We are now experiencing peak demand for climate COP reform. Midway through the 2024 conference (COP29), former and current UN chiefs urged “fundamental overhaul” of both the COP framework and the entire global governance system. Faith in climate multilateralism was already at an all-time low after a third consecutive so-called “petro-COP”, during which the fossil-fuel lobby had grown substantially. Fears deepened after the election of US President Donald Trump on the eve of COP29. This has sharpened senses to the need for forms of international climate collaboration that are resilient to the actions of disruptive states.
These mounting concerns have added extra impetus to establish a permanent Global Citizens’ Assembly with an innovative dual top-down and bottom-up structure. Launched last September with the backing of the COP30 President, Brazil, and many other influential actors, the assembly has the potential to have a huge impact on global climate action.
People are ahead of politicians
The assembly is designed to unlock the planet’s most valuable asset in tackling the planet’s most pressing crises: its billions of citizens, all of whom have knowledge of and care for their local environment and a stake in our collective future.
In so doing, the assembly aims to reinvigorate the global climate governance system that was designed for a different set of challenges from those the world faces today.
The fundamentals of today’s multilateralism were laid down in the postwar period, when an emptier world and lower consumption meant that humanity’s natural life-support systems were under less pressure. Capacity for mass participation beyond elections was also limited by technological constraints, and the global literacy rate was well below 40%, compared with today’s 87%.
Now, globalisation and technological advances have accelerated the climate and nature crisis to a scale so vast that no institution, no matter how well resourced, can respond without mobilising millions of people to act. These same forces have also dramatically boosted the world’s capacity to engage these millions. The demand is there, too. Research from Ipsos, Pew, and Earth4All shows that people are now way ahead of politicians on the need for action on many of today’s most pressing issues, not least climate change.
However, at present, this capacity and motivation remain largely untapped. The result is worsening crises and widespread frustration and anger at geopolitical barriers to progress.
The new assembly enables people to lead the way. It offers citizens from across the world a collective platform to shape global negotiations. But crucially, it also supports them to take action themselves – and at scale. The goal is for 10 million people to be participating annually by 2030.
Mobilising citizens
Despite clear signals of its necessity, reform of COP and other multilateral forums has been near absent in the last few decades. Transforming climate governance therefore requires a politically astute approach that is cognizant of how power works and progress happens. In brief, external pressure is required to galvanise institutions, and citizens have significant power to effect change with or without institutional support.
The assembly has therefore been set up as an independent permanent institution, with robust governance to ensure it does not replicate current biases and traditions that favour the global north. The assembly has an impact strategy that works closely with COP and other decision-makers but does not depend on them for success.
Citizens have significant power to effect change
The heart of the assembly’s insight and influence comes from thousands of local assemblies that will take place across the world. A large global network of community assemblies can supercharge climate leadership by ensuring that those on the front line of the crisis are driving the global response.
The assembly will allow anyone organising in response to the climate crisis to plug in. This includes the more than 200 climate assemblies that have already been organised as well as any other participatory decision-making using practices already culturally established. For example, while many in Europe may be familiar with the citizens’ assembly model, different countries use different methods and we want all of them to be able to plug-in.
Whatever the process, each assembly can feed into both global negotiations and local activation.
A soon-to-be-launched digital platform will make it easy for any organiser to autonomously run an assembly and decide on locally led action that makes sense for their community. The platform will also allow assemblies to draw inspiration from and connect to others around the world, with an interactive map revealing resources and stories that share and support progress.
Influencing institutions
Community assemblies will also be able to give their views on issues central to global climate negotiations. These views will be aggregated to inform the deliberations of a core assembly of 100–300 people selected by civic lottery, demographically representative of the global population.
The assembly will dock with key moments in the climate diplomacy calendar, including:
- Community assembly deliberations for 2025 will start in March on the theme of food systems.
- Data and stories from these deliberations will be showcased at climate negotiations in Bonn, in June, as well as during New York Climate Week in September, before acting as crucial learning materials for the core assembly.
- At COP30 in November, the assembly will enable thousands of grassroots citizens to participate directly in COP and have their lived experiences permeate the conversation.
- After this, the core assembly will sit for a longer period, working in tandem with ongoing community assemblies to influence key climate moments in 2026 and determine what the next iteration should focus on.
Helping to make this influence compelling will be a vibrant data dashboard that turns community assemblies’ views into engaging visuals that offer clear signals about the human family’s desires for its future.
At the very least, clear data showing citizens’ views on a variety of negotiating issues can strengthen the mandate of officials who want to drive the transition forward but worry that they are gambling with their political futures. Such data can also make it harder for petrostates and fossil-fuel lobbyists to obfuscate meaningful progress at COPs without adverse political consequences.
Over time, the assembly can become part of the operating systems of schools and universities, local governments, companies, faith-based groups, and more. In the coming years, the assembly can take such a strong hold of the climate mood music that multilateral negotiations will be galvanised by the popular current.
Creating a new centre of legitimacy
Perhaps most crucially, to the extent that progress in traditional multilateral forums is lacking, the assembly has the capacity to be an alternative decision-making beacon for the majority of people and organisations worldwide who recognise the need to take more ambitious action.
A coalition in support of the assembly was launched in September, with high-profile members including the governments of Brazil, Ireland, and Vanuatu and many public-, private-, and social-sector organisations. They are helping to spread mass participation in community assemblies, advocating for the assembly’s conclusions to be implemented in existing domestic and multilateral policy spaces, and aligning their resources behind the assembly’s conclusions, regardless of the fortunes of multilateral negotiations. The potential for this coalition to recentre democratic legitimacy is boundless as momentum builds.
We are hoping the democracy community can play an important role
Looking ahead, the assembly will drive five types of local and global impact: institutional actions, citizens’ actions, solidarity, learning at scale, and inclusion. The global movement of citizens’ assemblies and grassroots governance is fostering competition in the decision-making marketplace and creating a great reservoir from which to learn. Indeed, perhaps the most helpful way to think of the Global Citizens’ Assembly is as an institutional research and development (R&D) process that is deeply rooted in the cultural norms of communities.
We are hoping that the democracy community can play a particularly important role in this process as an enabler of grassroots democracy of all forms across the world. How can the digital platform best integrate the amazing diversity of governance practices into an amplified collective citizens’ voice? What other pioneering climate-democracy practices are needed to build active participation in addressing the biggest crisis of our time?
A critical mass now recognises that the international community will not adequately address the climate crisis without first addressing the crisis in global governance. As Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva put it while chairing the 2024 G20 summit: “It makes no sense to negotiate new commitments if we don’t have an effective mechanism to accelerate implementation of the Paris Agreement.”
Cultivating that mechanism requires climate and democracy communities to work more closely together than ever before. When President Lula bid to host COP30, he announced Brazil’s objective, to make it “the COP of the People”, thus giving breadth to the voices of all people. The assembly is one concrete way to transform this vision into reality and begin to reform climate talks now. Brazil’s leadership can lay the next stone, to a more hopeful and effective model of global governance.
This article was originally published at europeandemocracyhub.epd.eu. Republished here with kind permission. The copyright remains with the original publisher and/or authors.
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