The defining crisis of the twenty-first century has met a peculiar paradox in democratic governance. On the one hand, opinion polls consistently show that large majorities of citizens across the globe want stronger action on climate change. On the other hand, elected legislatures have repeatedly failed to pass the kind of transformative climate legislation that scientists say is necessary. This gap between public will and political output is not accidental. It is a structural feature of representative democracy as currently practiced — and it is one of the strongest arguments yet for direct citizen participation in policymaking.
The Representation Gap on Climate
Why do parliaments and congresses chronically underperform on climate? The reasons are well-documented. Fossil fuel industries wield enormous lobbying power. Electoral cycles incentivize short-term thinking, while climate policy demands investments whose benefits materialize decades later. Party politics turns energy policy into a tribal marker rather than an empirical question. And the diffuse, long-term nature of climate harm makes it easy for legislators to defer action without immediate electoral consequences.
The result is a persistent gap between what citizens want and what their representatives deliver. A 2024 UNDP survey across 77 countries found that 80 percent of respondents wanted their governments to do more on climate. Yet global emissions continue to rise, and the pledges made under the Paris Agreement remain collectively insufficient to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius. Representative democracy, for all its virtues, has a climate problem.
France’s Citizens’ Convention: A Landmark Experiment
The most ambitious attempt to bridge this gap came from France. In 2019, President Emmanuel Macron convened the Convention Citoyenne pour le Climat — a citizens’ assembly of 150 randomly selected French adults tasked with proposing measures to reduce France’s greenhouse gas emissions by at least 40 percent by 2030, “in a spirit of social justice.” The participants met over nine months, heard from climate scientists, economists, and industry representatives, deliberated in small groups, and ultimately produced 149 policy proposals.
The proposals were remarkably ambitious. They included banning domestic flights where train alternatives exist under four hours, mandating energy-efficient building renovations, introducing a climate crime of “ecocide,” and requiring environmental labeling on all consumer products. Many of these measures went further than anything the French National Assembly had seriously considered.
What made the Convention significant was not just the substance of its proposals but the process. Ordinary citizens, given time, information, and structured deliberation, arrived at policies that were both scientifically grounded and politically courageous. They were willing to accept short-term costs for long-term gains in a way that elected officials, perpetually eyeing the next election, were not.
Participatory Budgeting Goes Green
Climate-focused citizen participation is not limited to national assemblies. Across Europe and Latin America, participatory budgeting — the practice of letting citizens directly allocate portions of public spending — has increasingly turned green. Cities like Lisbon, Paris, and Melbourne have earmarked participatory budget categories specifically for environmental projects. Citizens vote on proposals ranging from urban tree planting and bike infrastructure to community solar installations and flood resilience measures.
The evidence suggests that when given direct control over spending, citizens consistently prioritize environmental improvements in their neighborhoods. A 2023 study of participatory budgeting outcomes in European cities found that environmental projects received a disproportionately high share of citizen votes relative to their share of proposed projects. People want green infrastructure. They just need the institutional mechanism to demand it.
Ireland’s Quiet Revolution
Ireland provides another instructive case. The Irish Citizens’ Assembly, convened in 2016, addressed climate policy alongside other contentious issues. Its 2018 recommendations on climate were sweeping: it called for a carbon tax increase, a phase-out of fossil fuel subsidies, and aggressive investment in public transport and renewable energy. Crucially, 80 percent of assembly members supported making climate action a constitutional priority.
The assembly’s recommendations fed into the Climate Action and Low Carbon Development Act of 2021, one of the most ambitious pieces of climate legislation in Europe. Ireland’s experience demonstrates something important: citizens’ assemblies do not just produce wish lists. When embedded in a responsive institutional framework, their recommendations can become law.
Why Citizens Get It Right
Several features of direct democratic deliberation explain why citizens often outperform legislatures on climate. First, randomly selected assemblies are structurally insulated from the lobbying pressures that distort legislative outcomes. Fossil fuel companies cannot buy advertising time in a deliberative chamber. Second, the deliberative format — small groups, expert testimony, facilitated discussion — encourages participants to weigh evidence rather than retreat into partisan positions. Third, citizens who are asked to consider the long-term future of their communities tend to take that responsibility seriously. The sense of civic duty that comes with being directly entrusted with a policy question produces a seriousness of purpose that partisan legislatures often lack.
This does not mean citizen assemblies are infallible. The French Convention’s proposals were significantly watered down by the Macron government before reaching parliament, and many were never implemented at all. The gap between citizen recommendation and political execution remains a critical weakness. But the failure is not in the deliberative process — it is in the institutional mechanisms for translating citizen will into binding policy.
Binding Mechanisms and the Path Forward
This is where the argument for direct democracy becomes most pointed. If citizens’ assemblies produce better climate policy than legislatures but lack the power to implement it, the logical response is not to abandon assemblies but to give them teeth. Switzerland’s referendum system offers one model: citizens can initiate binding votes on specific policy measures. A similar mechanism applied to climate — allowing citizen assemblies to place their proposals directly on the ballot — could break the legislative logjam that has stalled meaningful climate action for decades.
Some jurisdictions are already experimenting with this approach. The German-speaking community of Belgium has established a permanent citizens’ council with the power to set the agenda for citizens’ assemblies on topics including environmental policy. Several European cities have made participatory budgeting for green projects a permanent feature of municipal governance. These are small steps, but they point in a clear direction: toward a democratic infrastructure that treats citizen participation not as a one-off consultation but as a permanent feature of climate governance.
The Stakes
The climate crisis is a test of democratic capacity. If democracies cannot respond to the most serious threat facing human civilization, the case for democratic governance itself is weakened. Authoritarian regimes will point to democratic paralysis as evidence that liberalism cannot meet existential challenges. But the evidence from France, Ireland, and dozens of participatory budgeting experiments suggests that the problem is not democracy itself — it is the narrow, representative version of democracy that concentrates decision-making power in the hands of a political class structurally incapable of long-term thinking.
Direct citizen participation in climate policy is not a utopian fantasy. It is already happening, and where it happens, it works. The question is whether we have the political imagination to scale it up before the window for meaningful climate action closes for good.
