#19 · Before the Assembly
How to support participants understanding institutional frameworks and policymaking? How to be clear about the constraints and trade-offs in implementing policy suggestions?
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Policy visions are often abstract portrayals of futures, embedded within complex institutional structures that require legal and technical knowledge. A key challenge for CCAs is supporting members to grasp the complexity and ‘heaviness’ of policymaking, and understand how decisions are made, what constraints exist, and what trade-offs need to be considered. Otherwise participants may feel unprepared to engage with policy activities.
To make policy design more accessible, it is essential to break down the legal processes that enable collectives to express their needs and desires and exert their power. What, for example, is required for the political body to consider something? What steps are involved this process? On what legal basis is the assembly grounded? It is also essential to clarify the roles, responsibilities and competencies of participants, and to explain how their recommendations can inform formal policy processes and implementation, as well as where the limitations lie. For instance is it consultation, real participation or a decision-making mandate?
Structured exchanges between participants, administrators, policy-makers, implementers and other local local stakeholders shed light on institutional constraints while revealing technocratic framings. Such encounters foster mutual understanding and often lead to more balanced positions.
Describe and present politics in ways that relate to people’s everyday life. The Climate Assembly UK, CCC France, Klimabürgerrat South Tyrol structured discussions around daily practices like housing, mobility, food, energy, tourism and travel, a.o., Supporting participants to relate policy proposals to lived experience.
Case-grounded deliberation discusses policies through concrete cases PolicyCraft
Provide people with the possibility to follow webinars or presentations in which people with expertise discuss the advantages and disadvantages of particular policy proposals.
Inform participants (e.g. videos, booklet) on policy-making procedures and practices Schottlands Climate Assembly produced videos like What does the Paris Agreement mean for Schottland which enabled review of the presentations in advance of them being broadcast, enabled assembly members to re-watch and making them accessible to the broader public
Develop co-design policy workshops that consider feasibility (i.e. supporting citizens to make proposals that are realistic and usable linking citizen ideas to implementation) and acceptability (i.e. carefully considering benefits/costs and trade-offs between different positions) as key requirements.
Arnstein, S. R. (1969). A Ladder Of Citizen Participation. Journal of the American Institute of Planners, 35(4), 216–224. https://doi.org/10.1080/01944366908977225
Doherty, B., Sidhu, Y., Heron, T., West, C., Seaton, A., Gulec, J., Prado, P., Flores Martinez, P. (2023), “Citizen participation in food systems policy making: a case study of a citizens’ assembly”. Emerald Open Research, Vol. 1 No. 10 pp. No Pagination Specified, doi: https://doi.org/10.1108/EOR-10-2023-0004
Duvic-Paoli L-A. Re-imagining the Making of Climate Law and Policy in Citizens’ Assemblies. Transnational Environmental Law. 2022;11(2):235-261. doi:10.1017/S2047102521000339
Stark, A., Thompson, N.K., & Marston, G. (2021). Public deliberation and policy design. Policy Design and Practice 4:4, 452-464, DOI: 10.1080/25741292.2021.1912906
Kim, C., & Nam, K. Y. (2022). Policy Puzzle Game: making policy idea feasible and acceptable in policy co-design, CoDesign, 18:4, 448-465, DOI: 10.1080/15710882.2021.1995440
Kuo, T.-S., Ze Chen, Q., Zhang, A. X., Hsieh, J., Zhu, H., & Holstein, K. (2025). PolicyCraft: Supporting Collaborative and Participatory Policy Design through Case-Grounded Deliberation. In CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI #25), April 26–May 01, 2025, Yokohama Japan, ACM, NY USA. https://doi.org/10.1145/3706598.371386
