Workshop on Systems Change

This workshop will be held at 15:30-17:30 CET (Central European Time)

Why a workshop on Systems Change?

Citizens’ assemblies (CAs) are chief among a range of participatory democratic tools considered to have potential for addressing the numerous technically and morally complex problems at the root of the polycrisis. As the crisis most advanced in public consciousness, climate citizens’ assemblies have gained particular traction in the past few years. However, many processes in this deliberative wave have struggled to address system-level aspects of the climate crisis, its connections to other crises, and the trade-offs inherent in a transformed, low-carbon future. 

Guidance on how to design and evaluate deliberative processes on the climate crisis has become available in a short space of time, thanks to networks such as KNOCA. But few resources are currently available on how to design deliberative processes, climate or otherwise, to open discussion for the broader systemic transformations that are increasingly recognised as necessary. 

Purpose of the workshop

In this workshop we will discuss how citizens’ assemblies can address underlying systemic issues at the heart of a genuinely transformative response to the environmental and social crises facing the planet today. The discussion will build on a presentation of a draft of new guidance on this very issue that will be published by the Centre for Climate Change and Social Transformation authored by Claire Mellier (Iswe Foundation) and Stuart Capstick (CAST).

Who is the workshop for? 

This workshop is for policymakers, practitioners, researchers and other civil society actors who are interested in exploring whether citizens’ assemblies can be designed to grapple with systemic aspects of the polycrisis. 

If you register before Wednesday May 17th you will recieve a draft of the new guideline.

About the new guideline 

In their presentation, Claire and Stuart will introduce a guideline that is intended to help policymakers, practitioners, researchers and other civil society actors consider how citizens’ assemblies can address underlying systemic issues at the heart of a genuinely transformative response to the environmental and social crises facing the planet today. 
 
It focuses on power literacy as the key element that allows practitioners to understand how citizens’ assemblies can grapple with systemic aspects of present crises. It will illuminate the relationship between citizens’ assemblies, power, and systemic transformations through tangible examples, focusing on three previous climate assemblies that the authors had direct involvement in: the United Kingdom’s Climate Assembly (CAUK), France’s Convention Citoyenne pour le Climat (CCC), and the first transnational citizens’ assembly on the climate and ecological crisis, the Global Assembly (GA). 

About the speakers