Citizens’ assemblies on climate change. Climate democracy in the Anthropocene1

While the focus on climate change litigation strategies by both scholars and social movements is understandable, it might overlook the structural aspects of the climate crisis and its long-term repercussions. Relying on judicial decisions is not a sustainable strategy in the long term. The aim of this chapter, therefore, is to establish a comparative framework for recent experiments in Climate Democracy. After a brief introduction on the tragedy of the temporal horizon in the Anthropocene, the second section will present a survey of Citizens’ Assemblies on Climate Change (CACC), while outlining a theoretical framework to distinguish between deliberative and participatory democracy. The French Convention citoyenne pour le climat of 2019 will be examined. The third section will explore how CACC and other deliberative democratic practices have served occasionally as “drivers” for constitutional change, as the most recent Irish experiences might illustrate. The chapter concludes with a brief examination of Climate City Contracts within the EU Mission: Climate-Neutral and Smart Cities, emphasizing the potential of proactive (or physiological) tools-such as deliberative democracy and local governance-over reactive (or pathological) measures-such as litigation-in fostering “planetary climate stewardship”.