The climate is changing – so how do we feel about that?

In the lead-up to COP-15, the United Nations Climate Change conference held in Copenhagen in December 2009, this question was posed to global citizens for the very first time. While climate experts had been debating the consequences of global carbon emissions for decades, the views of communities whose livelihoods are at stake had never yet been canvassed.

Determined to have these voices heard by the politicians representing their countries at the COP, the Danish Government, in particular the Danish Board of Technology and the Danish Cultural Institute, initiated a global world-first democratic process, Worldwide Views on Global Warming (WWViews) to enable regular citizens to express their preferences for policy and action on climate change.

It was a great event for the unique opportunity it gave us to see the process of ‘deliberative democracy’ in action.

— Alison Atherton, Institute for Sustainable Futures

Rather than the standard process of voting, deliberative democracy features elements of both consensus decision-making and majority rule and seeks a more authentic representation of people’s views. Applying this overtly democratic approach to the worldwide views forum had three aims: to empower ordinary citizens to give their preferences for international policy and action on climate change, to inform and influence COP15 by presenting the views of ordinary citizens on the fundamental concerns being tackled by all nations, and to demonstrate and establish deliberative forms of public participation in countries around the world.

Representing the people

In Danish democratic decision-making, consulting its citizens is a common approach. A shared interest in this process saw the UTS Institute for Sustainable Futures (ISF) selected to organise Australia’s citizens event for WWViews. On September 25 and 26, 2009, 105 Australian participants met in Sydney at the same time as the citizens of 37 other nations around the globe. With the help of a marketing agency, the participants had been randomly selected to represent a diverse cross-section of Australian society.

The lead-up to the event required careful planning by ISF, including a video introduction recorded by then federal Environment Minister, the Honorable Penny Wong. On the first day of the event, all participants were provided with a set of information about climate change and spent a day and a half deliberating key issues in small groups. Professor Stuart White, the Institute’s Director, and Research Director Dr Chris Riedy were on hand to answer any questions before participants were invited to generate group answers to a set of pre-determined questions, with their recommendations to be put to political leaders.

I think World Wide Views was a bold experiment in global deliberation… The attempt to get people all around the world deliberating on climate change at the same time was worth making, even if the eventual influence on climate change policy was small.

— Chris Riedy, Institute for Sustainable Futures

Twelve years after the signing of the Kyoto Protocol, the event made it clear that participants wanted to see Australia’s comprehensive participation in climate agreements across both developed and developing countries. The results showed a high level of concern among the participating representatives of the Australian population. Seventy-five per cent were 'very concerned' about climate change, and 58 per cent felt that Australia’s short-term carbon emissions reduction target should be 25-40 per cent (the IPCC-recommended range) of the 2009 emissions by 2020.

The event produced three key recommendations to the Australian Government:

Commit confidently at COP 15: Act now to limit warming to below 2C through a legally binding global agreement.
Act now, survive later, urging for global leadership to set ambitious but realistic targets and provide incentives for innovation, and
Work together so our world will last forever: For Australia to be actively involved in achieving at least a 25 per cent reduction in emissions.

How to measure success

For ISF-UTS, an important question was how well the process had delivered the view of the people. Until the 2009 event, deliberative democracy had never before been attempted at a global scale. Unlike the more common approach of ‘polling’, this process allowed participants to engage more deeply with the issue at hand (ie. climate change), learn about it, and discuss their views with peers before adopting a position.

Those who participated felt privileged to be involved in this ground-breaking project and saw the opportunity for similar deliberative processes to be used for future policy-making.

Once you get an event that is big enough, once you get an event that is global enough, there is hope that the political leaders will hear some of the discussions and some of the outcomes and that maybe we will have an effect.

— World Wide Views Australia participant

From ISF-UTS’s perspective, the outcome of the WWViews process was mixed. The event was reasonably successful at bringing together a representative group of citizens from around the world to trial a global deliberative democracy process and received substantial media and practitioner attention. However, as a transient event, its contribution towards the emergence of a global deliberative system for climate change response was limited and did not measurably influence global climate change policy. In part, this was due to the lack of attention to appropriate pathways and strategies for achieving influence in different countries.

ISF also provided some critique of the process itself:

“The quality of deliberation was compromised by attempts to standardise the process that seemed misguided in light of cultural and political differences between the participating countries,” commented Chris Riedy. Despite these criticisms, the project overall provided a valuable learning opportunity on how democratic deliberative processes may be implemented at a global scale in the future.