Citizens and climate: what place for citizen initiatives towards COP 30?

Creating new spaces for dialogue to foster innovative sustainable development solutions

Challenges of this century cannot be faced without engaging populations in its diversity, bringing dynamism, resonance and innovation. Particularly, the prism of climate change and just transition enables the emergence of frameworks for democratic dialogue and the emergence of innovative mechanisms for citizen participation. The climate change emergency encourages renewed modes of governance: it offers opportunities to engage in in-depth consultation processes, creates debate to aim for a consensus on policy choices and puts in place tools to allow genuine co-construction on the choices of trajectories. 

The necessary transitions of the twenty-first century highlight the essential need to rebuild trust between public institutions and citizens, key to supporting and reinforcing democracy in the world. Citizen participation has a role to play in complementing and enriching public action and supporting the values of democracy. 

Heading towards 2030, combined efforts need to be made to close the existing gaps to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals. As a public development agency, Agence française de développement seeks to embrace these global challenges by supporting our partners in developing and implementing fair and legitimate public policies, among others by putting forward citizen participation mechanisms. 

Several formats and tools to make citizen participation happen already exist: climate assemblies but also other forms of deliberative practices. The aim of recent collaboration between International IDEA and AFD is to shed light on these practices, take stock of current trends, achievements, and successes but also highlight limitations and paths for improvement. Both in the geographies of the North and Global South, these practices could offer a strong role to play when it comes to solutions definition but also consensus and trust building. 

Join us for a 2 hours in-depth discussion on the role citizens can play in formulating, and implementing and assessing climate policies. This event will explore the critical role of citizen participation in addressing climate change. Organized around two panels, the first one will deep dive potential and challenges of citizen assemblies on climate change based on the recent study on deliberative practices on climate, elaborated by IDEA International. The second panel will discuss other forms of participation and proposing a prospective views looking towards COP 30.