For the first time in the context of a COP, a citizen assembly will accompany the climate negotiations between the States. One of its organizers believes, in an interview to the “World”, that this democratic exercise should be generalized but also integrated into the different institutions governing our societies.
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CLARE MELLIER is one of the initiators of the First World Assembly of Citizens on the climate that started its work in October. Previously she participated in the design or animation of a dozen citizen assemblies on the climate crisis, including those of the United Kingdom and Scotland, and also observed as a researcher the Citizen Climate Convention in France. It explains the interest and difficulties of a world panel, and also shows how the modes of organization of these devices, giving more or less room for maneuver to citizens, can play a role in the conclusions that flow from it.
The global climate citizens’ assembly will present the November 1 of the first recommendations under COP26. Why organized this device?
Climate change is a crisis worldwide, but decisions that would remedy it depend on public policies that only states have the power to set up nationwide. Unfortunately, we can see that the global governance process put in place within the COP and based on the negotiations between states is not sufficiently effective. We start the e edition and greenhouse gas emissions continue to increase. The commitments made by the States to date lead the planet to a climate warming of 2.7 ° C at the end of the century.
The idea of bringing together a citizen assembly was born from this failure of our governance system, and the desire to look for effective levers. It was initiated by researchers, foundation members, participatory democracy specialists, including the Danish Technology Council, the Policy Innovation Foundation [in Africa] and Canberra University [Australia].
Funding come from foundations and philanthropic organizations. Can a sample of the world’s population go beyond political and geopolitical cleavages by providing citizen expertise? This is what this experimental process seeks to show.
The experience is unpublished at the scale of the planet. How do you work?
The Assembly is composed of a hundred citizens drawn, representative of the world’s population of which eighteen Chinese, eighteen Indians, five Americans, seventeen Africans … it is also representative of the disparities in development in the population World: about 60% of the citizens drawn by fate earn less than ten dollars a day.
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