Global citizens’ assemblies can democratise global governance. But how these assemblies are convened need to be democratised too.

In recent years, national and local citizens’ assemblies have been celebrated as powerful solutions to the erosion of legitimacy in electoral democracies. It is high time that global governance received the same attention. While a global pandemic surges, issues such as climate change and global hunger remain unresolved. Global superpowers strong-arm cooperation efforts to their favour as they disproportionately influence intergovernmental organisations. None of these logics are democratic. There is a clear need to rethink the way we do global governance—the creation of global citizens’ assemblies has emerged as a potent way to democratise global governance.

It is exciting to see that the interest to convene GCAs is growing across the globe. At the moment, there are assemblies being developed to address specific issues at the global level. The Centre for Deliberative Democracy and Global Governance is organising The Global Citizens’ Assembly on Genome Editing. Also in planning, the Global Assembly on the Climate and Ecological Emergency for COP26 aims to establish citizen deliberation as a permanent infrastructure of COPS. These two assemblies will address topics of extreme importance through a model never seen before: multilingual deliberation among everyday citizens drawn by lot from different parts of the world.

GCAs are different from existing attempts at global dialogue and consultation. The first iterations of global deliberative dialogue aggregated results of national debates into a ‘global consultation.’ The Danish Technology Board used this approach in the World Wide Views project. More recently, Missions Publiques’ We, the Internet also aims to synthesise national sessions into a form of ‘global participatory consultation.’

In comparison to these precedents, GCAs engage in considerably longer deliberations. Deliberations in global consultations generally last one or two days. The citizens’ assembly format utilises between 40 to 120 hours over a minimum of four days. Among other considerations, longer deliberation in GCAs allows participants to familiarise themselves with deliberative practices and to grapple with cross-cutting tradeoffs on issues.

Second, existing consultations and dialogues do not mix participants across countries or languages. For GCAs, mixed deliberation is at the core of project design. People from different cultural and linguistic backgrounds come together to weigh evidence, exchange views, listen to each other and generate recommendations via live translation. Global assemblies represent an unprecedented attempt to put a truly global group of participants in direct conversation with one another.

The recent European Transnational Digital Citizens Dialogue, coordinated by Bertelsmann Stiftung, is a promising case to demonstrate that multilingual online discussions in parallel small groups is feasible given the right allocation of resources. If done right, multilingual deliberation can inspire a genuinely transnational feeling that can be the basis of finding common-ground agreements. As Dominik Hierlemann, a senior expert at Bertelsmann Stiftung, reflects: the ‘European feeling is amazing.’

However, open questions on how to conduct and fine-tune GCAs remain. Global representativeness and inclusion are at the heart of GCAs. One of the most pressing questions that future GCAs will have to answer is on the concrete and rigorous ways they can ensure inclusivity in their project designs.

Firstly, how can the linguistic inclusivity of transnational dialogues be enforced? Will GCAs ensure that all linguistic groups are included or will they only select major languages? The former causes complications in sampling and greater demands on budget for translation, while the latter leaves behind a significant segment of the world population.

Global assemblies represent an unprecedented attempt to put a truly global group of participants in direct conversation with one another.

Secondly, how will the next generation of global assemblies ensure socioeconomic diversity? So far, the deliberative community has been dealing largely with middle- to high-income participants, which is representative of less than 30% of the world population. Previous efforts at global deliberation either lack rigorous sortition to ensure socioeconomic diversity or report significant overrepresentations of participants with postsecondary education or employment in higher-paying industries. Some studies have estimated that the population living on less than $2 a day constitute 15% of the global population, and low-income people living on $2 to $10 a day constitute 56%. Inclusively factoring in those participants will be a defiant challenge for the deliberative community.

Finally, how GCAs can be further democratised at the initiative stage needs to be examined. Democratising global governance means finding new approaches to allow communities from the global south, ethnic minorities and other marginalised communities to set the agenda, instead of serving as secondary collaborators or partners of global processes initiated by relatively more privileged actors, who often come from wealthier countries.

How can this be done? One possibility is to organise a process that complements the emerging system of single-topic global assemblies. The World Citizens’ Assembly project was recently put together to organise an agenda-setting body, much like the Ostbelgien model already implemented in the German-speaking part of Belgium. As James Fishkin noted, there is nothing new about deliberative agenda setting: In ancient Athens, the Council of 500 met annually to determine the agenda for proposals to be deliberated in other citizen minipublics. Initiative designs like the WCA and the Ostbelgien model can generate unforeseen and diverse issues for deliberation. How agenda-setting processes, or other innovations that democratise the initiative process, will fit into the future of GCAs remain an important question to be grappled with.

The formation of GCAs represent a powerful stimulant for world governance.

As 2020 winds to a close, it is clear: the momentum to democratise global governance through GCAs is upon us. Ongoing designs of global assembly projects are already attempting to implement some of the important insights we mentioned in this article. Hopefully we will see the actualisation of these projects, as well as see new ones emerge in the coming years.

At a time when the pace and complexity of global issues continue to build, it is increasingly untenable to recycle outdated solutions. The formation of GCAs represent a powerful stimulant for world governance, which, to date, has excluded a range of voices. With enough resources and development, GCAs will mean creating an opportunity for any person in the world to become an agent of collective change.

About the Author

Yago Bermejo Abati is cofounder of deliberativa.org and member of Democracy R&D and OECD Innovative Citizen Participation Networks. From 2016 to 2019, he was the head of the Collective Intelligence for Democracy Lab in the Madrid City Council. He is the cofounder of the World Citizens’ Assembly project.

Susan Nakyung Lee is a collaborator at the World Citizens’ Assembly project. In 2016 and 2017, she worked at the We All Govern Lab, a democracy start-up based in Seoul where she translated and conducted research on citizens’ participation and democratic innovation. She is currently finishing her studies in political science and sociology at Amherst College.