Deliberative Minipublics’ Potential for Sustainability Science and Transformations

Abstract

In many democracies, political action to address sustainability challenges lags behind public concern, suggesting a need for more and deeper forms of democracy to avert environmental crises. Deliberative minipublics, such as citizens’ assemblies and juries, represent a democratic innovation of great interest for sustainability science. These randomly-selected groups of citizens deliberate under facilitated conditions with access to balanced information. Such conditions create a favourable environment for deliberative reasoning and considered judgement, suggesting that deliberative minipublics could be trusted intermediaries between science and society, enhance the transformability of democracies, and help to democratise transdisciplinary sustainability research. However, this potential remains largely unexplored beyond climate assemblies, and many questions remain about the ultimate effect of minipublic deliberations on decision-making and sustainable outcomes. We urge sustainability scientists to study and experiment with deliberative minipublics to address key research questions, to scrutinise and unlock their potential contribution to sustainable transformations.

Keywords: transdisciplinary science, deliberative democracy, technocracy, populism, sortition, environmental governance