Conclusion

The Potential of Deliberation to Tap the Power of Citizens to Address Climate Change and Other Issues of Sustainability

Tom Prugh and Matt Leighninger

There are signs that twenty-first century public institutions are not up to the challenge of dealing with wicked problems like climate change. For this failing, and a host of other reasons, the trust and confidence citizens once had in their public institutions is in sharp decline. If citizens no longer believe that the democratic structures and processes currently in place are capable of addressing one of the most pressing problems of our time, an opportunity to adopt new tools and methods is present.

This book is a product of the strong research component built into the Alberta Climate Dialogue (ABCD) project. It assembles a rich compilation of theoretical insight and practical wisdom from nine contributors with expertise in deliberative practice and sustainability issues such as climate change, as well as close familiarity with Alberta’s communities. The contributors’ chapters offer a great deal of nuanced analysis and reflection, and although we cannot hope to capture all of it, in this concluding chapter we aim to extract some of the key themes and observations toward making sense of a complex whole. Then, drawing on the experiences with the ABCD exercises addressing climate change among Albertans, we briefly explore the role deliberation might play in confronting the host of sustainability problems facing not only the citizens of Alberta but all of humanity, and argue that deliberation should find a natural home in the increasingly activist urban- and community-centred sustainability movement. We close with a tempered call for “amateurism,” in the traditional sense of work by engaged and knowledgeable non-professionals, in deliberation.

Key Themes

Here are some themes and ideas that emerge from the previous chapters, with an emphasis on those that might particularly interest practitioners and concerned citizens. Where applicable, references to chapters in parentheses indicate where more material on a particular theme can be found.

Deliberation is not just for experts. Deliberation needs to involve—and be useful to—a wide range of people with different values, concerns, life stories, and world views. This is especially true when it is used to address problems such as climate change, which are complex and affect essentially everyone. Deliberation can serve to integrate those differing perspectives and values, and thus support citizens in expanding their circle of concern as well as, crucially, stimulating and organizing input on the condition of their community and the ecological systems that enable its existence (introduction and chapter 2). As the product of a research effort, this book may appear to frame deliberation as an arcane and delicate practice, organized by experts, in which ordinary people can only participate if they are given ample preparation. Indeed, the experts have crucial roles to play, one of which is to ameliorate the tension between the complexities explored in these pages and the need to bring deliberation down to earth and engage a much wider public. But one of the more remarkable aspects of the ABCD experiences, and an enormous group of other deliberation stories, is that ordinary people can accept and adopt the practices of organized deliberation when they are properly introduced to them, despite the lack of such activities in most day-to-day political environments. We will have more to say about “deliberation for the people” in the last section below.

Deliberation works best in an oxygen-rich atmosphere. That is, not in a vacuum; it should support action and be tied to policy outcomes. People take to it with surprising enthusiasm, but it is valuable to ensure that the process leads to action. Deliberation exercises may be undertaken in the absence of such links, as indeed the history of democratic deliberation repeatedly reveals. But that is a waste of civic capital. Deliberation events and processes ideally should not be used merely to generate support for a predetermined policy, or even to select from a menu of options. They should instead be designed so that people can provide meaningful input into the range of potential policy options, and so they can decide how to contribute their own time and energy to implementing solutions. One of the strengths of democratic deliberation is that it taps the knowledge and values of a body of people with a stake in the outcomes but who are not often consulted—except to the extent that their votes are sought and their favour curried at election time. (See chapter 3 for a discussion of the ABCD experience in Alberta.)

Framing is more than decoration. How issues are framed and presented to participants can alter, for good or ill, the conclusions they reach. Framing for deliberation should present and clarify the different ways of looking at an issue so people can compare them fairly in order to weigh appropriate courses of action (see chapter 5).

Climate change, for instance, is usually framed as a challenge to be mitigated with technological solutions (the so-called “ecomodernist” stance), whereas in fact it may require deeper social and behavioural change. That is, while it is typically presented as a problem to be solved—a big, complex one to be sure—in fact it may by now have become largely a predicament that can only be coped with by means of various adaptations. (We might term this the “ecotransitionist” frame.) Adopting this latter frame immediately raises major, serious questions about social justice; topping the list might be how to help people and nations that bear little or no responsibility for climate change yet are suffering disproportionately from it.

At the same time, adaptation as a frame and strategy situates the problems of addressing climate change in particular places, which is an argument for localism and types of governance well suited to communities—such as deliberation. (In addition to these two frames, there is at least one more, which might be labelled “extreme adaptation.” This frame is based on the growing sense among some observers that radical resource scarcity will demand a deep retrenchment in our everyday technologies and a reversion to simpler lifestyles. We discuss this idea further below.) Organizers and participants in deliberation exercises need to be alert to the frames participants bring to the table, and also to their effects on shaping the process and the suite of policy options considered.

No deliberation without representation. Well, not no deliberation—but any deliberation structure, whether a one-off event or a standing body, needs to give due attention to the issue of representativeness: how closely the mix of participants resembles the larger community from which they come (see chapter 4). There are a number of ways of doing this, from an exact polling-style approach to a more welcoming, inclusive strategy that tries to achieve a turnout that is both large and diverse. At one end of the scale, random-sample methods try to create a more or less perfect microcosm of the community; at the other end, organizers welcome all comers but spend a disproportionate amount of time trying to reach people who seem less likely to participate. Either way, deliberative processes usually have to involve or at least influence large numbers of people in order to have an impact on policy. This is where random-sample “mini-publics” often fall short, since they don’t produce the critical mass of participants or the political will necessary for action. However, they can be valuable components of a broader strategy. As the ABCD projects illustrated, achieving adequate representation can be hard to do well, for a variety of reasons. Self-selection of participants is a factor even in random-sample strategies, and most deliberation exercises tend to over-represent people with higher education while under-representing young people. But to the extent that representativeness can be achieved, it enhances legitimacy and maximizes the odds of introducing into the deliberation the richest range of values, problem perspectives, and possible solutions.

Trust but verify. Deliberation exercises frequently (invariably?) become crucibles in which different actors with widely varying aims, expectations, and interests come together. While deliberation can be a powerful means of supporting collaboration, it’s most likely to succeed if trust and respect for different contexts and cultures of risk is built carefully (see chapter 6). This takes time. Deliberation is ultimately about power: who exercises it, and to what ends. When successful, deliberation leads to policy decisions, to inputs that shape policy, or to volunteer-driven action efforts in which people work together to implement the ideas they have generated (or all three). No matter what kind of outcome you want to support, the stakes can be significant and the process delicate. Trust building is crucial to keeping that process civil and productive.

It’s complicated, but it’s simple. Considered in the full richness of the associated scholarship and practice traditions, deliberation can be a complex business, from what it signifies and embodies in terms of political theory to the nuances of recruitment, process design, and competent facilitation. This makes it hard work (see chapter 7). Likewise, climate change and other sustainability issues are complex, global problems, frequently termed “wicked”: different stakeholders define the issues in different terms; understanding of the problems changes over time; there may be no clear “right” solutions; and what appears to be a problem may be just a symptom of something deeper. Yet climate change manifests itself in characteristically local effects, and deliberation itself is also “particular and local” (see chapter 8): it takes place in a specific community and usually focuses on a narrowly defined issue. This creates an opportunity. Deliberation asks—and enables—citizens to confront complexity (in any issue, not just climate change) and, if not master it, at least become acquainted with it; to grapple with issues, to sit with them and become conversant with their nuances; and to make thoughtful and reasoned judgments about how a community ought to address them. (See “Deliberating Cities and Communities,” below)

Shelter Needed from the Perfect Storm

The ABCD deliberation exercises offer hopeful evidence that deliberation can be a useful, perhaps necessary, method for confronting multiple, complex, and even existential challenges. Climate change certainly qualifies as one of those: it is deranging the most complex system of which we know—the Earth’s biosphere—thereby threatening the viability of civilization in ways that we barely understand and with emergent consequences we cannot predict. The litany of likely (and indeed already observed) effects of a warmer world is by now familiar: rising sea levels; hotter and longer droughts; heavier floods; wilder weather and more extreme storms; stressed and unreliable fresh water supplies; ecosystems corrupted by invasive species or destroyed altogether; expansion of disease vectors; degradation and possible collapse of marine food chains as the oceans acidify; loss of agricultural productivity; and so on.

These problems alone would make the governance challenges of the coming decades daunting enough, but they are not the only systemic changes coming at us fast. At least two others are visible on the horizon.

The first is the decline and approaching end of the fossil fuel era. At this writing, gasoline prices in North America are low and sales of SUVs are surging; arguments about “peak oil” are laughed off or ignored. Nevertheless, while short-term fluctuations in energy prices and the vagaries of geopolitics may temporarily mask the longer trends, the fact remains that humanity for the last 250 years or so has been burning through an endowment of fossil energy created over eons by geological forces; such a windfall will not come again. The early signs of trouble include the increasing expense and difficulty of finding oil deposits to replace current consumption. Rising demand and the exhaustion of conventional oil supplies force oil companies to develop sources such as Alberta’s tar sands, fields in the Arctic Ocean, and those far beneath the deep sea floor. Not only are these deposits more costly, dangerous, environmentally destructive, and challenging to tap, they simply do not yield useful energy products at the rate conventional fields once did. The amount of energy they yield for the energy required to get it out of the ground, refine it, and deliver it to consumers—a critical ratio called EROI (energy return on investment)—has plunged over the last century or so from roughly 100:1 to less than 30:1, and even lower in many cases. That matters, because the energy available to run our cars, planes, trains, and ships is only that which is left over once the energy development bill has been paid.

The EROIs of coal and natural gas have also been declining in recent years. Add to that the growing urgency of leaving fossil fuels in the ground unburnt so as to avoid the serious risk of catastrophic climate change, and the urgent compulsion to end the fossil fuel era becomes plain. However, that is easier said than done. A debate rages among environmental and energy scholars, scientists, and activists about whether and how fast renewable sources of energy can be substituted for fossil energy, but nobody argues that it will be easy. Building out a new energy regime will cost trillions of dollars and take many years, and of course the energy to do so must come from fossil fuels themselves. Moreover, it is an open question whether all sectors can be engineered to function on renewables. Lighting and conditioning buildings would be relatively straightforward using renewably generated electricity, but high-heat industrial processes are not so easily tackled, and there are serious obstacles to transforming global transportation—almost completely dependent on energy-dense liquid fuels—to run on renewables. No current or foreseeable biofuel or renewable electricity source is available in sufficient quantities to drive the trains, ships, commercial aircraft, and heavy trucks that current developed-world economies rely upon. And while nuclear power has its dogged champions (including many ecomodernists), it faces nearly insurmountable obstacles of its own: waste, safety and security issues, huge costs, long lead times, and popular opposition.

Finally, it is well worth noting that no society has ever fully transformed its energy regime. As the Canadian energy analyst Vaclav Smil has amply documented, new energy sources have not eliminated old ones (whale oil possibly excepted) but rather have been added into the mix as humanity’s collective energy consumption has soared over the last few centuries (Smil 2010). Yet the challenge of the renewable transition is to displace the overwhelmingly primary source of energy—fossil fuels—with something quite different.

The upshot is that, barring cold fusion or some other miracle, the voracious consumption of energy that underpins the current global economic system is probably unsustainable, even apart from its effects on the climate. In the not too distant future we will have to make do with less energy as the one-time pulse of cheap and abundant fossil fuels that supports modern civilization—and hundreds of millions of newly middle-class people—tails off and ends. That seems likely to usher in a period of social and political unrest.

The second systemic challenge to the current order is intertwined with the energy dilemma: a range of developments that suggest the approaching end of economic growth itself. Since energy availability underlies economic growth, diminishing energy supplies will clearly impede growth, but there are other factors at work too. Ecological economists such as Herman Daly and many others have argued for years that infinite economic growth on a finite planet is impossible anyway (see, for instance, Daly 1991). But now economists with more mainstream orientations are also beginning to talk about “headwinds”—declining rates of innovation, demographic factors, globalization, wealth and income inequality, vast government and private debt—in seeking explanations for Japan’s long stagnation and the globally weak recovery from the 2008 crash (Galbraith 2014; Gordon 2012).

Growth has long been the go-to solution for many or most political problems, so its decline and end seem likely to add to the stresses on society imposed by declining energy. While it is possible, in terms of the Earth’s resource availability, to provide decent lives for most people on the planet—to have “prosperity without growth” (as the title of one prominent study puts it; see Jackson 2009; Victor and Jackson 2015)—this admirable goal will remain far out of reach as long as existing resources and wealth are so unevenly apportioned among the world’s peoples. Serious issues of adjustment and wealth distribution remain to be negotiated as the era of growth winds down (Heinberg 2011).

To sum up, the world is changing in ways that challenge our usual assumptions about humanity’s economic future and that could require profound shifts in the shape and character of our communities, our economies, and our methods of governance. The end of a stable climate, along with the end of the unique and extraordinary period of cheap and abundant energy and the probable end of economic normalcy, together could spell the end of political normalcy. There is an urgent need to build governance systems that can adjudicate what are likely to be increasingly contentious disputes over how to navigate these challenges.

Deliberating Cities and Communities

Could a culture of democratic deliberation help? It remains to be seen, but the question may have an answer in the near future. To date, democracies’ performance in addressing climate change and other sustainability issues has, on the whole, been disappointing (notwithstanding the somewhat toothless agreement struck in Paris in December 2015). We suspect that a key reason lies in an inherent weakness of representative democracies: they isolate their citizens from each other as political actors, and from direct confrontation with the problems governance is meant to solve, by treating them essentially as wards or children (Kemmis 1990; Nabatchi and Leighninger 2015). In this way, modern democracies tend to cultivate what philosopher Richard Weaver calls “a sort of contempt for realities” (cited in Orr 2013, 287). Even when polls reveal widespread support for more aggressive action on climate change, the ordinary machinery of democracies tends to provide few potent means to convert it to action.

But perhaps the spread of deliberative civic engagement (DCE) could help change that. In conducive settings, deliberation changes minds, helps viewpoints evolve, and improves the quality of collective decision making—processes that urgently need to be promoted with respect to sustainability issues. Deliberation is also tailored to local concerns and interests, which “dictates environmental watchfulness and, when problems arise, a deliberate search for solutions,” as well as helping to resist private interests whose actions may be inimical to sustainability (Gundersen 1995, 200).

Successful DCE initiatives, which have sprung up around the world—Australia, Brazil, China, India, Nigeria, the Philippines, South Africa, and in Europe and North America—tend to share certain characteristics:

they bring together a large and diverse group of citizens . . .
in structured and facilitated small-group discussions combined with larger groups focused on action, plus they create . . .
the opportunity for participants to consider a range of arguments, information, and policy options, and . . .
they focus on concrete outcomes. (Leighninger 2012, 20)

Like the exercises members of ABCD were involved in, most of these DCE initiatives have been ad hoc, but there are a number of examples of sustained deliberative engagement as well, both historical and contemporary. Particularly in Brazil and other parts of the Global South, deliberative engagement has been built into the way that many cities operate. These instances of sustained engagement include citizen-driven land use planning exercises in India, local health councils in Brazil, ward committees in South Africa, “co-production” in the Philippines, and annual participatory budgeting processes in hundreds of cities (Spink and Best 2009; Peixoto 2012). In some of these cities, tens of thousands of people are engaged annually.

In addition to giving people meaningful opportunities to take part in public decision making and problem solving, these examples of sustained engagement have been connected with other societal outcomes, such as higher tax compliance, lower levels of corruption, higher trust in government, higher levels of economic development, and lower economic inequality (Touchton and Wampler 2014). These kinds of outcomes may be due to the fact that sustained engagement strengthens social capital and the web of relationships between neighbours.

DCE remains a largely local phenomenon. This is particularly true of sustained forms of engagement. However, the spread of online networks, especially the hyperlocal online networks that have proliferated dramatically at the neighbourhood and town level in recent years, provide new opportunities for scaling up engagement to address global challenges like climate change. On any level, DCE tends to have the greatest impacts when it involves a large, diverse critical mass of participants; the sheer number of participants is what helps give these processes the political weight to affect policy makers inside government and/or the accumulated volunteer capacity to implement action ideas outside government (Nabatchi and Leighninger 2015).

When it achieves this kind of scale, DCE has much to offer as a way for communities to come to grips with complex problems, such as climate change, that are both universal and particular. Interestingly, the spread of deliberation coincides with an impulse toward the localization of responses to sustainability problems. Climate change mitigation and adaptation are increasingly being adopted into the policy portfolios of cities and local communities worldwide, driven partly by disappointment with the pace of progress at the international level (Worldwatch Institute 2016). Cities of all sizes and on every continent are committing publicly and in writing to specific greenhouse gas emissions reduction targets, and are developing and publishing plans, strategies, and timelines to achieve those targets and to make progress toward other sustainability goals. They are developing standards and protocols by which progress can be tracked and assessed. And they are banding together in organizations for mutual support, consultation, and peer-to-peer engagement—ICLEI/Local Governments for Sustainability, C40 Cities, Urban Sustainability Directors Network, and others—that together constitute a vast stratum of activity humming beneath the high-level but sluggish international diplomatic processes.

We believe that this convergence of deliberation and localism in the sustainability movement is fortuitous. Precisely at the time when cities and communities are stepping up to chart their own ways forward into a warming and transforming world, deliberation is blossoming into a proven and potent means of harnessing the insights, commitment, buy-in, and action of ordinary people everywhere. As David Kahane notes in chapter 8, “a systemic deliberative democracy would support citizens in coming to grips with the wicked and socially complex character of climate change, so that they could shape wise and effective responses to the challenges.”

Do Try This at Home

Growing citizen empowerment and greater fragmentation and polarization could result in political systems that make governing more difficult. [. . .] The digital age undermined many of the barriers that used to protect public authority, rendering governments much less efficient or effective as the governed, or the public, became better informed and increasingly demanding in their expectations.

Klaus Schwab,
The Fourth Industrial Revolution

Significantly, the author of the above quote, Klaus Schwab, sees citizen empowerment as a bad thing. But then, he is the founder of the World Economic Forum, sponsor of the annual gathering of the world’s political and business elites in Davos, Switzerland. We would argue the opposite point, that a certain constructive public resistance to being told what to do, even if that makes citizens more difficult to govern, is a good thing. People should become “better informed and increasingly demanding” in order to raise the odds of successfully confronting sustainability challenges. Deliberation is a useful way to promote that.

By now this essay may appear to be a hymn to deliberation. While we believe in its potential, we think it wise to guard against being too starry-eyed about it. If democracy is the worst form of government except for all others, deliberative democracy may be the worst form of democracy—except for all the other forms. That is, it’s flawed. Localized communities or polities can easily go off the rails, like separate populations of organisms evolving in isolation. As Adolf Gundersen has noted, “purely local action will tend to be chauvinistic” (Gundersen 1995, 199). But surely in an Internet-connected world it should be more possible than ever to link our neighbourhoods, towns, and cities in “communities of regional communities,” in Herman Daly and John Cobb’s words (Daly and Cobb 1989, 176) and thereby to temper, to some extent, the excesses. Moreover, while we believe that deliberative democracy is probably better able to anticipate and cope with the changes in store due to climate change, we also believe that the community capacity cultivated where deliberation takes root will better enable those towns and cities to survive and prosper in a world where an increasingly deranged biosphere stresses, and possibly unravels, global social, political, and economic systems.

So, let a thousand deliberative flowers bloom. If there are expert practitioners available, by all means tap their knowledge and skills. Otherwise, go ahead—carefully!—anyway. The help needed to maximize the odds of success is available in many forms (see the website—www.albertaclimatedialogue.ca—for useful sources and organizations). And now is the time—among many people there is an ache for a system in which citizens take a larger role in managing their communities. Millions of us have become heartsick and cynical about the generally impoverished character of popular political discourse. We are appalled by the demagogic, sound bite-driven, corporate-funded, lowest-common-denominator election campaigns that typify politics in so many countries. That’s why we are drawn to deliberation—we recognize that when people come together in a calm setting to think and talk about the issues that concern them collectively, interesting and positive things can happen: views shift and evolve, and people learn things. Sometimes they change their minds. Sometimes they cease to view those who disagree with them as Hell-spawn. Perhaps they become less susceptible to the kinds of one-dimensional and emotion-driven arguments that characterize contemporary public politics, and less willing to accept the outcomes delivered by the hidden machinery of backroom governance. While there might be less theatre in a world with more deliberation, can anyone doubt that our political lives would be better? The people, John Adams wrote, “must be taught to reverence themselves, instead of adoring their . . . generals, admirals, bishops, and statesmen” (cited in Rothman 2016). To put this in twenty-first-century terms, citizens and leaders need settings in which they will be more likely to reverence one another, and move from a parent-child relationship to one that is more equitable and complementary.

Three million years of hominid evolution have hard-wired us for functioning in small groups that are relatively “flat” in organizational terms. It remains to be seen whether this legacy equips us to confront and cope with complex, global problems requiring systemic thinking and large-scale, collective action by billions of people. But it is mainly our institutions that both channel and mitigate the good and bad tendencies built into our wiring as social primates, so we owe it to ourselves to refine our institutions, especially our governance institutions, in ways that align them with our evolutionary biology. Perhaps our long history of sitting around campfires together and talking about what’s going on in the world around us, and what we ought to do about it next, can be put to good use.

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