How climate assemblies transform climate action
25 maart 2022 16:00 t/m 17:00 - Locatie: Zoom - Door: Social Innovation in the Energy Transition | Zet in mijn agenda
Topic
Deliberative mini-publics, such as climate assemblies have been designated as one promising approach for urgent climate policy-making. A random, small, more or less representative group of citizens is given a central role in formulating policy recommendations through deliberating after expert hearing, quizzing of information and their own experiences. Climate assemblies have the potential to reduce polarization, build citizen capacity, produce higher quality decisions and in some cases break political impasse.
Maija Setälä, Professor of Political Science at the University of Turku and longtime expert on deliberative mini-publics, will discuss benefits and weaknesses of using mini-publics in climate action. Showcasing lessons learned from a Finnish citizens’ jury on climate action, Maija will present possible remedies to current challenges of climate assemblies, such as political cherry-picking, inclusion and their institutionalization within the political system.
Anatol Itten from TU Delft will close the webinar with a discussion on how future climate assembly might be transformed through digital technologies to open up new opportunities for crowd-sized deliberation.
Key-note speaker:
Majia Setälä
Majia Setälä received her PhD from The London School of Economics in 1997. Since then, she has worked at the University of Turku and Åbo Akademi. In 2012, Maija was appointed as a Professor of Political Science at University of Turku. She has made research visits at Columbia University, Australian National University and University of Westminster. Her area of expertise is deliberative democracy, democratic innovations and political trust. At the moment, Majia is the Principal Investigator of the projects "Participation in Long-Term Decision-Making" (PALO) funded by the Strategic Research Council of Academy of Finland (2017-2022), and "Facing Systemic Change Together" (FACTOR) funded by the Academy of Finland (2021-2024). As part of the research project, Majia and colleagues organized a Citizens’ Jury in April 2021 to deliberate on climate actions, commissioned by the Climate Policy Roundtable and the Finnish Ministry of the Environment.