Introduction
Multi-disciplinary Analysis of a Complex Deliberative Process

Dimitri COURANT and Bernard REBER1

Of all of the issues facing today's world, climate is the most crucial. However, as we face the prospect of an unprecedented disaster, the institutions of what is termed "representative democracy" appear to be relatively impotent. They are afflicted by: short-term vision linked to relatively short electoral cycles; the preponderance of lobbyists and interest groups; reticence to change on the part of general populations; difficulties in effecting systemic transitions; etc. Clearly, there is no shortage of challenges. As a potential remedy, while some people advocate a so-called "green dictatorship", others propose innovative democratic measures. Such innovations would ensure pluralism and efforts to find compromise. Above all, they would ensure an informed, collective decision-making process, in line with the freedoms that the Rule of Law States guarantee to their citizens. The goal of this approach is to enhance citizen participation, improve the quality of political deliberation, and adopt an alternative method for making long-term decisions; decisions that are urgently needed but that elected officials, constrained by short-term popularity, are reluctant to take. In recent years, many citizens' assemblies on the climate issue have been held in the Global North. However, these assemblies do not always share the same goals. France's Convention citoyenne pour le climat (C3 - Citizens' Convention for Climate) leads the pack in this area, in terms of size, duration and the number of political proposals it produced. With an official mandate from the French government, the C3 included 150 citizens selected at random, making up a diverse panel designed to represent the diversity of French society. Launched in October 2019, participants listened to presentations from guest experts, deliberated for nine months, and put forward 149 recommendations to the French President in June 2020. In February 2021, a final session was held for the citizens to appraise the government's response to the recommendations. This lengthy process involved organizers, facilitators, experts, representatives of special interest groups, journalists, and political figures. Any worthy analysis of the C3 must reflect the complexity and richness of the process. In order to analyze and evaluate the C3, a group of researchers worked throughout the Convention - and indeed outside and beyond it - conducting observations, surveys, and interviews. Their work is intended to be more than merely a simplified overview of this extraordinary initiative.

What lessons can be drawn from the Citizens' Convention for Climate? Is it possible to combine deliberative democracy with an ecological transition that advances social justice? These two questions are addressed throughout this book. Their implications extend beyond France. The French President, Emmanuel Macron, later opined that the question put to the Convention - "How can we achieve a 40% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2030, in keeping with the spirit of social justice?" - was too broad. Nevertheless, this question is at the heart of the balance which needs to be struck in order to bring about an ecological transition within any democracy, where decision-making and sustainable implementation are informed by true deliberation (Reber 2023).

Hereafter in this introduction, we will briefly examine the C3's place in relation to similar initiatives; specifically, the constellation of deliberative mini-publics, which pre-date the C3 by some distance. Thus, it was not a radical innovation which came out of nowhere. However, we will underline some of the features which set it apart from other initiatives (it was notably distinguished by its exceptional scale). We will then describe how this book is structured and provide overviews of the individual chapters. Finally, we will reflect on the unusual research carried out in this field study, by a multi-disciplinary group of some twenty researchers, studying just one experiment (an extraordinarily high number). The conclusion completes this reflection and looks at the problem of evaluation: the levels, bases, and criteria used. Indeed, the assessment criteria and the way in which they are interpreted serve as filters to allow for an analysis to be carried out. The aim of this book is to analyze the process of the C3, with all its strengths and weaknesses, in order to enrich our knowledge of citizen deliberation, in particular, on climate policies.

I.1. Deliberative mini-publics, elsewhere and previously

The C3 would not have been possible, or even conceivable, without the development of other deliberative mini-publics, over a long period of time. Mini-publics constitute a type of democratic innovation (i.e. a set of practices and devices which allow for the involvement of ordinary citizens beyond the usual context of voting and elections, social movements, or trade unions). Widely varying arguments have been employed to justify these practices, based on a range of democratic theories or simple interpretations of guidelines to lend them legitimacy. Such is the case, for example, with the theory of deliberative democracy (Reber 2011a, 2011b, 2023; Bächtiger et al. 2018). At least four types of democratic innovations can be distinguished: 1) local assemblies and participatory budgeting; 2) referenda and popular initiatives; 3) "e-democracy" (electronic/digital); and 4) mini-publics constituted by random selection (Smith 2009; Elstub and Escobar 2019). Mini-publics are diverse panels of citizens selected at random, who deliberate on one or more political issues, and make recommendations (Grönlund et al. 2014; Harris 2019). The lottery procedures are combined with selection criteria to ensure that the diversity of the resulting panel reflects that of society.

After the advent of commonly known legal juries (or lay juries) (Gissinger-Bosse 2019), it was not until the early 1970s that new randomly selected citizens' assemblies emerged. We can point to at least six generations of mini-publics (Courant and Sintomer 2019). First of all, in 1969 in France, came the launch of the Conseil supérieur de la fonction militaire (High Council of Military Function). It was the world's first mini-public, but also the longest-lasting and the first permanent assembly of randomly selected members in the 20th century. This deliberative body brings together 80 military personnel who are proportionally representative of the various ranks and groups within the army twice a year. It then produces a report that is submitted directly to the Minister for Defense (Courant 2019b).

Subsequently, in the 1970s, came the citizens' juries and planning cells, set up respectively in the USA and Germany (Dienel and Renn 1995; Crosby and Nethercut 2005; Vergne 2010). In the 1980s, the Danish Board of Technology organized a number of "consensus conferences" to produce reports on controversial technologies. Other European countries, including Switzerland, used this same model to implement "hybrid forums" (Joss and Bellucci 2002; Hendriks 2005; Reber 2005, 2011). France also adopted them, albeit much later than Denmark. However, in France, they are held less frequently and are known as citizens' conferences (Boy et al. 2000; Bourg and Boy 2005). All of these democratic innovations brought together between 15 and 40 citizens for three weekends. Thus, they were on a smaller scale than those which were to follow. France also experimented with citizens' conferences within a larger setting: the États généraux de la bioéthique (Reber 2010). This very French name harkens back to the country's historical Estates General.

In the 1990s, deliberative polls offered greater representativity, thanks to the larger number of participants (between 100 and 600). However, they were a decrease in terms of deliberative production, as they merely expressed the "enlightened opinion" of a representative sample through surveys, instead of asking the panel to produce recommendations on public policies (Fishkin 2009; Mansbridge 2010).

The next stage takes us from the 2000s up to today, with Citizens' assemblies commissioned by the state, made up of between 100 and 200 participants. Pilot projects in this direction have been run in Canada (Warren and Pearse 2008; Lang 2010), the Netherlands (Fournier et al. 2011), Ireland (Suiter et al. 2019; Courant 2021), France (Reber 2020), the United Kingdom, and many other countries. In parallel to these "state-led citizens' assemblies", NGOs have organized "civil society-led citizens' assemblies" (Courant 2019a) in Belgium (Caluwaerts and Reuchamps 2018), Iceland (Bergmann 2016), Germany (see Chapter 15) and Australia (Carson et al. 2013). Similar initiatives have also been set up by universities (Reber 2011b).

Finally, in the 2010s, many US states set up a Citizens' Initiative Review (CIR): a deliberative panel of around thirty participants, charged with producing a statement to inform voters about the opportunities and risks surrounding an upcoming referendum (Knobloch et al. 2015). This process was replicated in Switzerland at local level in 2019 by the...