What Goes Wrong with Assemblies?

The OECD, Council of Europe and others have put a lot of time and energy into establishing principles and standards for citizens’ assemblies. These have been important to inspire good practice and as a way to challenge malpractice. At KNOCA, we work towards ensuring high quality processes and outcomes. But rather than establishing another series of standards for climate assemblies, this workshop approached the issue from the other end—namely, what goes wrong with climate assemblies.

‍

We can and should learn from our mistakes (wilful or otherwise). They generate insights that can help inform future climate assemblies to improve commissioning,design, delivery and follow-up. With this workshop, KNOCA aimed to provide commissioners, organisers, and other stakeholders with clear examples of common failings to avoid. We did not name individual assemblies but rather focused on the specific issues that can undermine the legitimacy and effectiveness of climate assemblies.

‍

Before the workshop, KNOCA circulated a short draft of examples of failings in practice to catalyse thinking.

‍

During the session, we heard short interventions about the most common failings from Yves Dejaeghere, Executive Director of FIDE; Eva Mackevica, Participatory Projects Coordinator at Field of Dialogue, Poland; and Lucy Parry, Senior Research Associate at the Centre for Deliberative Democracy and Global Governance and Research Fellow at the University of Edinburgh.

‍

Key takeaways from the workshop:

• No assembly is perfect. We can (and should) always learn from mistakes.
• Understanding what goes wrong with assemblies can help us avoid these failings in the future.
• Clarifying common failings is particularly helpful for those who are commissioning and organising for the first time.
• Talking about failings is good collective therapy!

‍

Together,we aimed to provide a roadmap of what not to do when commissioning, organising,and responding to climate assemblies.‍

‍