UC EVENTS

This event is hybrid. Join us on Zoom or at Building 24, University of Canberra.

The Goals of Climate Change Deliberation: Empathizing with “The Other Side” and/or getting the “Facts Right”?

Climate change policies are frequently subject to misperception-generating strategies pursued by actors with vested interests, so correcting misperceptions is a crucial goal of interpersonal deliberation. Although the epistemic benefits of deliberation may be important, there is frequently not one “right” answer to questions about “what should be done” regarding concrete policies and their implementation. This particularly applies to decisions about highly complex and contentious political issues (see Dryzek 1990; Fleuss 2021). Climate change policies are a perfect example where developing constructive action-guiding strategies in interpersonal deliberation are not solely dependent on people’s capacities to “get the facts right”. Against this backdrop, another account of “the ends of deliberation” bears promise for understanding the constructive potential of climate change citizens assemblies: it features 1) the crucial role of increasing participants’ reflectiveness (Dryzek & Niemeyer, 2008), and 2) of developing a mutual understanding for the values, interests, preferences of “the other side” (also see Fleuss 2023; Habermas 1984; Muradova 2021). While previous research indicates that deliberation has the potential to achieve both goals, (i.e., to improve the accuracy of judgments and participants’ reflectiveness), it also suggests that there may be a trade-off between gaining more knowledge and improving reflectiveness (e.g., Muradova 2021; Suiter & Reidy 2020: Suiter et al. 2020).

So far there is, however, no systematic assessment exploring the relationship between peoples’ reflectiveness and the accuracy of their judgements that may result from interpersonal deliberation about climate change. Against this backdrop, we (a) develop a conceptual account and corresponding measurement for “reflectiveness”. Based on this, we (b) explore how deliberation about climate change affects the accuracy of people’s judgements and their reflectiveness in deliberation about environmentally responsible climate change policies – and the relationship between both “ends” or “effects” of deliberation to each other. Answering these questions also bears promising political-practical potentials: If there is, for example, a significant trade-off between “improved accuracy” and “improved reflectiveness”, this also provides an empirically grounded point of departure for rethinking the goals and the design of deliberative processes which aim at contributing to more consequential democratic action on climate change policies.

This paper is co-authored by Jane Suiter from Dublin City University.

This seminar will be chaired by Simon Niemeyer.