In recent times we have seen a spate of climate assemblies across Europe as the climate emergency gains increasing prominence in the political agenda and as the citizens’ assembly approach to public engagement gains popularity. However, there has been little empirical research on how the scope of citizens’ assemblies affects the internal logic of the assembly process and its impacts on external policy actors. This is a significant oversight given the power of agenda setting. It is also of particular importance for climate assemblies given the exceptional scale and complexity of climate change, as well as the need for co-ordination across all policy areas and types of governance to address it. In this paper, we start to address this gap through an in-depth case analysis of the Climate Assembly UK. We adopt a mixed methods approach, combining surveys of the assembly members and witnesses, interviews with the assembly members, organisers, MPs, parliamentary staff, and government civil servants, and non-participant observation of the process. We find that attempts to adapt the assembly’s scope to the scale of the climate change issue compromised assembly member learning, the co-ordination of the resulting recommendations, assembly member endorsement of the recommendations, and the extent of their impact on parliament and government. We argue that more democratization in setting the agenda could help combat these issues.

Citizens are often accused of being disinterested and incapable of taking part in politics. This chapter demonstrates how deliberative mini-publics (DMPs) can be designed to address this issue, in a manner that conforms to norms of deliberative democracy. DMPs are, by design, venues that should facilitate balanced and critical deliberation among participants representing differing viewpoints. The design features of mini-publics, such as random selection and moderated small-group discussions, should thus at least to some extent correct potential biases in evidence. Mini-publics’ capacity for critical scrutiny can be further strengthened by specific design features that help participants to become more reflective in their own views.

This chapter examines the bases of deliberative mini-publics’ (DMPs) internal and external legitimacy and discusses how their outputs can influence collective decision-making. It addresses some of the most contentious issues in the field of democratic innovations today including: To what extent should deliberative mini-publics shape decision-making? Should DMPs be empowered to make binding decisions? Are they better off taking an advisory role? What is the basis of DMPs’ legitimacy in the first place?

In this inaugural issue of the Journal of Deliberative Democracy, we are pleased to present reviews of five recently published books that will shape the scholarship on public deliberation in the years to come. These books engage with key theoretical and methodological debates in the field, contribute to the way we understand deliberation in relation to other political practices, and present compelling empirical accounts of how deliberative democracy comes alive in contemporary times.The reviewed titles are Mapping and Measuring Deliberation by André Bächtiger and John Parkinson (2019); Demagoguery and Democracy (2017) by Patricia Roberts-Miller Re-imagining Democracy by Jane Suiter and David Farrell (2019); Oral Democracy by Paromita Sanyal and Vijayendra Rao (2018) and Beyond Liberalism by Michael Briand (2019, Praeger).