In Leeds in 2019, we facilitated our first climate jury. The council gave its formal response to residents' 12 key recommendations in March 2020. Since then, we have run more than 10 similar deliberative processes in diverse areas of England.
From Bude in Cornwall to the North of the Tyne Combined Authority, we constantly see everyday citizens, not your usual activists or experts, produce compelling and insightful proposals for adapting to and mitigating climate change.
We have learned during the last five years that it is not enough to just deliver the recommendations. What is lacking is follow-up, ongoing engagement and tough citizen scrutiny
assemblies', we see a huge role for smaller climate juries. They follow the same format of random selection, expert testimony and extended deliberation. By being smaller, and more local, we believe they fill a gap between the enormity of global climate change and place-based citizen action.
In our deliberative climate work we have been constantly amazed by the power of a good process. Participants join them nervously, unconfident and uncertain about their capacity to bring change. By the end of the process so many are keen to take forward their recommendations.
Feeling informed, heard and part of a group is the foundation of good community development. Yet, too often they, and we, are then frustrated by the snail's pace of change. Or indeed, no obvious change.
We have learned during the last five years that it is not enough to just deliver the recommendations. What is lacking is follow-up, ongoing engagement and tough citizen scrutiny. Otherwise, only the easier ideas, or those that are already in the minds of politicians and public officers will stick. More innovative or challenging ideas risk falling by the wayside.
In Lancaster, after facilitating their 2020 climate jury, we were keen to return to run a follow-on local climate engagement project.
We started with structured training on public participation for public officials and helped them design practical projects with their partners. This led to a deeper dive into the single issue of local mobility and accessible transport, using a menu of engagement approaches.
These included an online Pol.is survey (a real-time system for gathering, analysing and understanding what large groups of people think in their own words), training jury members to become community researchers and focused deliberative workshops. Separately, we have been involved in Your Pots, the Closing Loops project created to stimulate a thriving regenerative local economy in North Lancashire. It is a £200,000 national lottery funded participatory grant-making initiative, which is enabling local responses to climate transition, focused on food, waste reduction, reuse and repair.
Overall, we have now been working on climate change projects in Lancaster for more than four years. This is what good engagement should look like.
In Blackburn, we advocated not to stop at the launch of the climate jury report. With our support, jury members have lobbied their MPs, helped guide a new council communications campaign, run accountability sessions with local stakeholders and held climate conversations with their fellow residents.
Independent think-tank New Local talks about a sense of perma-crisis in local government, of rising demands and falling resources. That means leaders must develop new capabilities and ways to mobilise communities and partners beyond institutions and have the ability to build resilience and lead with compassion and empathy.
We believe there is no point going into a deliberation unless there is a firm plan for what comes next. We see the decreasing trust in institutions and a need to reach out to communities through meaningful dialogue. This means accepting there will be criticism of the authority.
Working through that barrier ensures the relationship moves from customer to citizen – from public engagement on a contentious topic being seen as a burden, towards it becoming an asset. This is difficult.
Risk-taking by officers and elected members must be nurtured while the new relationship is forged. To that we would add the need to take an ecosystem approach.
Deliberation is most effective when part of an ecosystem of connected democratic practices, such as linking a climate assembly with participatory budgeting (PB). Off the policy agenda in England for a while, there are exemplars, like Newham's £1.6m People Powered Places programme and there is significant PB action in Scotland.
This isn't about top-slicing already stretched budgets. It is about properly mainstreaming public engagement.
Jez Hall and Pete Bryant are directors of social enterprise, Shared Future CIC
