Participation in a Citizens' Assembly beyond just members
The challenge
The Scottish Climate Assembly was a citizens' assembly, commissioned by the Scottish Government in 2020 as a way of answering the question: 'How should Scotland change to tackle the climate emergency in an effective and fair way?'
About 100 people from all across Scotland convened over seven weekends from November 2020 to March 2021. While the sample of participants was representative, the nature of citizens' assemblies means that the vast majority of citizens are excluded from proceedings.
Given that the climate emergency is something that affects every citizen, the Scottish Climate Assembly wanted to allow other Scottish people to have a stake in the proceedings of the Assembly.
The approach
They chose Dialogue, a discursive tool designed for structured, meaningful online conversations. The team set up a challenge which asked the same question posed to the members of the Climate Assembly.
Anybody who wished to participate could share an idea about what they thought the Assembly should discuss, and rate and comment others' ideas. Ideas were taken into consideration in the development of the agenda for assembly weekend.
The results
The Scottish Climate Assembly team pre-seeded a few ideas to kick off the conversation, and by the time the challenge had closed there were 235 ideas and hundreds of comments. Ideas were well-informed and highly considered, with thoughtful comments in both English and Gaelic.
Ideas from the Dialogue were read by the experts presenting at the Climate Assembly, assessed for feasibility and put to Assembly members with recommendations on how or if the idea could reasonably implemented in line with the Assembly principles of fairness and effectiveness.
The general population has a genuine stake in the outcomes of the Assembly and therefore it is important they have the opportunity to have an input into its proceedings.
Delib is a govtech leader specialising in consultation and engagement, trusted by over 600 government organisations worldwide, including major planning projects. Since 2004, we've been building secure, accessible digital platforms to make participation simpler, fairer, and more inclusive. Our flagship product, Citizen Space, was built in collaboration with the UK government and has supported more than 11 million responses across over 110,000 democratic activities.