Democratizing Climate Governance: An Inconvenient Necessity?

This conversation revisits the original impetus behind large-scale citizen participation efforts such as the World Wide Views (WWViews) consultations: to close the democratic gap in global climate negotiations. These efforts were grounded in a theory of change that prioritized democratic legitimacy and durable collective solutions, even at the expense of speed.

This placed WWViews, which argued that “science informs us, it doesn’t tell us what to do,” at odds with the growing impatience and frustrations brewing among the activist climate science community. It prompted a cautionary article by Nico Stehr in 2015, “Democracy is not an inconvenience.”

In the years that followed, particularly in the wake of the Yellow Vest movement in France and the launch of the 2020 Citizens’ Convention on Climate, climate activists and experts increasingly turned to citizen assemblies and deliberative democracy as a corrective to the failures of representative democracy. These approaches were embraced not only for their legitimacy, but also with the expectation that they could help accelerate climate action. Movements such as Extinction Rebellion elevated citizen assemblies into one of their core demands, further embedding deliberative processes into the climate governance discourse.

However, after an initial period of momentum and experimentation, citizen assemblies have struggled to resolve the underlying tension between speed and legitimacy. Their influence appears to be receding as attention shifts toward other political and economic priorities, raising renewed questions about the role and limits of democratized approaches in addressing urgent, large-scale climate challenges.

A more recent reframing comes from Bill Gates, who argues that climate strategy should be evaluated less by temperature targets and more by human welfare, including health, prosperity, and resilience. In this view, climate change is inseparable from poverty, disease, and development: improving people’s lives is itself a primary form of climate action.

Taken together, these perspectives suggest a deeper proposition:

We cannot solve the climate problem by treating it as an isolated technical problem. We will need to address it by engaging with people’s lived realities, something that cannot be done by science alone, especially without democratic legitimacy.

Drawing on transatlantic experience and two decades of participatory innovation, the discussion will explore:

• The original ambition of closing the democratic gap in global climate governance
• The evolving tension between legitimacy and speed in participatory processes
• The shift from climate as a technical problem to climate as a human welfare and development problem
• Competing governance logics: technocratic urgency versus democratic engagement
• The implications of rising populism, authoritarian tendencies, and declining trust in institutions

Ultimately, the conversation will ask whether the more urgent crisis is not only climate change, but a crisis of confidence in institutions, and whether closing democratic gaps is a necessary condition for rebuilding that confidence and enabling collective action.

• Bjorn Bedsted, International Director, Democracy X (joining virtually); former Deputy Director, Danish Board of Technology (DBT). Bedsted led the global coordination of the World Wide Views initiative, overseeing the 2009, 2012, and 2015 citizen consultations on global warming, biodiversity, and climate change, each linked to UN COP processes with the explicit aim of closing the democratic gap in international negotiations. Since 2020, he has been a principal at KNOCA, a knowledge network on climate assemblies. He will bring a European and DBT perspective on the evolution of deliberative climate governance.
• Mahmud Farooque, Associate Director, Consortium for Science, Policy and Outcomes (CSPO). Farooque will reflect on the U.S. trajectory, including CSPO’s role in coordinating the U.S. component of WWViews and building a 15-year portfolio of participatory initiatives across climate resilience, solar geoengineering, carbon dioxide removal, spent nuclear fuel siting, fusion energy, and clean energy demonstrations. His perspective situates democratization within broader questions of public value, institutional design, and science-policy integration.

• K.L. Akerlof, Associate Professor, Department of Environmental Science and Policy, George Mason University. Akerlof’s research focuses on the intersection of governance, science, and risk communication. Her work examines three core areas: the communication of science to policymakers; public participation in decision-making; and the use of social science in government programs. Dr. Akerlof currently serves as an associate editor of Evidence & Policy, co-chair of the International Network for Governmental Science Advice’s Legislative Science Advice Community of Practice, and a member of the editorial advisory board of Science Communication.

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ASU Barrett & O'Connor Washington Center, 1800 I St NW, Washington, United States

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