Citizens' climate assemblies are proliferating. Some of them are large-scale and with unprecedent impacts on decision-makers. Recently, many climate assemblies are or have been organized at the national level in Europe. Contrary to the Chilean constitutional convention, these large-scale processes bring together randomly selected ordinary citizens. They are tasked to provide public policy recommendations after hearing experts and stakeholders. What are the promises, limitations, and presuppositions of these socio-political experimentations? These types of democratic experimentalism show that heterogeneous assemblies can face complex issues and make relevant proposals. Nevertheless, they indicate how difficult it is to reach high deliberative quality, considering moral pluralism, uncertainty, and the requirement of argumentation among different communicational capacities. We must keep in mind the warnings of Habermas and Rawls, with their importance in the foundations of deliberative democracy theory, thinking that it is very difficult, if not impossible, in intersubjective empirical experiments. The legal and political system plays this role. Beyond citizens’ assemblies themselves, we must consider the possible necessity to move from deliberation in minipublics to explicit deliberative system, pluralist, responsive and accountable.  

Expositor:

• Bernard Reber (CEVIPOF-Sciences Po)

• Hayley Stevenson (Universidad Torcuato Di Tella)

El evento será en inglés, sin traducción. Se desarrollará de forma presencial en el Campus Di Tella y de forma virtual a través de la plataforma Zoom.