How Ireland’s Citizens’ Assembly helped climate action
Holding a Citizens’ Assembly on climate action is one of just three demands by the headline-grabbing activists of Extinction Rebellion, whose city-stopping protests now progress to local movement building. Yet many people don’t even know what a such an assembly is, even as the City Council in Oxford, UK, prepares to organise their own. But Frances Foley, of the Citizens’ Convention on UK Democracy, writing here for the Rapid Transition Alliance, says that a ground-breaking Irish experiment in deliberative democracy shows that citizens’ assemblies really can help deliver climate action.
A national roll-out of low-carbon public vehicles, state support for community energy generation, higher taxes on carbon-intensive sectors, incentives for responsible agricultural land use and carbon sequestering, government-backed planting of forests, an extension of bus and cycle lanes and climate change at the centre of all government policy making.
It reads like a Christmas list for a climate activist. A bold, comprehensive and realistic government commitment to taking climate change seriously. Real leadership, real ambition – a real shift.
Yet this policy programme comes not from the Green Party central office, nor from yet another environmental thinktank report. The 13 recommendations were reached through a serious exercise in democratic decision-making in Ireland. The government signed up and set up; the citizens turned up and scaled up. It was a show of good faith from every side – political class, citizenry, media. It was a leap of democratic faith.
It reads like a Christmas list for a climate activist. A bold, comprehensive and realistic government commitment to taking climate change seriously.
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