key: cord-0060277-5ko4eoga
authors: Berglund, Oscar; Schmidt, Daniel
title: Reimagining Democracy
date: 2020-09-10
journal: Extinction Rebellion and Climate Change Activism
DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-48359-3_5
sha: b18e51b56de78b538a1f2ceea3680751b49de8d2
doc_id: 60277
cord_uid: 5ko4eoga

This chapter explores XR’s demand for a citizens’ assembly and how it draws on critiques of representative democracy that have been growing in social movements to provide a more democratic model. We argue that the citizens’ assembly demand as sketched by XR comes from an established critique of representative democracy but that it then becomes a way of avoiding answering the big question of what needs to be done to address the climate emergency. The demand for a citizens’ assembly on the climate emergency highlights the tensions in XR and beyond around solution agnosticism and the ignoring of the power relations and structures that drive climate change in contemporary capitalism.

as sketched by XR comes from an established critique of representative democracy but that it then becomes a way of avoiding answering the big question of what needs to be done to address the climate emergency. The demand for a citizens' assembly on the climate emergency highlights the tensions in XR and beyond around solution agnosticism and the ignoring of the political economy.

In the first section we argue that XR's critique of representative democracy draws on political discourses of anti-capitalism, so-called left populism and an institutional critique of the short-termism in representative democracy. We then proceed to study the demand of a citizens' assembly and how such assemblies have emerged from the scholarship on how deliberative democracy can address some of the shortcomings of representative democracy. In the third and fourth section we explore what the citizens' assembly demand does for XR as a movement. We argue that the demand lies at the centre of the tensions around solution agnosticism, reform or revolution and the non-engagement with the political economy that we set out in the introduction. It allows XR to defer solutions to the climate crisis to a future citizens' assembly and thereby avoid detailing critique and demands. XR's assembly demand is designed to create radical climate policies and not to lastingly transform the way we do politics. The prospective climate assembly, as envisioned by XR, represents a single exception to politics as usual which can exert pressure on politicians to act in the public interest and enact the climate policies that we need. We argue that a citizens' assembly is unlikely to solve the climate emergency but rather becomes a tool in the much broader struggle to do so. This is because a citizens' assembly does not fundamentally alter the power relations in society and the economy that drives the climate emergency.

XR's critique of representative democracy comes at a time when representative democracy has lost significant legitimacy across society and society has become increasingly polarised. As such, we distinguish three types of political discourse that XR echo or draw upon in their critique of representative democracy; anti-capitalism; so-called left populism; and an institutional critique of the short-termism of representative democracy. In their Declaration of Rebellion, XR announce that we, in alignment with our consciences and our reasoning, declare ourselves in rebellion against our government and the corrupted, inept institutions that threaten our future. The wilful complicity displayed by our government has shattered meaningful democracy and cast aside the common interest in favour of short-term gains and private profit. (XR 2019d, p. 2) This declaration gives expression to the movement's conviction that the political process is broken. Representative democracy has here proven incapable of acting in the public interest and tackling problems such as inequality and climate change. The movement holds that the present political system serves the needs of short-term financial interests of elites; has been co-opted by these elites; and is structurally inept to deal with climate change.

XR's discursive treatment of capitalism is muddled and purposely so. Many XR spokespeople and members are anti-capitalists and publicly state their political convictions. The movement's official line, in contrast, is to stay away from what XR call 'lefty language'. But even in this official line, there are references to the domination of capital to explain past governments' failure to address the climate crisis. Here, 'democratic representatives are lobbied by powerful corporations' (XR 2019c), which makes them more beholden to the interests of businesses than the public. This is seen as particularly catastrophic for climate change policy since the current fossil-fuel-run capitalist economy has significant interests in maintaining the status quo. There is in other words an implicit, if not explicit, critique of what Badiou calls (2010, pp. 98-99) 'capitalo-parliamentarialism'. Implicit or soft anti-capitalist discourse often appear as what has been termed left populism, where the people are pitted against the elite (Stanley 2008; Mudde 2017) . According to Roger Hallam (2019a) , 'elites in business, government and the media' (p. 9) and 'the various supporting pillars and groups who follow their orders: courts, police, security people etc.,' (p. 17) are unwilling to 'respond even minimally to demands for structural change' (p. 23). This reluctance makes them the 'opponents' in XR's struggle. Here the problem is seen to be 'post-democracy' (Crouch 2005) , a system in which the private interests of a small elite predominate democratic institutions. There are in other words strong similarities between particularly Hallam's anti-elitist language and that of the Movement of the Squares (Flesher Fominaya 2015; Fernández-Savater et al. 2017) , as well as the anti-austerity parties that grew out of that movement (Della Porta et al. 2017) .

Lastly, XR critique the institutional limitations inherent to representative democracies. The movement argues that the 'five-year electoral cycle discourages governments from attending to long-term issues like climate breakdown' (XR 2019c, p. 16) . They argue that since 'political power in the UK is in the hands of a few elected politicians' who 'simply can't see past the next election', the political system has failed to make 'the long-term decisions needed to deal with the climate and ecological emergency' (XR 2020a). Policies whose positive impact will only become evident in decades to come do not help politicians win the next election. Hence, representative democracies exhibit a strong tendency towards 'short-termism', a bias that partially accounts for the electoral system's failure to adequately tackle climate change (see Hanusch 2018 ). An aggravating factor, according to XR, is politicians' reliance on opinion polls, or 'partially informed knee-jerk reactions', to 'inform themselves on what their constituents might want' (XR 2019e). This, they argue presents a form of 'will of the people' that is devoid of any reflection or learning. There are in other words echoes of various strands of scholarly and popular critique of representative liberal democracy in XR's discourse.

The difficulty of representative democracy to tackle a long-term issue like climate change has led to demands of both authoritarian and more democratic forms of governance. Many concur with XR's diagnosis but infer an argument in favour of technocratic authoritarianism (Stehr 2016; Fiorino 2018) . By their account, climate action requires 'governance by experts' and a political process which is less publicly accountable (Shearman and Smith 2007) . XR and many other social movements go in the other direction and advocate for deeper forms of democracy. The climate emergency requires, according to XR, 'radical system change on a scale never seen before' (Knights 2019, p. 11 ). The movement is however diffused on what such radical system change may entail in political economic terms but is clearer on how they will take place in terms of institutional democratic reform. The 'only way by which we can take back control from the corporate captured system currently failing us', according to XR, are 'radical new forms of democracy that put decisionmaking back in the hands of the people' (XR 2019b, p. 3) . To this end, XR propose the establishment of citizens' assemblies. If these are the political discourses that XR draw upon in demanding a citizen's assembly, there is also a wealth of theoretical and empirical scholarly research into forms of deliberative democracy that bolster this demand.

The demand of a citizens' assembly draws on a long tradition of critique of representative democracy and for deliberative democracy to play a greater role in governance. The demand states that the 'government must create and be led by the decisions of a citizens' assembly on climate and ecological justice' (XR 2019a). The citizens' assembly is to be tasked with finding solutions to the climate and ecological crisis, providing the public 'with a way to decide what is best for our future, even if that requires radical changes in the present' (XR 2020a).

Assembly members are to be chosen through the selection mechanism known as sortition, or selection by lot. As for jury service, every eligible citizen has an equal probability of being selected to participate (Smith 2009, p. 167) . XR propose stratified random sampling where 'the public is divided into subpopulations based on, for example, gender, age, ethnicity, education level and geography' and the makeup of the assembly is proportionally representative of the population as a whole according to these subcategories (XR 2019c, p. 15 ). This process ensures that the chosen members are broadly representative of the demographics of the general public (Manin 1997) . Unlike jury service, however, citizens who receive an invitation to become an assembly member will not be obliged to take part (XR 2019c). By making participation voluntary, assembly members are more likely to be interested and motivated in the proceedings. But even with stratified random sampling, voluntary participation decreases representativeness by allowing for some self-selection, perhaps towards more politically engaged citizens (Leib 2004, pp. 103-114; Fishkin and Farrar 2005, p. 74) .

The purpose of sortition is to do away with current inequalities in terms of representation. For XR (2020a), current representative democracy enhances pre-existing power relations and disproportionately advantages older, male, white and wealthy populations and interests. Because future assembly members would not be exposed to lobbying and electoral pressures, they would speak more freely about what was on their mind and decide on what they truly believed was in the public interest. Yet, the selection process can put pressures of a different sort on participants. While meant to encourage assembly members to draw from their diverse experiences and backgrounds in joint pursuit of the public good, sortition can also encourage participants to think of themselves as representing 'people like them' (Smith 2009, pp. 82-83) . It may be expedient to temper strong claims to representativeness so that participants do not think of themselves 'as irreconcilably divided by race, selected only to fill a particular racial or gender slot' (Abramson 1994, p. 11) .

A common critique against citizens' assemblies that XR has to counter is the average citizens' alleged ignorance or incompetence. It is often posited that randomly chosen citizens are not qualified to make policy decisions since they lack the required expertise, experience, skills or, in harsher formulations, cognitive capabilities (van Reybrouck 2016). Weighting different responses to climate change requires a deep understanding of the science of climate change, technical expertise of relevant technologies and policy knowledge. This supposedly makes climate assemblies a more precarious endeavour than prior citizens' assemblies on abortion, euthanasia or same-sex marriage. XR would however be right to retort that the purported technical expertise of politicians and other policymakers has so far not led them to implement compelling climate policies. Moreover, assembly members have plenty of opportunities to listen to and cross-examine experts in order to gain relevant knowledge.

Citizens' assemblies are a form of participatory democracy. In contrast to a representative system with elected officials, citizens' assemblies put power in the hands of people who are not professional politicians. By involving citizens in policymaking, citizens' assemblies are designed to be participatory in regard to political outcomes. The idea is that the decisions of a citizens' assembly can be accepted as representative of what the general public had decided if all citizens had taken the time to properly inform themselves on an issue:

People are supposed to think: 'If I were selected, if I had time to learn and to deliberate with my peers, perhaps I would come to a similar conclusion as the assembly did'. (XR 2019e) However, the model falls short of realising two elements of a participatory democracy, mass participation and civic education (Pateman 1970; Fishkin 2009, Chapter 3) . In fact, only a minuscule percentage of the general population takes part in a citizens' assembly. If some 100 people participate out of tens of millions of eligible citizens, this hardly constitutes a wider democratisation of society (Pateman 2012; Lafont 2015) . Consequently, the educative effects attributed to participatory practices are also restricted to the very few participating individuals. If the large majority of people does not personally experience the assembly process, they will not be able to benefit from the experience and grow into better people or citizens in a way that participatory democracy is intended to (Pateman 1970) . For a polity to be truly participatory, not only should everyone be given an equal chance to participate; a broad segment of the population actually has to be involved. As well as participatory, citizens' assemblies are also designed to be deliberative.

Citizens' assemblies are deliberative in that they enable lay citizens to make good policy decisions by bringing people together and facilitating face-to-face discussions (Goodin and Dryzek 2006; Warren 2008) . They aspire to the ideal of a deliberative democracy which attributes a central significance to deliberation and the concomitant requirement to give reasons for one's opinions (Rawls 1997; Smith and Wales 2000; Gutmann and Thompson 2004; Fishkin 2009; Lafont 2020) . Deliberation consists of 'mutual communication that involves weighing and reflecting on preferences, values, and interests regarding matters of common concern' (Bächtiger et al. 2018, p. 2) . Deliberative democracy is conceptually contrasted with aggregative models of democracy that are based on the counting of votes. The former considers the reasons people give for their expressed views and asks for justifications. The latter model takes people's preferences as given and only seeks to combine them in a fair way (Dryzek 2000, p. 3; Gutmann and Thompson 2004, pp. 13-21; Chambers 2009 ). Ideal deliberation aims to arrive at a rationally motivated consensus. But in practice, deliberation and aggregation, talking and voting, are often combined (Cohen 1989; Bächtiger et al. 2018 ). Citizens' assemblies generally have a voting mechanism in place to decide on the final policy recommendations. After all, it is very improbable that all assembly members will arrive at a complete consensus for any one policy, let alone a significant number of measures.

A key area of inquiry in deliberative democratic theory pertains to the conditions that constitute authentic deliberation. Even within XR, while citizens' assemblies are accepted as a good idea in principle, there are prevalent concerns regarding their practical implementation. One XR activist aired concerns 'about how we choose the experts that provide the evidence to give to people' and how to put the 'knowledge of a very technical, complex subject into the hands of ordinary people' so that they have a good enough understanding 'to make well-informed, sensible decisions'. This goes to show that, in order to be perceived as legitimate, citizens' assemblies need to have a thought-out process in place to guide participants step-by-step to the eventual drafting of policies (Fung 2003; Gerwin 2018; Patriquin 2019, Chapter 2) .

XR advance an assembly process that is divided into four phases: learning, consultation, deliberation and decision-making (XR 2019c, p. 12; 2019e) . During the learning phase, experts and stakeholders present information on the issue at hand to the assembly members, who also have an opportunity to invite and question additional experts. All the assembly members are to learn climate science and social justice issues. XR advocate that participants subsequently disperse into multiple citizens' panels on specific issues, such as transport, agriculture, housing or power, with a size of between 50 and 100 members each. Next, in the consultation phase, individuals and groups from society can make written submissions which are summarised and presented in the assembly. During the deliberation phase, in plenary sessions and facilitated group discussions, assembly members reflect on and discuss the evidence and opinions they have heard. Finally, based on these deliberations, they draft and vote on policies and deliver a report outlining their decisions.

To guarantee a fair process and legitimate deliberations, four distinct groups are to run and monitor the citizens' assembly (XR 2019c, pp. 8-9 ). An impartial coordinating group conducts the random selection of citizens and invites experts, stakeholders and facilitators. An advisory board, composed of academics and practitioners, develops the selection criteria for the expert/stakeholder panel and ensures balance of the background material and evidence presented to the assembly. A team of experienced facilitators sits with assembly members and makes sure that the deliberation is not dominated by a vocal few. Lastly, an oversight panel is tasked with monitoring the entire process.

Deliberative democratic practices, and by extension citizens' assemblies, have encountered a number of criticisms. For one, deliberation is held to be susceptible to manipulation. Contrary to the 'ideal speech situations' posited by discursive theorists such as Habermas (1984) , in real-world discussions the force of the better argument may rarely be decisive. Humans are not purely rational beings and vulnerable to sophistry and manipulation. There is plenty of opportunity for the most educated and those most skilled in rhetoric to sway the decisions in their favour (Elster 1998, pp. 1-2) . Moreover, deliberation does not necessarily result in consensus. Even deliberations that take place under favourable conditions are not always conducive to a convergence of opinions or a deeper understanding. They 'can get nowhere and peter out, they can cause people to become even more confused than they were at the outset', 'foster polemics, and generate further bitterness, rancor and division' (Geuss 2019) . Empirical findings attest to the phenomenon of group polarisation, where discussion is likely to shift judgements towards more extreme positions than the initial inclination of members (Sunstein 2000) . And especially in divided and polarised societies, discussions between citizens often exacerbate differences rather than resolve them (Mouffe 1999; Dryzek 2005) . Lastly, and especially troubling for climate assemblies, decision-making in deliberative bodies is slow and it has historically taken a long time for assemblies' recommendations to become law (Fenton 2019) . A long-winded process is incongruous if quick action is needed. These critiques notwithstanding, XR's demand of a citizen's assembly is grounded on decades of scholarship on the shortcomings of representative democracy and potential for deliberative democracy.

The citizens' assembly demand serves to make a strategy that is based on how to achieve revolutions become democratic and reformist. It thus lies at the centre of the tension between revolutionary and reformist tendencies in XR's discourse. The movement's strategy, or 'theory of change', is based on the tactic of mass arrest. XR aim to mobilise a small minority of the general population to publicly and visibly break the law in acts of nonviolent civil disobedience. Roads are blocked and transport systems obstructed until the inflicted economic costs and logistical difficulties caused by mass-arresting peaceful protesters force the government to accede to the movement's demands (Hallam 2019b) . XR recognise that this seemingly revolutionary strategy can be problematic for a democratic movement. After all, a majority of the population may disagree with XR's aims and demands. XR attempt to circumvent this problem by means of the citizens' assembly demand. That is, XR do not impose solutions of its own on the majority but rather demand to let the people decide. Thereby, according to a local XR coordinator, the movement turns a strategy that is 'profoundly anti-democratic into something that is supremely democratic'. Through the assembly demand, the movement's strategy becomes compatible with its democratic self-appraisal. This makes the citizens' assembly demand an indispensable corollary to XR's theory of change as it balances the revolutionary with the reformist. This analysis, however, is in tension with XR's demand to achieve carbon neutrality by 2025. XR stipulate that the national citizens' assembly is to determine how to achieve net-zero emissions in the UK by 2025 (XR 2019a). The 2025 target is widely regarded as highly ambitious and its realisation would require, according to XR, a mobilisation 'of the scale of a World War' (XR 2020e). Crucially, this implies that the timeline for the yet-to-be-determined policies is set by XR and not itself up for democratic scrutiny and debate. Assembly members are only to decide on the policies that will achieve carbon neutrality by 2025, not to question the target itself. This indicates a tension in XR's solution agnosticism as it limits the remit of a future citizens' assembly. It expresses an uncertainty about a citizens' assembly deciding that carbon emissions should only be level as late as, for instance, 2040. Alternatively, it addresses the risk that the future assembly will not be able to agree on a target.

The citizens' assembly demand has limited the movement in talking about solutions to the climate emergency. XR have been reticent when it comes to lobbying for particular climate and environmental policies and projects. A number of local working groups are discussing action plans with city councils, for example, regarding airport expansions. Nevertheless, there is little broader debate within XR about what kind of society we need and what kinds of lives we would have to live in order to address the impending climate crisis. Discussions between XR members circle around topics such as actions, movement strategy, media messaging and wellbeing. There is surprisingly little discussion about both climate change and what kind of systemic changes would be needed to address it. This void speaks to the tensions of solution agnosticism and how XR relate to capitalism in their clamour for system change. The void is justified on the basis that XR are a self-selective movement that has neither the legitimacy nor the ability to implement political responses. For XR, only the national government 'has the power to enact the scale and scope of necessary action' (XR 2019e). Hence, the movement is best served by influencing the public debate and forcing the government to create a citizens' assembly in the first place. Essentially, XR is to concentrate on forcing the government to agree to its three demands.

This reluctance to talk about political solutions has not gone unchallenged. A number of XR activists hold that the citizens' assembly demand indulges the illusion of a straightforward path towards victory. In one coordinator's view, XR does not talk about solutions, what we are gonna do. We barely even have policy demands. We just say 'let's build a citizens' assembly' and the citizens' assembly will work out the policy positions.

From this perspective, XR's theory of change gives people a false sense of security. Some activists thus believe that XR need to take a more active part in bringing about the transformations in our ways of life and the structures that sustain them. To do this, XR should broaden its strategic outlook from solely pressuring the state to making changes in the very make up of (capitalist) society. This view seems to have held some sway in the movement. In the strategy paper for 2020, XR delineates a year where rebellion will go beyond the streets and into the fabric of everything we do…We won't wait for our demands to be met, we will begin to enact them, piloting new participatory systems in democracy, media and economics. (XR 2020c) Part of this project are local citizens' assemblies which will enable communities to develop their own, smaller-scale initiatives. XR are also planning to increase their contestation of non-state actors, be it the 'corporate media' or the 'economic systems that destroy life on earth', by 'offering alternatives which disrupt the business-as-usual hold on power' (XR 2020c) . This reorientation is more in the spirit of a 'revolution of the everyday' which urges individuals and communities to create democratic and egalitarian spaces in the fissures of power without initially aiming for large-scale transformations (Davies 2014) . It is in other words a whole lot more prefigurative than what XR have been doing up until this point. How this new prefigurative agenda will play out in practice is as of yet uncertain but it does point to tensions in and a possible break from the solution agnosticism that has dominated until now.

This brings us to the tangled relationship between the prospective climate assembly and the current political system. As we argued above, XR introduces the citizens' assembly as a response to the failures of representative democracy. Like many other movements, XR see the political sphere as negligent and corrupt and look for different means of redress.

The citizens' assembly demand promises to go 'beyond politics' (XR 2019a), heralding a new kind of collective decision-making. However, XR's proposal is less transformative of the current political system than may be inferred by the movement's rhetoric. For one, the citizens' assembly is to be an addition to the representative system, not a substitution. The assembly's decisions 'will provide political cover and public pressure for politicians to set aside the usual politicking and do the right thing' (XR 2020a). It will thereby 'enable politicians to address the emergency before it's too late' (XR 2019c, p. 5). Policymakers remain central to XR's vision and parliament as well as all other representative bodies will continue to exist and do what they have always done. Additionally, the citizens' assembly is only to discuss how to tackle the climate and ecological emergency. Once the assembly submits its recommendations, it will disband again. The climate assembly's scope and duration is in this discourse not intended to lead to lasting disturbance of the liberal democratic consensus. An add-on, single-issue, once-only citizens' assembly would not fundamentally alter the political system. In this sense, the national coordinator for XR UK's citizens' assembly working group is right to claim that 'a citizens' assembly, to me at least, is not that radical at all' (All Hands On 2019). Here, 'beyond politics' does not signify a transformation of the political sphere but an exception to politics as usual subsequent to which things can continue as before. The tension between reformist and revolutionary undertones in XR's discourse becomes visible here. The talk of system change and the deeper theory of change based on transforming the state as we know it and its concomitant unequal power relations gives way to a reformist discourse where a citizens' assembly is an add-on to existing structures.

The primary use of the prospective citizens' assembly is not to alter politics but to get better climate policy. XR hope that the climate assembly will endorse a more radical and socially just environmental action plan than anything that parliament can come up with. Such deliberative mini-publics have indeed been found to 'be relatively sensitive to the perspectives of environmentalists' (Smith 2003, p. 101) . While they do not always provide the results environmentalists look for, green positions seem to be favoured compared to decision-making in representative bodies (Dryzek 2013; Bryant and Willis 2019) .

Nonetheless, the outcomes of the assembly process will depend on the assembly's design. These design elements are contested, as is perfectly exemplified by the differences between XR's demanded citizens' assembly and the existing Climate Assembly UK, which is taking place at the time of writing (Climate Assembly UK 2020). The latter was established by six House of Commons select committees and convened over four weekends in the Spring of 2020. For a start, contrary to XR' s demands, the Climate Assembly UK discussed how to achieve carbon neutrality by 2050. By postponing the underlying target by 25 years, the ensuing policy proposals were ensured to be less far-reaching and impactful. Additionally, as XR (2020d) point out, 'the net-zero target Climate Assembly UK will work towards does not account for emissions from aviation or trade' or for the 'UK's international emissions, so we can continue to outsource a significant proportion of our emissions to other countries'. Another limitation of the assembly is what XR criticise as an overall focus on 'changes on the individual level' that 'will not adequately address top-level policies, such as regulations for industry, infrastructure and international supply chains' (XR 2020d). People debated 'how we travel', 'what we buy' and learned about heat and energy use in the home, consumption, waste, dietary choices and land use (Climate Assembly UK 2020). Yet structural issues relating to the global economy were effectively omitted. We can then see how what appears to be a radical political demand in the form of a citizens' assembly can be watered down and thus result in something that falls well short of necessary action.

The Climate Assembly UK, lastly, has only an advisory status. It was not commissioned by the current government but by the previous parliament and is consequently restricted to making advisory recommendations (Fenton 2019) . According to XR, non-binding recommendations are insufficient since they are open to challenge by the current political system, and hence interest groups and corporations. XR suggest that assembly proposals with over 80% support should be binding. As for recommendations with between 50 and 80% support, the government is to address them and provide a rationale for why they were either rejected, modified or accepted (XR 2019e). While this would be ideal, there is an understanding within XR that getting the government to agree to legally binding decisions is unlikely. The more realistic option is to exert pressure on politicians so that they do not dare to reject the assembly's proposals (XR 2020b) . In this case, the likelihood of success will also depend on the perceived legitimacy of the citizens' assembly amongst the broader public.

In this chapter, we have argued that XR's citizens' assembly demand draws on influential critiques of representative democracy and delineates a seemingly straightforward solution to the climate crisis. While we agree with XR that a randomly selected, deliberative political body has a number of desirable attributes we nonetheless allege that XR's proposal relies on several leaps of faith. To start, the citizens' assembly's ability to deliver a more participatory and deliberative democracy is severely restricted. XR's claim to go beyond politics does not signify a lasting transformation, but a short-lived exception, to politics as usual. The assembly demand's actual role is to create a one-time chance for implementing radical policies specifically relating to climate change. XR may, however, be overly optimistic in their expectations of the assembly results. Guided deliberation does not necessarily lead to superior policymaking and assembly members may not arrive at a consensus or clear majority decisions. Citizens' assemblies have indeed been shown to favour environmentalist positions, but the prospective climate assembly's design will be crucial for determining the eventual recommendations. These design elements are highly contested and amenable to the vested interests that currently impede effective climate action. Lastly, in order for radical proposals to be implemented, the climate assembly will either have to sit above existing representative bodies and make legally binding recommendations or there has to be strong political and public support for the assembly. In the current political climate, the former option seems unlikely and the latter is highly dependent on XR's success at 'truth-telling' and convincing the public of the urgent need for action.

Citizens' assemblies and the demand for them can be a useful political tool in the fight for climate action and climate justice, but they are unlikely to be a silver-bullet solution. Deferring solutions to a climate assembly gives XR democratic legitimacy but it also ignores the power structures that are in fact preventing effective action on climate change. Part of XR's discourse is that representative democracy has been co-opted by economic elites and the fossil fuel industry has played a particular role in delaying addressing the climate emergency. There is also a recognition that the media plays an important role in maintaining what XR call the status quo on climate change. A citizens' assembly that operates in a political system and society that is still dominated by these power relations would not have the power to overcome them. A hostile media could have undue influence on part of the assembly. It could also severely undermine the legitimacy of the assembly in the eyes of much of the public in the currently polarised society. Shielding participants in the assembly from undue influence from the fossil fuel industry would also be crucial but challenging.

Not least, a citizens' assembly on climate change would have to be so overarching in its remit that it would have to sit above the rest of the state in many ways. This is because addressing climate change will involve huge changes to how we make, sell, buy, trade, transport and invest in goods and people globally. In other words, it involves transforming global capitalism. The initial response to COVID-19 taking place at the time of writing gives some indication to how dramatic such changes are likely to be. That is a rather larger task than deciding on individual policy issues, such as when abortions should be legal. We do not dispute that a citizens' assembly would be as qualified as elected representatives to make important decisions. We do however dispute citizens' assemblies as solutions in and of themselves. That is, if we in a hypothetical future would find ourselves in a situation where a citizens' assembly is unaffected by the currently existing power relations in global capitalism, we would have to overcome those power relations first or the effects of the citizens' assembly would be too limited to achieve the necessary reforms. The citizens' assembly would not do that for us. In short then, if demanding a citizens' assembly can give legitimacy to XR and climate change activists; suggestions from a citizens' assembly set up under current circumstances would have a high level of legitimacy, making the assembly a useful tool in the fight for climate action; but the assembly would not be able to solve the climate crisis without wider changes in the power relations that have created the climate crisis.

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