In 2021, a diverse group of actors—from scientists to social activists, practitioners to academics—organized a global citizens’ assembly for that year’s UN Climate Change Conference (COP26) in Glasgow. The Global Assembly was an attempt to redress some of the failings of the COP process of climate summits, which have been running for almost thirty years. This initiative was not only the world’s first global citizens’ assembly; it was also an effort to provide the blueprint for a new piece of global governance infrastructure, owned and led by a representative group of the world’s citizens, over whom no one could have undue influence. But did the Global Assembly run successfully and have an impact? And can it help engage global citizens in climate change decisions on a long-term basis?
A New Space for Global Climate Governance
Global governance is not like local or national governance: there is no one in charge. UN Secretary General António Guterres does his best to herd the sheep, but his frustrations are obvious. In this contested land, the Global Assembly was a hastily erected tent that every citizen on earth was invited to enter. It was an example of what political sociologist John Gaventa had called a “claimed space” for participation.
At the nation-state level, the norm is for a citizens’ assembly to have a mandate from a politician, such as French President Emmanuel Macron for France’s 2019–2020 Citizens’ Convention for Climate, or a political body, like the British Parliament in the case of the 2020 Climate Assembly UK. This figurehead or institution prompts a question for discussion and then decides how to respond to the citizens’ recommendations. That is, most citizens’ assemblies are top down, initiated by governments or legislatures.
The Global Assembly was the opposite. It was co-designed with communities, institutions, scientists, citizens, and social movements from around the world and built entirely from the ground up. Initiated from within civil society in this way, the assembly was docked into formal UN COP governance arrangements with the guidance of representatives from the UN Secretariat, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, the UK and Scottish governments as the hosts of COP26, and the COP Champions Network.
Guterres endorsed the initiative, saying, “The Global Citizens’ Assembly for COP26 is a practical way of showing how we can accelerate action through solidarity and people power. You are helping to send the message loud and clear: people everywhere want bold, ambitious climate action, and now is the moment for national leaders to stand and deliver.” This endorsement came alongside those of others, such as COP26 President Alok Sharma, COP26 High-Level Champion for Climate Action Nigel Topping, First Minister of Scotland Nicola Sturgeon, climate justice activist Vanessa Nakate, and a host of others who supported the attempt to create a citizen-led governance chamber connected to institutions, civil society, and grassroots communities.
A Blueprint for a New Global Governance Infrastructure
To understand the Global Assembly, it is important to appreciate that it seeks to create a new piece of global governance infrastructure that explicitly activates all citizens as powerful agents of change. This matters because citizens are critical parts of the change process, whether it is how people physically distance themselves in response to pandemics, how they adapt to price rises, how they reduce their energy consumption, or simply whether they look after one another in whichever layer of the current polycrisis they find themselves.
Societies need citizens to take action themselves; and in an era of rapidly rising costs and needs, this is even more urgent because there are simply not the resources available to depend on states or businesses alone. Active engagement is, after all, a shorthand for kindness, connectedness, and agency: not just the ingredients of well-being and good mental health but the substance that makes life worth living and societies function well. While politicians regularly advocate such activated democratic engagement rhetorically, they rarely—and often systematically fail to—create governance systems that cultivate it.
The Global Assembly sought to alter this situation by developing a theory of change guided by four core assumptions: First, citizens have significant power to effect change with or without institutional support. Second, generating understanding, respect, and solidarity among diverse social groups is a key driver of win-win outcomes, such as vaccine sharing, loss and damage reparations, and peace building. Third, there is a significant policy-action gap: policies do not always translate into effective action on the ground and so need the support of other actors, such as citizens. And fourth, institutions will not implement citizens’ proposals without external pressure. This means that a suite of strategies—including both insider influence, such as working closely with decisionmakers, and outsider influence, for example in partnership with media and social movements—is required to encourage institutions to act.
The assembly aimed to work along three primary routes to impact: encouraging new actions by institutions, supporting new actions by citizens, and demonstrating a new governance model. The objective was to create a governance system that promotes and builds citizen power that is independent of institutional power. This goal was reflected in the assembly’s three main activities: a core assembly, community assemblies, and a cultural wave. Each component responded to the following framing question: “How can humanity address the climate and ecological crisis in a fair and effective way?”
The Core Assembly
The core assembly consisted of one hundred people. To select the assembly members, the project developed a global civic lottery—or sortition—process that used NASA population density data to select one hundred points around the world, fairly weighted toward population centers. At each point, the project recruited a community host organization, whose job was to select people through random door knocking and on-street engagement to form an initial pool of potential assembly members (see figure 1). This pool was then stratified to create a globally descriptive sample by age, gender, education, and views on climate change.
This cohort deliberated online for sixty-eight hours over twelve weeks and in December 2021 collectively produced the People’s Declaration for the Sustainable Future of Planet Earth. The declaration was presented by assembly members at a dedicated event on November 1, 2021, the first day of COP26. Sturgeon, Nakate, and key architect of the 2015 Paris Agreement Laurence Tubiana spoke at the event.
The Community Assemblies
Community assemblies were self-organized events that anyone could run anywhere, using the same learning materials as the core assembly and guided by a do-it-yourself tool kit. The Global Assembly’s mission was to give people a seat at the global governance table, and community assemblies were a way of ensuring that anyone who was not selected for the core assembly could still take part and have their voice heard. Over 400 organizations registered to run a community assembly, and 1,300 people from at least forty-one countries participated (see figure 2).
The community assemblies demonstrated that demand exists for participation. Simply providing an events tool kit and access to learning materials can increase engagement dramatically. These assemblies provided a new way of thinking about engagement across the spectrum of political action, from towns and villages to nation-states, and from local networks to transnational and global systems. The model of community assemblies is an attempt to make the systemic approach to deliberative democracy a reality. It presents deliberation as a communicative activity that occurs in a diversity of spaces and emphasizes the need for interconnection between those spaces.
However, despite its conceptual and practical appeal, the community assembly model in its current format has its limits. For community assemblies to have impact and achieve their potential of engaging millions of people, more sophisticated processes are needed to support organizers to run events in a consistent, high-quality way that is also adapted to local needs. There is value in people engaging with broadly the same materials, responding to the same questions, and facilitating events to common standards, as doing so supports consistency of inputs and throughputs and equality of participation; but much more experimentation and evaluation are needed. In essence, what is required is a common operating system that enables anyone to plug in and provides a clear mechanism for the outputs to be meaningfully collated and analyzed.
The Cultural Wave
The cultural wave is an approach that was co-developed with a global community of creatives—among them French designer Nelly Ben Hayoun and British musician Brian Eno—and piloted in 2021. It resulted in a range of artistic responses from across the world, including poetry, street art, and community quilt making. If community assemblies were a way of providing a seat for everyone at the global governance table, the cultural wave was an attempt to tell people that the seats existed, were comfortable, and were in position for an incredible discussion. For the Global Assembly to be a truly inclusive forum, people have to know about it and must want to get involved. Generating a wider public debate is also critical for the final recommendations to have impact locally, nationally, and globally; the cultural wave was the Global Assembly’s attempt to do this.
Differences From National Citizens’ Assemblies
Perhaps the initiative’s main innovation was its global scale. There are big differences between a global citizens’ assembly and a national or local one: the former is characterized by an opaque global political context, the cultural diversity of communities, and the question of the legitimacy of running a global governance project. As no one is in charge of global governance, the normal approach of getting a national political mandate does not apply. This challenge is common to all global governance—and surely lies at the heart of the international community’s inability to tackle climate change.
A key principle of the Global Assembly was that everyone could participate in their first language. To do so, each participant had a community host who undertook live interpretation during deliberations on Zoom and translated all the learning materials. Notetakers, making liberal use of Google Translate, created boards on the collaboration platform Miro to capture digital records of the conversations in the language of each participant. This is one way that the project embraced the cultural diversity of the communities involved. Other ways included seeking to accommodate religious days, such as Fridays and Sundays, and using hand signals to enable nonverbal communication.
Another legitimacy consideration for any team seeking to run a global assembly is how to be as deeply embedded as possible in the communities involved without being extractivist or imposing operating models that are not culturally sensitive. The Global Assembly worked across a huge variety of political contexts, from old and new democracies to authoritarian regimes and countries at different levels of economic and educational development. Some of the participants in the core and community assemblies were illiterate, requiring the initiative to adapt accordingly.
The Global Assembly attempted to be both embedded and adaptive by embracing a highly decentralized delivery model, in which community hosts were recruited at each of the one hundred locations; these hosts were then grouped by language and supported by language-specific cluster facilitators. There were also rules about paying team members according to their role, not their location, to try to ensure that values of equity were hardwired across the delivery model. The setup was far from perfect but provided a good basis to inform future global assemblies.
A final key innovation of the Global Assembly was the development of new multimedia learning tools, which enabled people to engage intellectually and emotionally with the latest data sets produced by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
Long-Term Impact?
The Global Assembly’s final report was published during the 2022 UN Climate Change Conference (COP27) in Sharm El-Sheikh. An evaluation by a group of thirty researchers from across the world will be published in spring 2023.
Now that the assembly has run its course, it is clear that organizing such a global process is possible and that many people across civil society and institutions find the idea inspiring and want to support it. That is no mean feat when the vast majority of so-called expert feedback received in advance of the initiative suggested that it would be impossible.
But can this kind of global democratic participation really help respond to the current polycrisis? At the start of the coronavirus pandemic, historian Yuval Noah Harari wrote, “In this time of crisis, we face two particularly important choices. The first is between totalitarian surveillance and citizen empowerment. The second is between nationalist isolation and global solidarity.” Fundamentally, the Global Assembly is in the business of creating spaces to empower citizens, increase solidarity, and help institutions tackle tough issues, such as climate change, healthcare, and inequality.
The Global Assembly increased the agency of its members. From the start to the end of the initiative, the share of participants who felt they had “a great deal of influence” in addressing the climate and ecological crisis increased by 17.6 percentage points, while the number of people who felt they had “very little influence” decreased by 14.8 points (see figure 3). Assembly members ended the process with a greater sense of influence than they started with; this was especially pronounced for local decisionmaking on the climate crisis, where perceptions of personal influence rose by 16 percentage points.
It is worth noting that pessimism increased after participants observed the COP26 proceedings. This was likely due to a feeling of empowerment during the writing of the Global Assembly’s people’s declaration, followed by observation of the COP26 proceedings and disappointment with the final wording of the Glasgow Climate Pact, the agreement reached at the 2021 summit.
Nevertheless, the Global Assembly also built solidarity among groups. By the end of the initiative, 95 percent of assembly members “agreed” or “completely agreed” that “fellow members respected what I had to say, even when they didn’t agree with me.” The share of participants who agreed with the statement “I understood the perspectives and concerns of others very much” went up from 28 percent to 60 percent. There was also significant qualitative evidence of solidarity being built. For example, Midori Yajima, a notetaker from Italy, explained, “It was unexpected to see how people from different backgrounds connected, empathized, and even laughed together, finding a way also to go beyond their daily dimensions, learning mutual respect and maybe widening their horizons.”
It is hard to know for sure whether the assembly had much impact on institutional decisionmaking. But given the assembly’s minimal integration into the COP negotiating cycle and relatively low media profile, it is fair to assume that the impact was limited.
One challenge is to dramatically increase the number of citizens involved. The community assemblies are crucial here and provide the key to the Global Assembly realizing its mission of giving everybody on earth a seat at the global governance table. To do this, it is necessary to ensure that the experience of sitting at the table is as rewarding and easy as possible.
For this to happen, community assemblies need to become widely integrated into existing structures, such as school and college curricula, places of worship, sports clubs, and grassroots movements of all kinds. The vision is to create a vast network of community assemblies that can cultivate globally conscious local action—the original intention of the “Think global, act local” mantra of Agenda 21, a product of the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro. In particular, community assembly organizers need much better support so that they have more power to effectively self-organize, generate and share data, and connect to official governance structures.
In addition to getting more people involved, another challenge is to increase the institutional impact of global participation. To make a real difference to global decisionmaking, stronger insider and outsider routes to influence are required. A more robust insider strategy would involve deeper engagement in the annual COP conference and policy development process; this might include assembly members engaging with nation-state delegations or having a more formal role at the summit. A bolder outsider strategy might mean working with social movements, which could act on and advocate for the people’s declaration and encourage wider participation in community assemblies. This type of engagement is common practice for many policy influence strategies, and the same approach should be adopted here.
Unlocking COP Momentum
For all its limitations, the UN COP process remains the primary mechanism for climate global governance. The November conferences have become States of the Union for the climate, and as a minimum they provide much-needed media attention and political pressure. The Global Assembly has the potential to unlock COP momentum in four ways.
Harness the COP cycle as a route to citizen action, not just political action: COPs at present focus on increasing the ambition of political and business leaders, but 72 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions are due to the consumption of food, products, energy, and travel by people. The Global Assembly provides a practical mechanism for bringing citizens to the negotiating table with the politicians. This is a big opportunity for the UN, as according to a 2016 BBC World Service poll, people increasingly identify as global rather than national citizens—a trend that is especially strong in emerging economies, for example China, Nigeria, and Peru, where at least 70 percent of citizens see themselves in this way. It may well be that citizens will identify more strongly with, and trust, global rather than national processes.
Prevent politicians from using public opposition to justify inaction: Blaming inaction on public opposition is an old political trick, and it has been endemic at COPs for decades, with politicians reciting lines such as “I’d love to support this or that fossil fuel levy, but the voters just won’t stomach it, especially now with the cost-of-living crisis.” But would voters be opposed? That is not what previous citizens’ assemblies have found.
Raise the profile and engagement of ordinary people in the COP process: Most people are not aware of what the IPCC or the COP process is. The Global Assembly provides infrastructure to increase public engagement with IPCC data and participate in COP discussions. At present, although more people than ever see themselves as global citizens, there are few political routes for them to act globally. The Global Assembly could change that.
Bring citizens into nation-state negotiating teams: The annual COP negotiation process mainly involves nation-states. Global citizens’ assemblies could generate informed citizens who could help national negotiating teams by offering access to data on lived experiences and representing perspectives that are uncommon in government.
Beyond these kinds of specific recommendations lies perhaps the biggest challenge: how to use the experience of the 2021 Global Assembly to create a more permanent global citizens’ assembly on climate change. The key next step in the formal UN process to reboot global governance is the Summit of the Future, which will be convened in New York on September 22–23, 2024, to adopt a Pact for the Future, with a preparatory ministerial meeting to be held in September 2023. The 2024 summit could be an opportunity to launch a permanent Global Assembly.
Achieving this will require support from nation-states, UN institutions, social movements, communities, and the media. Most importantly of all, the transformative potential of the Global Assembly must not be dampened by the formality of existing UN arrangements. The project’s community and institutional roots must be maintained: both are critical. If the Global Assembly becomes another adversarial political chamber, the opportunity generated by the 2021 prototype will be lost. But in a way, it is already an achievement to know that a global citizens’ assembly is possible and does generate citizen empowerment and solidarity. With greater participation, decisionmakers will start to listen; indeed, they already are.
Claire Mellier is knowledge and practice lead at Iswe Foundation.
Rich Wilson is chief enabling officer at Iswe Foundation.
The authors are also co-initiators and organizers of the Global Assembly. They used the Global Assembly report to inform the writing of this article.
Carnegie Europe is grateful to the Open Society Foundations for their support of this work.
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