Abstract
The need for engaging citizens in climate policymaking is increasingly recognised. Despite indications that the form of expert involvement can strongly influence participatory processes, this remains scarcely researched. We analysed two unique and contrasting cases of citizen engagement in national climate mitigation policy: (1) the Irish Citizens’ Assembly (ICA), the first national climate assembly involving live expert presentations and face-to-face deliberations; and (2) the Participatory Value Evaluation (PVE) on Dutch climate policymaking, where more than 10,000 citizens compared policy options in an online environment based on expert-based information on policy effects. Taking a dramaturgical approach, we found that the opening up and closing down of policy options and perspectives was influenced by the setting, staging and scripting of expertise. Apart from providing information on policy options, experts had significant roles in design choices and formulating recommendations, which shaped citizens’ deliberations and policy advice. In deliberative processes, citizens’ deliberations can be further influenced by putting experts in a privileged spot and emphasising their authority, whereas in the setting of an online tool, experts’ design choices may be masked by the fact-like presentation of expertise. Future research should further investigate the role of experts and expertise across a wider range of practices. Nevertheless, we conclude that the high degree of required technical knowledge in climate mitigation policy naturally implies strong expert involvement, which concomitantly steers the results. Alternatively, we may search to enhance citizens’ engagement in guiding climate policymakers by focusing on citizens’ normative perspectives.
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Data Availability
Most data generated during and/or analysed during the current study can be found in the Supplementary Material. The data gathered regarding the policy options that were proposed by experts in the Irish Citizens' Assembly are not publicly available due to identifyable information but are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.
Notes
Empirical work on the role of information on opinion shifts in deliberative mini-publics shows contrasting results: where some find opinion shifts were influenced more strongly by information rather than deliberation (e.g. Goodin and Niemeyer 2003), others find the opposite result (e.g. O’Malley, Farrell and Suiter 2020).
Both the PVE and the ICA can be considered ‘democratic innovations’ that are aimed at deepening and expanding the scope of citizen engagement. However, these innovations are highly diverse (Elstub and Escobar 2017) and the democratic quality of deliberative mini-publics is contested (e.g. Curato and Böker 2016).
This material is available on YouTube and is accessed between January 2022 and November 2022 https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC2DgyetL9aUTMry_F9B9yUw
We recognise that 3 interviews may not capture the diversity of stakeholders’ views. However, these were used to obtain some provisional insights into policy outcomes of the PVE which was not the core interest of our comparison and is only used in the case description (Sect. 5.2). See also Supplementary Information A.
The quantitative analysis of preferred policy options of all PVE participants and the qualitative analysis of 2000 of the participants’ open questions regarding their arguments for and against policy options as well as the open evaluative questions was performed by a group of 14 researchers including authors 1 and 2. The findings are reported in a Dutch report which is used as key reference in our results (Mouter et al. 2021d).
Policy options that were provided textually by experts in their papers and slides or orally during their presentations were counted. This is an estimated number of policy options, taking into account the possibility of double counting.
The names of ‘process designers’ and ‘technical assistants’ were not named as such in the report but identified here based on their responsibilities.
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Acknowledgements
The authors thank all interviewees for their valuable time and insights. We thank the research team involved in developing the Participatory Value Evaluation on Dutch climate policymaking, in particular Annemarie de Ruijter, Jose Ignacio Hernandez, Schoutje Schouten, Linde van Noord and Shannon Spruijt. We also thank the participants of the Science and Democracy Network seminar in June 2022 as well as Ruth Lightbody for their suggestions on how to improve this research. We thank the anonymous reviewers for their valuable time and comments.
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van Beek, L., Mouter, N., Pelzer, P. et al. Experts and expertise in practices of citizen engagement in climate policy: a comparative analysis of two contrasting cases. Climatic Change 177, 10 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-023-03659-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-023-03659-1