89: Citizens assemble: participatory approaches for climate action

After catching up on professional and personal news, Matt, Becky and Fraser welcome Rachel Coxcoon to the pod. Rachel, a former councillor and founder/director of Climate Guide, and is currently doing a PHD at Lancaster University.

In this episode, we talk about the role of deliberative democracy such as climate assemblies, and how we can use these effectively to achieve Net Zero.

AUDIO TRANSCRIPT

[music flourish]

Becky: Hello and welcome to Local Zero with Becky, Matt and Fraser.

Becky: Joining us today is Rachel Coxcoon. Rachel spent many years working at the Centre for Sustainable Energy, leading their work around local and community empowerment. She's a former councillor, Director of Climate Guide, and if that wasn't enough, is now doing a PhD at Lancaster University, exploring how socioeconomic differences and political outlooks influence how people engage with the Net Zero transition.

Fraser: In this episode, we'll be chatting about the role of deliberative democracies such as citizens assemblies in climate policymaking and how to use these effectively as a core part of the Net Zero transition.

Matt: Really looking forward to this one. But before we get stuck into the episode, a plea from us to review Local Zero five stars, of course, wherever you listen to your pods and please do get in touch with us. If there's anything you'd like us to discuss, you can do that via email Localzeropod@gmail.com or Twitter at Local Zero pod.

Matt: We really do love hearing from you all.

Fraser: Yes, and if you enjoy Local Zero, the number one way you can help us is by recommending us to friends and colleagues. So if you could take two seconds to send the pod on to others, we would really, really appreciate it.

Becky: And you can also find further reading, episode transcripts, and the entire back catalogue of Local Zero on our website, localzeropod.Com.

Matt: So we've been asking many of you to get in touch with examples of how Local Zero has informed your work and it's been very heartening to hear the responses. So thank you to all of those who've taken the time. Now we had an email from Isaac Beaver who was recently on the pod about how Local Zero has influenced climate action scorecards in Canada, Isaac said, I thought I would let you know that a Canadian organization called the climate reality project, listen to your original podcast with Hannah and found out about our project.

Matt: They got in contact with us last year, and there is now a scorecards based project in Canada, with the results that are going to launch in June. Hope that's helpful for your funding impact as well as a nice story for a Monday afternoon. Well, Isaac, it was indeed a nice story and it's really great to hear that we're shifting the dial elsewhere.

Matt: Maybe we'll try to organize a chat with them, add that to the website and on the show notes.

Becky: Very, very exciting. That's cool. Like just shows that influence around the world. Absolutely

Matt: amazing. It was. And. A little closer to home. We also had a chat with Alistair McPherson, who's CEO of Plymouth Energy Community.

Matt: So a community owned and led charity that's looking to essentially deliver zero carbon houses and also community owned renewables. Uh, Alistair organize a quick chat with me, 20, 30 minutes. Basically just saying this pod has really helped to inform his thinking, his colleagues thinking about the next steps their organization is going to take.

Matt: So Alistair, thank you for taking the time. It's really, really appreciated.

Fraser: We're everywhere. We're everywhere.

Becky: Ultimately, this is the goal, right? Because so much of the, the knowledge that folk have that work in this space, I feel like stays in bubbles, not even just kind of the academic sector or, you know, whatever sector you're working, but even more micro bubbles than that.

Becky: And I just think that having the opportunity to share insights and learnings and knowledge more widely is, I mean, it's the heart of why we're doing all of this. So yeah, really warms my, really warms my spirit. And please, please, if you've got more stories like that, we'd love to hear them.

Matt: We're not just screaming into the void.

Matt: Yeah,

Fraser: it really, it really, I think it's just nice to hear that someone out there is listening. Sometimes we have these conversations and we've, we almost, we almost forget that there's an audience for this. So it's always nice to, it is to hear from, to hear from all of you. So absolutely get in touch.

Matt: Yes, absolutely.

Matt: We're, we're, I mean, we're all about positivity here and good news stories and never, never talk about the other side. So, so here's another good news story. Fraser, you have just been, not just nominated, you've now been ratified. You have been awarded fellowship from the Royal Scottish Geographical Society.

Matt: So that is, acknowledgement, I think, of the sterling work that you've been doing in this space. So congratulations and insert round of applause here, please.

Fraser: Thank you very much, Matt. Yeah, no, it's a, it's a lovely, lovely thing. So it's a, an honorary fellowship from what I think if anyone's not familiar with Royal Scottish Geographic Society, they're a wonderful, wonderful organization and very much at the forefront of, of thinking of, of policy influence and advocacy of working with communities on, on climate and sort of broader Net Zero issues in Scotland.

Fraser: An organization that do tireless work with really, really great members. Other honorary fellows include, for instance, Ban Ki moon. I don't know if you recall the name, but some really, really cool people are part of this network. So it's nice to be recognizing that.

Fraser: And again, just another, um, Another example of it's nice to know that the work that you're doing and the things that you show incessantly about aren't just completely hurled into the void.

Matt: I'm definitely jealous. Um, as I did a geography degree. So this is the, the Nirvana. This is the promised land. So, um, Fraser, I, I bow to you and your prowess, you've, you've scaled, scaled the summit.

Matt: Well done.

Fraser: Thank you.

Becky: So in future episodes, can we expect to see. Another kind of certificate award behind you alongside your PhD.

Fraser: Well, I will insist on, I will insist on being called, you know, your supreme excellency, just something to that effect. Yeah. It's not quite a knighthood. I actually think this is better to be honest, but

Matt: yes, I completely agree.

Matt: Um, now as as we sit here, um, we are probably by the time this goes out, I think the manifestos for the forthcoming election will start to emerge. But as we sit here, we are being bombarded with news, uh, about various parties, green policy credentials, what will be in these manifestos, what won't be. And one of the will they, won't they stories has been Labour's infamous 28 billion pound commitment to green energy amongst other things.

Matt: As we sit here, it's looking like it's going to get pulled / water down and I don't know. I just wanted to pause and reflect here. So we're, I think it's not a massive stretch to say this is a monumental election. It's a monumental year for elections. Generally, it's not just the UK that's doing this, but the US and many, many other countries, but green, the green agenda will very much beyond that.

Matt: And one of the, the kind of the context, around this is about looking to be economically and fiscally sensible, a safe pair of hands. And one of the first things that could be cut is green. So wanted your quick kind of back of the fag packet response on that.

Fraser: I so I find this incredibly frustrating and not just the flip flopping around on the 28 billion, I don't think that's quite as important as the commitment to investment full stop.

Fraser: And what I find frustrating is the idea that they want to seem economically sensible. So they're going to curb sort of pull back on any commitments to investment. When you see the, the catastrophe, the absolute disaster that's been caused by under investment over the last 14 years. There's nothing left to cut.

Fraser: There's nowhere else that money can come from. So this, this, this narrative that to show that you're economically sensible means that you have to show that you're willing to make tough decisions and that you're willing to sort of enact misery and in a lot of law ways and not spend anything in the face of an existential climate crisis, of a cost of living crisis, of decline in living standards, and demonstrable underinvestment compared to the rest of, of the OECD, compared to the rest of sort of wealthy or more developed nations, I think is an absolute nonsense.

Fraser: I also think against that background, sorry, I will give way, but against that, the backdrop of the state of the country just now, the idea that people are at all interested in fiscal rules that anyone's going to go and vote based on your arbitrary fiscal rules versus the the opportunity to invest and make things better.

Fraser: I think this is the point where you challenge the narrative. You don't backtrack to say we're not going to spend anything because people will think we're sensible. I think people have broadly had enough of not spending and sensible fiscal rules. Now's the time to get behind investment and to really stand on it because at some point or other you're going to have to, lest we completely miss it.

Fraser: everything that we have to do on climate, economy, and society in general. Thank you very much. I'll see you next week.

Matt: So, so, so not a fan then Fraser. It, it's short, not happy. Becky, any, any immediate response?

Becky: Well, I will, I will layer onto the fact that I think Fraser's right about where a lot of people are kind of coming to, uh, coming to this debate from and time and again, and not just at the kind of at this sort of political level, but even within programs run by the energy industry itself.

Becky: There's this assumption that we are completely motivated by money and the economic argument yet. All the social science research out there from, you know, not just in the energy domain, but in so many different domains shows us that really, that is not the most, that is not the strongest way in which people make decisions.

Becky: And Fraser's absolutely right. Like aligning with deeper, um, and more intrinsic core values is absolutely the way to win over people and votes. So, you know, I think you've, I think you're onto a point there. I think for me, the bigger issue is it's just short term thinking, isn't it? Because the reality is, is that we need to invest in this in order to avoid a lot of the, um, detrimental impacts.

Becky: And more spending down the line. So it feels, you know, it's just another, another way in which spend less now spend more in the future. We're loading and loading this on to future generations and not future generations, you know, that many away, probably, probably later in our own lives and our kids lives.

Becky: And it just, yeah, it feels very short term to me.

Matt: My, okay, so I'm going to, I'm going to play devil's advocate and come at this about maybe some of the, um, ways in which I understand what they're doing before then maybe disagreeing with it. I understand moving, stepping away from a big number, uh, which they can be turned against them and used, um, you know, during the election as an example, which some people would frame of, of labor, you know, increasing tax and increasing spend.

Matt: So a lot of people are happy with increased spend as long as it doesn't result in increased tax. And given the cost of living crisis for some, you know, not all let's remember that there's some people doing. Plenty well out of the current situation, but I can understand the sensitivity sensitivities and that there's this talk Pat McFadden and others bomb proofing the manifesto, but this is the big, but if, if this is one of their five key missions, it's a massive plinth for economic stimulus for social welfare and justice.

Matt: And also, lest we forget dealing with these problems before they get bigger and require more effort and cost to, to resolve if they're going to step back on this. It does raise a question on what they're for. So I hope, I hope they're binning the number, but not the commitment. And we shall see.

Becky: We shall see.

Becky: Let's lighten up a little bit. That was quite, quite heavy. I want to talk about sheep in wells, in homes.

Matt: Amazing. I'm in. What about them?

Becky: Um, so maybe not as controversial as you might think, but there's a new project.

Matt: it's definitely a scene change, isn't it?

Becky: Yep. From, from labor to Welsh sheep. This is a project in North Wales where they're looking to, you know, Use traditional products like wool, like sheep's wool to help make homes more energy efficient for less.

Becky: And so it's really looking at how can we take more traditional materials and use them in new ways to improve the housing stock and look at. What, uh, what performance of that could be. And so this is really this, this big eco project trying to lead a major decarbonization program, working alongside communities and businesses over the next 10 years, but using those, uh, those things that we have right there on the doorstep.

Becky: To, to see how we can do better with them.

Matt: Plenty on the doorstep of Wales. That's great. No, I mean, I'm, I love this idea about building with, with more organic, natural materials, many of which that we can, we can capture and harness on our doorstep. I mean, I'm amazed by what you can do with, with wool. So I would love to see this.

Matt: And one of the places I actually really want to visit is the center for alternative technologies in Wales, where I think these types of technologies are being profiled. So that's, that's another place for me to drag my children along to next time we're in Wales and that might be Easter time kids. So,

Becky: Oh, your kids are getting quite the education, aren't they?

Becky: It's absolutely awesome.

Matt: Very bored. Um, no, that, I really liked that. Okay. So. I think we need to bring our guest in because a lot of maybe the discussions that we've, we've been having now by this manifestos, what have you, it's, I think it's all about how we engage the public, how we inform the public, how do we bring them in as part of this?

Matt: So I think it's probably about time to bring them in.

Rachel: Hello, my name is Rachel Coxcoon and I'm a PhD researcher at Lancaster University in the climate citizens team.

Becky: Hi, Rachel. Thank you so much for joining us. I noticed that you introduced yourself as a PhD researcher, but actually you've got a really, you're not a.

Becky: perhaps, uh, traditional type of PhD researcher. You've got quite an extensive background working in, well, a huge diversity of spaces. So maybe just give us a little bit of an overview of, of, you know, what, what you've done before and how you got into this really exciting space and PhD program.

Yeah. Um, so yes, I don't fit the normal PhD student mold in that I am a great deal older than most of them.

And I got into the PhD really at the end point of, of thinking about engaging with communities and local government around the climate crisis. So I, my, my main background is that I worked for about 15 years for an organization called the Center for Sustainable Energy based in Bristol, where I set up and then led the local and community empowerment team, which was focused really on supporting communities around things, particularly like community owned energy renewables, you know, community wind farms and so on, as well as a lot of work around the planning system.

So neighborhood planning at that very local scale, as well as supporting local councils to write their planning frameworks around Net Zero. Um, and all that work with communities and local government, when I moved to the Cotswolds about 10 years ago. Kind of really um, open my eyes to the fact that the council there was doing very badly on climate change, um, for such a beautiful green area.

There was very little actually going on, um, and that encouraged me to run for election, principally about making sure that building was better around there. And so I managed to, to win, but was also part of a group who then took part to control of the council. So sort of more by accident than by design, I became cabinet member for climate change and forward planning at Cotswold District Council, which was, you know, fascinating and rewarding and frustrating, probably in equal measure, which I did for about four years.

Uh, and then I'd moved away from the area, but a lot of the work that that I'd done through all of that, through working with communities, through representing my own community, through the development of things like the future energy landscapes, um, consultation approach that I developed for the campaign for rural England at the campaign to protect rural England.

It was all that kind of, how do you help people make decisions that are very local? Because I've kind of been around in this game long enough to have seen what happens, like what happened under the last Labour government, where for very good reasons they were really promoting the rollout of renewables.

And that ultimately caused the backlash against, for example, onshore wind that we have, when we had lots of people feeling like Infrastructure had been imposed upon them. So doing all that kind of work with communities and say, where is that right scale to make these decisions geographically, spatially, and culturally, how do we help people come together to make decisions about energy planning particularly, ultimately led me to wanting to think.

Think more about it, uh, which then led me to applying for the PhD that I'm doing now.

Becky: So maybe you can just help before we get started, just a bit of clarity over some of the terminology that we might be using. You know, you talked about engaging people and supporting, I guess, more democratic decision making.

Becky: So we hear terms like that. We also hear things like climate assemblies, mini public citizen juries, you know, and, and there's probably a few more, maybe you could just set out some clarity over what do we mean by these different terms? Are we really talking about the same thing or are there any like really key differences we should be aware of it.

Rachel: That has become quite a problem over the last few years of people applying a label to something like saying something is a climate assembly when it isn't. So when we talk about citizens assemblies, that is a form of what's called a deliberative mini public. Uh, and deliberative mini publics themselves are part of a wider Kind of academic area of thought, which is called deliberative democracy.

Rachel: And when we talk about deliberation, what we mean is bringing people together in a way that they can deliberate. So to talk in a rational and reasoned way is not a debate. It's not about, you know, like a school debating club where one side wins and one side loses. It's very much about working through the issues, which means you need to have people need to have space and time to do so.

Rachel: It's not something you can do in a couple of hours. They usually happen over multiple sessions, few evenings and weekends, sometimes spreading over more than a month. And, and expert speakers are brought in so that they can have that kind of external information and the setting and the grounding for what they're discussing.

Rachel: Um, and that lies at the heart of them. But the other thing that's, uh, that's taken to be a sort of crucial component of a citizen's assembly is that it's what's called descriptively representative. Of the macro public. So if you're talking about a mini public, that means it's like a small version of, of the bigger population that it represents, which could be town, could be an entire nation.

Rachel: And so that would mean that they get recruited in this really quite comprehensive and time consuming way. What normally happens is that an organization like shared future that you mentioned would work with someone like the sortition foundation and they would Send out, let's say 15, 000 letters across the county, the size of Devon.

Rachel: And they would be aiming to recruit from that about 40 or 50 people. Uh, what would happen is you'd send out 15, 000 letters, maybe let's say five, 600 people would respond to that invitation saying they'd like to take part and then they would look through those respondees and say, well, we need this many men and women, this many wealthy and not wealthy mix of ethnic minorities that reflect, you know, so you have kind of a pie chart that says this is what Devon looks like in terms of young and old, rich and poor.

Rachel: And you'd want to try to sort of create something that looks like that at the mini scale. The idea being that if that group have take the time to deliberate over this issue, that what they come up with should reflect what any random group of 50 people that you picked out of Devon would also have come up with.

Rachel: That's the theory behind a deliberative mini public.

Matt: Yeah, I probably want to just add an apology here. Um, that I think I, until quite recently was using some of the terms sloppily, uh, lazily. Uh, we've been developing a report on exactly this on, on, on participatory approaches for communities and really digging into the difference between deliberative democracy, participatory democracy.

Matt: Um, and you know, where exactly things like citizens assembly sit in or participatory budgeting. And there are kind of Key differences here, and I guess for me, some of the key lines are like you're saying, are you trying to get, you know, a representative slice of a particular group or public, um, versus maybe having a handful of, of non representative individuals, but digging maybe much more deeply into a subject and these, these individuals being more informed.

Matt: What I'd like to kind of do is because we could spend an entire episode splitting these apart, but I wonder what we do with this. Like, how do we take some of these different methods? So I always like in this with my students is you've got a different tool for, for a job. So you have to begin with the job at hand and work back from there.

Matt: And what tool, so from a, from a kind of. Participatory perspective or deliberative perspective, do you see these tools being fit for different purposes and different jobs, or, or, or is there a gold standard, which we should be gunning for and kind of work back from that and dilute it with what time and resource we have available?

Rachel: Yeah, that's, I mean, like you say that, you know, you could spend well over an hour just talking and splitting hairs on what, what is the best form of representative, uh, you know, descriptive deliberative mini public. Um, It is really difficult because lots of people use the words, have come to use the words citizens panel or citizens assembly a bit loosely.

Rachel: So we see somewhere it's more like a town hall meeting, but it might be advertised as a citizens panel. And what that is, is more of a kind of usual suspects thing. Come along, let's say it's about climate change, come along to, you know, Hackney town hall and we're going to talk about climate change today.

Rachel: And it might be called a citizens panel. And I think often that's because it's infused with a background, um, political ideology or worldview. So that largely speaking, my view is that people who are on the left of the political spectrum can tend to be more supportive of these things that they see as enabling grassroots participation, but perhaps aren't necessarily always thinking very deeply about.

Rachel: What they mean when they use the words, because it's an, there's an essential belief that it's a fundamental good, that the more people you get involved, the better the outcome will be. And of course, with climate change and other topics that are quite either polarized politically or generally contentious because they have maybe like a moral underpinning, something like abortion, um.

Rachel: Then I think you can argue that deliberative mini publics are a very useful thing to do because you can push back at those challenges that you have gathered the usual suspects into a room because you can go out of your way to say that you haven't. Uh, because we did all of this sortition and when we made sure we had young and old rich and poor and so on.

Rachel: But what my PhD has been looking at to, An element of my PhD is really challenging this idea that this approach is as appealing across the political spectrum. So one of the things I've been looking at is if, for example, you hold a conservative worldview, you are more likely to believe more strongly in the concepts of hierarchical representative democracy.

Rachel: You know, we go out, we vote, we elect an MP. It's the job of that person to represent us all then once they become the MP for, you know, whatever constituency. And that, that, that kind of hierarchical system is the right and proper way to do things. So that therefore introducing methods like this to someone who holds more of that worldview could be seen to be circumventing what they see as democracy.

Rachel: You know, who gave these 40 people the right to make these decisions? I didn't vote for them. Um, and we actually even have some conservative, uh, parliamentarians commenting on that in the last conservative government, you know, if you want to vote. Get elected was I think what one of them said, you know, if you want to, I want to voice, sorry, get elected or something like that.

Rachel: And my early research is suggesting that actually when you send out those letters, those 15, 000 letters, you will get fewer conservative responses than you might expect to get. I mean, they'll have to over select for certain groups. So I think. Where the issue is very contentious and you are wanting to make a claim that you have created a genuinely representative mini public, you have to go to extraordinary lengths to make sure that you really did, uh, what, but where the issue is less contentious.

Rachel: Then all sorts of other forms of participatory democracy come into play. And I think you can even make that that point when an issue particularly affects a certain quite small group, then it's okay to over select for them.

Matt: From what I understand to be an already very complex process, I think you've just added another layer here, which is kind of slightly blown my mind, which is.

Matt: It's all well and good to, to, to approach a community and say, right, this is, you know, Arnstein's ladder or Wilcox's ladder. And we've got a sense of what is, uh, you know, from coercion all the way through to kind of participatory co development. And you've kind of got that engagement process from bottom to top.

Matt: But actually what I think you're saying is you, we need to understand what the worldview of that community is. To understand what they view as the gold standard of, you know, democratic or participatory democracy. And I'm, I think for instance, if you abstract this further to an international level, different countries will have different perspectives on the type of governance that they would prefer, or even what they perceive to be democratic.

Matt: And so if you come back. To even just the Cotswolds or, um, maybe expand that out to the UK, you take a different postcode and you might have a different perspective on what that community would. And, and so that's almost like you've got to engage with that community to understand how they want to be engaged with.

Yeah. And so to give a good example of that, An organization, KNOCA, K N O C A, and it's something like the Knowledge Network on Citizens Assemblies, I think is what it stands for. And they keep a website that collates information about every one of these Citizens Assemblies on climate that's happened. One of my colleagues, Alfie Shepherd, is currently involved in the epic task of pulling together the outcomes and recommendations of the 50 odd UK climate assemblies that have happened so far.

Um, and what I found when I was looking through that database that, that Alfie has is, And I suspected it, this is why I was looking for it, is that the vast majority of those processes were commissioned by Labour councils. So if we take those outputs and we say 50 assemblies have happened across Britain and therefore if we look at the kind of meta recommendations that come out of all of them, we can say that this is what the people of Britain would say.

Actually, what we can say is that this is what people who live in areas that tend to tend to elect Labour politicians would say. And so then to give the contrasting view, I've just submitted a paper for review, which may well get rejected, but what I did was I looked at the Herefordshire Climate Assembly.

So Herefordshire is a extremely rural and it's, it's what you could call a, a genuinely conservative place. It's had a, it's got two constituencies. They've both had a conservative MP unbroken in one case since 1850. The other one briefly had a Lib Dem. And not only do they have conservative MPs, but they win with more than 50 percent of the vote under a first past the post system.

So you can argue that Herefordshire's conservative MPs genuinely won, you know, with 50, 60 percent of the vote in most cases. You would expect that if you randomly selected 40 people over and over again, Going out into the streets in Hereford, 55 percent of them would be conservative voters based on that long electoral history.

But when I surveyed the people who had taken part in the Herefordshire Climate Assembly, I found that there were considerably fewer, statistically significantly fewer conservatives than you might have expected. And that made me question why, why do, why, when, because people talk about deliberative mini publics as being selected by lot.

You know, it's almost Athenian, the way people have this kind of, not necessarily accurate view of how Athenian democracy worked. They're not selected by lot, they're invited by lot. The 15, 000 letters go out. It's not like someone comes up to you at gunpoint and says, you have been selected to take part in the DNP and you must come along.

You receive a letter and you make a decision about whether you're going to respond. And my hunch is that people who hold certain worldviews are more likely to respond. And therefore we want to represent the real community. We have to over select for those who are less likely to respond.

Fraser: Yeah, I'm interested in that side of it, Rachel, because it's again, it's, it's something that we talk about a lot in terms of engagement, which appreciate is not strictly about the deliberative side or the assemblies, the juries and the mini publics.

Fraser: But in terms of that, that sampling side, is there a need to correct for that sampling? Do we think that this is a tool worth continuing to pursue? Is it appropriate? And how do you overcome that genuinely without being seen to effectively manufacture that? Or over manufacture that, that mini public.

Rachel: Yes, you can.

Rachel: And I feel like this is, you know, even though I haven't finished it yet, I feel like I have had a small impact, which is that, you know, I raised this point and I think groups, people that are involved in running these things have taken this point on board. So I'm aware now that there've been a couple of processes commissioned just in the last few months where the selection questions where they might previously have asked age, ethnicity, income bracket, they are also asking political affiliation.

Rachel: Uh, and that what that came out of is when I first raised the question, uh, with one particular organization who does a lot of this, they said they don't ask because it's political questions under GDPR are in that bracket of, it's like asking people about their sexuality and so on. If you can avoid asking these personal questions, you do because they, they're different forms of personal data.

Rachel: And I'm saying, but I think it's important and we have to ask. And so they did in the next process, they had their pie chart and they said, well, if this. If this place would, would be normally we would expect maybe 29, 30 percent conservative voters and 29, 30 percent labor and so on, we should be looking for that as well as half and half men and women and so on.

Rachel: And when they got the responses back from their invitation, they've only had 7 percent conservative voters in the response. Uh, and they had to, Therefore, massive from that pool of people that select almost all of them to make up the 27 percent so that they then did end up with a reflective mini public.

Rachel: The question to me is, will this materially affect the outcomes of these processes if we have previously been ignoring, you know, not on purpose this voice. But I think it's a field that, that wants to react and respond. I don't think it's a defensive field that's sort of going to put it, Oh no, I don't know what you're talking about.

Rachel: This is rubbish. I think it's a field that wants to learn and wants to be genuinely representative. And this is just one small angle. You could, I mean, you can cut out representativeness any, any kind of way. So I think. These things are, they're definitely meaningful. It's how we fit them into the democratic processes that we have.

Rachel: I was co author on a paper called the Messy Politics of Local Climate Assemblies, which my colleague Pancho Lewis, um, mainly authored, but I did the really complicated diagrams for it about what drives people to. to set up a citizens assembly. And there's this very linear, normal narrative we have, which is, you know, council recognizes that climate change is a problem, calls a citizens assembly, listens to the people, implements their findings.

Rachel: And actually that's not what happens. It's not even why they're all stimulated. Some of them are stimulated because XR activists were gluing themselves to the council chamber and it was difficult to do daily council work. Some of them were commissioned because a particular politician wanted to push it over the line and found this useful.

Rachel: Some of them were commissioned because XR produced a climate emergency declaration template, which councils deployed and copied and pasted from each other, which included the words, we will hold a citizen's assembly on climate. So then I find that very interesting because that meant that councils who previously had potentially very mediocre or even quite a poor reputation for how they engaged people and how they consulted, jumped from doing really awful standard council consultation badly to, we're going to do a citizens assembly, which is, you know, you could argue is the gold standard.

Rachel: Without really a cultural understanding of what they had committed to. And in some cases, I think that that was driven by the fact that they literally copied and pasted a climate emergency declaration that had the words in, which meant they weren't really, in some cases, not in all, but in some cases, that meant they hadn't fully thought through, how does this then fit? Is it binding? Is it advisory? What do we want these people to do? How are we going to explain to the participants who've given up all this time, what we've done with their findings?

Rachel: So, it's, what worries me is, as with all of these things, things become the buzzword of the moment, and then they're unthinkingly applied.

Matt: Mean, I, I don't want to fall down this, this rabbit hole, Rachel, but, um, are there not parallels here with the Brexit referendum and is one thing to do the engagement and to invite the participation. It's another thing to then be clear. About what you do with what comes back because it's, there's no, there's no, I guess there's no, as that example illustrates, there's no clean cut end to these things.

Becky: No.

Matt: Do we do engagement forever? Because when I've engaged with policy makers with industry, they kind of see engagement as a, as a thick blob that happens before they do something.

Rachel: I mean, I suppose some of it is that at some point things have to filter back into the statutory processes and the regulatory processes that thinking about local government, for example, if you're a council and you've run a citizens assembly, you've had to make a decision about whether you're situating that assembly to ask it to consider a question that you know that you have the power to deliver on.

Rachel: But that would make you, as, as a lot of people are completely unaware, local councils don't have a statutory responsibility to tackle climate change. It's not a duty that's imposed. So the Climate Change Act sits with government and is not imposed downwards on local government, which means any council that wants to do meaningful things on climate is kind of choosing to do them other than where they're they're doing them often in spite of government through things like the planning process.

Rachel: So some councils, like the Herefordshire Assembly, purposely chose to try and open out the assembly and they said, how should Herefordshire, not Herefordshire Council, how should Herefordshire respond to the challenge of the climate emergency? That was the question posed to the people of that assembly.

Rachel: And I've actually interviewed some of the people who took part in it. All of whom were conservative actually and all of whom found it useful and a meaningful process even though one of them was a climate change denier. What they found was that they valued that, that possibility of talking with other people, of listening to experts, of talking through some of the issues.

Rachel: But across the board what I found was a frustration. That they felt afterwards that their recommendations had largely gone unimplemented. And I think that that was a confusion about what they understood the council was actually capable of doing. Um, because I think what the council was doing is saying, what we need to do is work with the community.

Rachel: This is our, everybody's problem to solve. You can't sort of delegate it to the council to fix climate change. You know, how, what partnerships do we need to build? What things do we need to achieve? But there's still a potential then that the people taking part think we're going to do these things. We're going to make these recommendations and then somebody will pick them up, insert them back into a process and make them happen.

Rachel: And I think that that, you know, I don't know. I'm not going to say that I know the answer, but it's, it's very difficult. I think for, for local government to. Be clear enough with people about what's really going to happen with what they've done in these processes. I don't know if that answers your question.

Rachel: I've gone off piste a bit there.

Becky: What I'm hearing from, from you and what I'm really reflecting on is, is the need to be very clear going into this around the reason for doing it. And using that to really help identify the people that need to be there or should be there or what that, what that public looks like, depending on what you're discussing, and also being really clear about how those discussions, insights, recommendations coming out of it are going to be.

Becky: driven forward. And I can totally empathize with frustration of trying to influence policy. I mean, Fraser, Matt and I all work in this space. And sometimes I know it can feel like you're banging your head against a brick wall and, and change happens slowly and over time. And, you know, with a lot of push and drive and in an ongoing way, I'm just wondering about some of the wider impacts that we might see.

Becky: And you mentioned that people sort of had valued, uh, you know, with the Herefordshire example, that people had valued taking part. Fraser and I were involved in one of these processes, looking at the role of local and community energy in Scotland. And one of the things that really struck me, and I was really an observer through it, rather than a facilitator of, of the sessions, was.

Becky: The way that people came into it with all sorts of preconceived notions about wind turbines, PV, often not having many, but seeing things in certain ways and not really understanding, you know, what the point of them was and why they were there. And often that leading to frustration and dislike. And through the engagement.

Becky: With the experts with each other came to totally on their own, like two very different points of view. And in one case, a completely opposite point of view came in thinking that wind turbines were the worst thing ever and left thinking, this is brilliant. I want to invest in local energy. And I want to talk to other people I know and share this knowledge and share the reason.

Becky: So I'm just wondering, like, you know, maybe there hasn't been sort of peer reviewed type research in this. Maybe there has been, it's just, I haven't seen it yet. Maybe it's more anecdotal, but are you seeing sort of these, any wider social impacts or positive impacts coming from, from these sorts of engagements?

Rachel: Yeah, um, you're right that quite often people have just not had the opportunity in their life to, to dig into some of the issues around things like renewables. I don't necessarily think that you need a deliberative mini public to achieve that. I mean, I, I found the exact same thing years ago when I used to run things like the future energy landscapes workshops, I had a giant model.

Rachel: It was about five meters long and it had a mountain at one end with some hill wind turbines and it went through to a city and had every kind of renewables on it and people would come. Some people. Would come striding into the room, a point at the wind turbine, you know, which was sort of a foot tall on the model.

Rachel: We're not having any of those around here. And then you kind of work through the process and remember a real Damascene moment in a Somerset community where this one guy who'd been quite anti wind all the way through suddenly went, hang on. So for the same amount of energy that we would get from that one turbine, we'd have to fill every field around the village with solar.

Rachel: And I was sort of like, yes, that's, that's kind of, you know, not understanding the respective outputs of different technologies is a real barrier for a lot of people. So that level of kind of energy literacy, renewable energy literacy is so low, and I'm sure this is true of a whole range of non energy topics too, that there's, that there can only be a positive outcome to giving people the space and time to think about it.

Rachel: And Christina Lafont, one of the kind of writers around democratic theory, that's both supportive of and critical of democratic, uh, deliberative mini publics. One of the things she talks about is rather than using them to replace existing systems is how can they become embedded in regular parts of these systems so that they feel almost like jury duty so that you know, everyone knows someone who's been in a mini public.

Rachel: Uh, maybe you've been in one yourself twice, maybe you did one on health and adult social care, and then you did one on renewables in the countryside or wherever, and it's just a thing that we recognize will be called upon to do. And that sense of kind of general policy literacy that would emerge from embedding it in a big way like that, I, I, I agree with Christina Lafont, uh, on, so I think, I think that that, I think that they really have a place.

Rachel: But that you also, what I have found is that, Where, where people have come in with a very entrenched and polarized view on a particular issue. Um, is that if, and climate change is a good example, if your starting point is there is a climate crisis and we have to deal with it. And you've got people coming into the room who, for whatever, because of the media they consume, don't believe that.

Rachel: If you, if you lay that down, regardless of whether you know that you're right and all the science points to that, they will believe that they weren't allowed to discuss the real issue. The real issue is whether or not there is a climate crisis. So I think I'm making a slightly unpopular point, which is that climate assemblies or assemblies around climate actually need to go back a bit further than many of them do and take the time just as your folk that you're talking about come to the conclusion that although they hated wind when they came into the room, they've now worked out why they like it.

Rachel: People need to be given the time to say, well, I've heard that. Uh, you know, I've looked at graphs that suggest it's Milankovitch cycles of the world wobbling on its axis and all these other things that are causing it and, and allow them to explore those issues and understand why they're wrong. Because otherwise you will always have a cohort in any of these groups that politely sit through them and come out of the other end thinking that was all biased and that was all rigged.

Matt: Yeah. So this, this then kind of. Makes me panic a little bit more because firstly, I agree with you entirely. And the second is I'm wondering how we actually do that, how we kind of raise that water level of literacy around climate and energy. And part of me thinks, well, this is, this is the responsibility of our education system, first and foremost, I think from, from primary, secondary through to, to higher and, and, and other, um, You know, we're, we're at the point as, as we speak, as I understand in the next week or so, or even this week, uh, some of the, the major parties will be finalizing their manifestos.

Matt: Um, without getting into the detail of that, a lot of these policies will need to be costed. And I'm The type of, I think, education plus engagement that is required to have a meaningful and informed debate about policy going forward is going to cost. I can't, I can't really get away from the fact that it's going to cost a lot of time, a lot of money and political capital.

Matt: I personally think it's necessary to start making some good choices. And informed choices, but how do we square that off against the kind of the hard nose practicalities of having to run this, you know, through the treasury, for example, I just wanted to, to be devil's advocate for a moment.

Rachel: Well, I think it depends who runs the treasury, doesn't it?

Rachel: I mean, again, culturally, if the treasury is part of a government that perhaps it is, wouldn't necessarily believe in mass participation in policymaking, then it's going, you're not going to have treasury ministers that, that back the idea of spending money on this. Um, I think, you know, when you look at the CCC's work and showing what now needs to happen in relation to the continued downward slope towards Net Zero.

Rachel: Most of what we have achieved in the last 20 to 30 years is technical background stuff that, uh, people didn't need to know about much. There were the touch point issues like replacing coal with wind and so on, but we're into the realms where kind of over half, nearly two thirds of what still needs to be achieved requires wholly or partially behavioral change.

Rachel: It's not gadgetry and wizardry and changing efficiency standards in appliances and so on. So we're reaching that point where you start to then have a cost benefit discussion about lack of action on climate change and what that will ultimately cost. Um, as opposed to the cost of, as you've just pointed out, raising the literacy across the board of everybody to properly engage with these processes and to give like a really small Um, analogy to that, when I was a counselor, uh, in the Cotswolds, one of the things that you get thrown at you quite a lot is, you know, we pay your wages.

Rachel: Well, firstly, counselors are not paid, but you know, leaving that aside, we pay for this, we pay for that, our council tax pays for whatever. The vast majority of people think that their council tax is what's paying for the council to do everything the council does. And they were always completely shocked when I would say to them, actually, the council tax that we collect doesn't even cover the cost of emptying the bins.

Rachel: That's what That's it. That's all we do with all your council money is empty nearly all the bins, everything else we have to find money for somewhere else. And that reality check of people going, Oh, wow. You know, I thought council tax was a lot of money. Does it cost more than that to run a council? Yes, it does.

Rachel: It costs quite a lot more. That kind of analysis is analogous to what we need to talk about with climate. There's often such a low level of literacy about What needs to be done and the scale of what needs to be done, but also offset against the savings, most people are again, completely unaware, you know, that CCC analysis shows that although getting to Net Zero will be something like 1 percent of GDP over 30 years is almost entirely offset by savings to the public purse, um, in particularly in relation to public health spending and things like that.

Rachel: So having people involved in these processes is really important. But Becky Willis, who's my supervisor and also the, the, the head of the climate citizens team, uh, she's done some work with Jake Ainscough, who's also part of the team over the last year or so, and they just had a paper published. And I think this is where we may have Exhausted the concept of the climate assembly.

Rachel: What we've done so far is had people come together and talk about climate change, like the Herefordshire thing. What shall Herefordshire do about the climate challenge? That's an enormous, enormous thing. Even if you're asking people to give up six evenings and four weekends, that's enormous. When actually what they're looking at, based on a really useful case study they did in Birmingham a year ago, which is how do we then start to break it down into policy deliverable areas?

Rachel: So they ran a process. You know, on home energy retrofit for the, for the owner occupier market. So how can we have a citizen's assembly on how we should develop policy to support the owner occupier market? Those who have agency over the homes they live in, what policy structures and frameworks and support would they need to use their agency and their capabilities to drive forward retrofit in this world that's very different to the policy structures that would be needed to drive forward retrofit in social housing, for example.

Rachel: But also. What that does is it allows us to extract from the very polarized concept of is there or is there not a climate crisis down to some issues that are not actually politically polarizing at all, which is, shall we insulate some houses? Who, who doesn't want us to insulate houses? You know, we don't need to take that one with the politics of climate in some ways. We don't necessarily even need to taint stuff around food and farming with the politics of climate because these are conversations that people want to have a whole host of reasons about biodiversity and countryside management and health and well being. So we're at that point where, you know, they, they published a paper a month or so ago.

Rachel: It's talk about embedding deliberation, you know, how we should better use many publics in, in climate policymaking, thinking about that. You know, how can we, How can we almost drill down at this point and have topic topic by topic DMPs, which then lends itself better to that Christina Lafont conception of this becomes like jury duty, which should be constantly reflecting two people for a sanity check.

Rachel: And, and another colleague of mine, Andy Yule is just embarking on a project. Um, the energy. Demand reduction center. This is going to be a two year panel. So taking people, they'll come together for eight blocks over two years. And what they'll be doing is looking at the models, you know, these huge technical models of heat demand reduction that government use, that contain some heroic assumptions often about what will happen in a technical sense and how straightforward it will be to persuade people to do X, Y, and Z.

Rachel: And this group of, of. representatively selected UK citizens will, will work with modelers and we'll analyze those models and we'll feed back that kind of human, well, hang on, have you thought of this element? So it's like the perfect marriage of, you know, genius modeling and ordinary person constantly interfacing with each other.

Rachel: And I think that that's a really excellent way of tying together the structures, the current structures and limitations of policymaking, which is you must have some data and some evidence to drive something forward to create a business case, but then to give that human element to it, that human kind of marking of the homework.

Becky: I guess what I would really like for, you know, from you for some closing thoughts is taking all of this knowledge that, that you've been building, that those that you're working with have been building, how do we take all of that? And what do we need to do to make it better in the future?

Rachel: Well, I think from my point of view, I feel like my kind of the flag waving that I'm always going to do is when we're talking about descriptive representation, my view is that people's values and worldviews are at least as important, if not more important than, uh, other, uh, ways you could slice the cake, you know, things like age and ethnicity and so on are important. But I think if we're not incorporating people's underlying world views, we are going to be getting a skewed output from these processes.

Rachel: Because if you want people to come together to give up their time. And then you're asking them to deal with too much in that time, you are ending up with only again, ever a surface level of understanding, which makes it easier for those organizing the process to bend it to their will, because there's a, you know, there is always that, again, this kind of unspoken belief that those organizing the process are entirely pure and innocent, and don't really care about what comes out of it when realistically, they have their own agenda and this is because we're all human.

Rachel: So I think that kind of more atomized approach of specific policy areas, having a really clear, um, conception in government, either now or whoever comes next, of a good solid understanding of what deliberative democracy actually is and a clear way of being able to demonstrate whether it's advisory or binding in terms of how they'll use these processes and how they intend to fund and support them and a way of evaluating how and if they are actually improving policymaking because just, we don't want to get to a position where we unthinkingly use them, they just become a tool in the toolbox where we go, we ran a DMP on home energy retrofit, and these were the answers, but we didn't really kind of fully work through why we were doing it or what we were going to do about it.

Rachel: As with everything, if this is going to happen, as Matt said, So clearly pointed out, it needs properly funding and I think that that's nowhere is that more true than at local government level, local government can barely afford to run its most basic services at the moment.

Rachel: So without a genuine commitment to doing this well, my final warning would be that. It will end up being a postcode lottery, which will benefit large urban areas, uh, particularly combined authorities and those that have devolved powers, because they're the ones that have budgets that are orders of magnitude bigger than a rural county council.

Rachel: And this is the other half of my PhD, which is around the impacts of climate policy on rural areas. Um, Essentially, if rural communities are expected to host many of the solutions to the climate crisis, like altered agricultural practices, large scale renewables and so on, but they gain none of the benefits like decent retrofit schemes, proper public and active transport routes and so on, then the social contract there is broken and it will continue to create a divide in the country between those areas that are culturally conservative and those that are more mixed liberal metropolitan areas.

Rachel: Um, We cannot have a situation where we have lots of largely labor mayors in combined authorities, commissioning and running all these excellent DMPs and rural areas being entirely excluded from this because it isn't something that's funded. It will create a backlash like the backlash we saw against the wind industry in the early 2000s.

Matt: Yep.

Becky: Yeah, very powerful thoughts there, Rachel, and I was typing them up as you were saying it, because I think there's a lot, a lot to learn, really a lot to take away, and a lot for any of us that are working in this space or involved with any of these processes to be thinking about more deeply. So thank you so much for joining us and sharing your knowledge and wisdom.

Becky: Absolutely brilliant, uh, brilliant discussion. Thanks.

Rachel: It's mostly other people's knowledge and wisdom.

Becky: So thank you again to Rachel. You've been listening to Local Zero. If you are a fan of the pod, please do take two minutes to help us out by leaving a review and sharing it with friends and family. It really does help us grow our listenership and thank you to everybody that's already done this.

Fraser: Absolutely. And if you have any questions, suggestions for episodes or queries, let us know by emailing us at localzeropod at gmail. com or by messaging on twitter @ localzeropod.

Matt: Absolutely. But for now, thank you for listening.

Becky: Bye.

Matt: Produced by Bespoken Media.