concern is that, even with the best recruitment strategies, it can still be difficult to get a truly representative sample of the public, especially among low-income and marginalized communities that have less time to spare for an assembly—although offering participants financial incentives can help, Elstub said. 

A deeper issue: The fact that participants often change their minds during deliberation means that, by the end, their consensus opinions may no longer reflect those of the population at large. 

That became clear in 2007, when citizens of the Canadian province of Ontario were asked to vote on a citizen assembly’s proposed election reforms in a referendum. Only 37% of voters agreed, not nearly enough to pass the measure, said professor emeritus Jane Rainey of Eastern Kentucky University. 

“The people who are in the assemblies learn things, they know things. They go into group discussions, exchange information, exchange viewpoints, and refine out of it an idea about how to change or adopt a policy,” said her husband, Glenn Rainey, a professor emeritus of the same institution. But the public, “they haven’t had all of that.”

If the majority of the public disagrees with a citizens’ assembly, “you’ve still got to go with the majority,” Elstub said. “Otherwise, we’re going down dangerous undemocratic territory if we allow the hundred people to govern over the millions.” It is for this reason many experts argue that assemblies shouldn’t have any direct decision-making authority, instead using their recommendations as a basis for referendums or to guide policies that politicians then craft. 

In any case, assemblies should be accompanied by aggressive education campaigns to inform the public what their members learned and how they reached their recommendations—something that Ontario put little to no effort into doing, Jane Rainey added. The goal of citizens’ assemblies is not to reach a consensus that reflects the public’s opinion, she said, “but to agree on the best possible solution and convince the citizenry to agree.” 

For this reason, Lafont prefers other kinds of “deliberative mini-publics” to boost political engagement. She points to Oregon’s Citizens Initiative Review where citizens are convened not to come up with policy recommendations, but to review current ballot measures and produce statements on key facts, and reasons to vote for and against. This helps other citizens make up their minds using less biased, more relevant information than received by politicians or the media. “If you give them the considered judgments—the well informed and thought-through reasons in favor and against—it’s very hard to say it’s rigged, because you don’t have an agenda,” Lafont says. 

Elstub sees citizens’ assemblies, when they’re well-executed, as one of many tools that can improve democratic decision-making. One of their greatest strengths is perhaps the impact on the participants themselves. In surveys where Elstub followed up with members of the U.K. climate assembly two-and-a-half years later, he saw it had been a transformative experience for many of them. Most of them were more often discussing climate change, recycling more, and eating less meat and dairy. In France and Austria, assembly members have formed climate NGOs to hold policymakers accountable to their recommendations. 

As for Scovel, he thinks that every state, city, township, village, and city council should have a climate assembly. “If more people could participate in citizens’ assemblies,“it [would] allow more voices to be heard, which is really all we want,” he said.