Towards Permanent Climate Citizens' Assemblies: Learning from the Early Adopters

A wave of citizens’ assemblies on the climate at local, regional, national and even transnational level has emerged across Europe and beyond over the past five years. They carry the promise of finding better approaches to solving the climate and ecological crisis, while promoting a more inclusive and democratic way of doing politics.

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However, these are typically one-off or ad-hoc processes. Is this sufficient to contribute effectively to both the climate and ecological crisis and the democratic crisis in the long run? For this reason, a growing number of practitioners, activists and researchers are advocating for permanent or institutionalized climate citizens’ assemblies. 

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In this briefing, we summarise the different arguments that are made in favour and against permanent assemblies. We then provide a brief sketch of three specific cases and draw out key insights and recommendations.