France’s grandiose exercise of deliberative democracy serves as a cautionary tale of the state making a promise it cannot keep.

The French Citizens’ Convention for Climate (CCC) was a groundbreaking political experiment that placed citizens’ voices at the centre of national conversations on climate policy. Meeting over seven sessions from October 2019 to June 2020, 150 randomly selected citizens were tasked by no less than President Emmanuel Macron to craft recommendations for France to reduce its carbon emissions by 40% before 2030. The CCC is certainly not the first citizens’ assembly on climate, but it is the largest and longest process of citizen deliberation to date.

As an observer of the CCC, I witnessed the power, but also the limits, of citizen deliberation. From start to finish, I observed how participants committed in deliberating on technical, legal and ethical issues on climate change. They spent Fridays and weekends discussing a range of issues. Among the most contentious issues were the reduction of working time from 35 to 28 hours per week, and the mandatory renovation of buildings toward energy efficiency.

To support participants, experts were on standby to provide evidence. There were noticeably few scientists as most of the experts were members of agencies sponsored by the State or of think tanks. Lawyers were present to help translate participants’ proposals into judicial language.

In the end, participants proposed 149 measures. A large majority recommended to make ecocide a crime, to ban domestic flights if a train alternative taking 4 hours was available, to include the protection of biodiversity in the Constitution, and to tax heavy cars (above 1.400 kg), among others.

The CCC is a cautionary tale of how the achievements of an ambitious democratic innovation can be devalued when decision-makers don’t hold up their end of the bargain.

The CCC challenged perceptions that citizens are too busy or ignorant to engage in a time-intensive process of citizen deliberation. It demonstrated that ordinary citizens like truck drivers, farmers and nurses are willing and able to deliberate on complex issues when they are given the opportunity to learn, scrutinise evidence and deliberate with their peers.

This story, however, is far from being a fairy tale with a happy ending. In many ways, the CCC is a cautionary tale of how the achievements of an ambitious democratic innovation can be devalued when decision-makers don’t hold up their end of the bargain.

How the government will treat the assembly’s recommendations was unclear for a long time. President Macron promised in the spring of 2019 that all propositions from the CCC would be ‘transmitted without filter’ to Parliament, subject to a nationwide referendum or sent for direct executive implementation. However, President Macron backtracked months later, first by granting himself the right to reject several of the CCC’s propositions, including a tax on dividends in order to finance ecological transition, the reduction of speed on the highway, and the modification of the preamble of the Constitution to place the protection of the environment above other liberties.

Later, in the negotiations between the ministers, stakeholders, lobbyists and citizens, many recommendations were eliminated or watered down. In the end, considering the bill on ‘climate and resilience’ proposed to the Parliament as well as direct executive directives, 10% of the CCC’s recommendations were accepted by the government without modification, 37% were modified or watered down, and 53% were rejected. The boldest propositions, such as the ban on advertisements for polluting products or the tax on heavy vehicles, were excluded from this bill. At best, the most consequential impact of the CCC rests on three proposals that are subject to a referendum, but only one seemed to be accepted for the ballot by the government: the proposal to modify Article 1 of the Constitution to state that ‘the Republic guarantee the preservation of biodiversity.’ In the end, it was just revealed that even this sole referendum will not happen, as Macron decided not to go through with it.

In the final session of the CCC held on February 2021, participants expressed their disappointment and gave the government a grade of 3 out of 10. Some citizens regret having trusted the government and their own vote, refusing to put most of their propositions to a referendum. Indeed, studies show that almost all the recommendations of the CCC would have been approved by the French people.

Policymakers can learn three key lessons from the French case: in terms of input, throughput, and output.

On the input side, the process of setting up the citizens’ assembly must be transparent and publicly justified. Decisions related to the CCC’s launch and design choices were neither done with transparency nor public justification. The assembly may be representative in demographic terms, but there was no consideration of whether participants have diverse viewpoints. This poses the issue of whether the CCC was formed by an ideologically skewed sample. The British climate assembly avoided the same problem by including the criteria ‘attitudes toward climate change’ in the panel selection.

Most citizens voted on measures they had not examined in their own deliberations.

On the throughput side, the deliberative process must be collective and fair. First, contrary to citizens’ assemblies in the UK, Canada and Ireland, deliberations in the CCC took place in silos. The CCC had five fixed thematic groups of 30 citizens, so participants did not hear the same experts or deliberated on the same issues. Instead of a collective intelligence of 150, measures were crafted by separate tables of around 5 citizens and then quickly presented to the 25 others in thematic groups. Plenary sessions with the 150 participants became central in the last two sessions but the deliberation time was drastically reduced. This division of labour means that most citizens voted on measures they had not examined in their own deliberations.

Second, there was an absence of facilitators who could support participants at the tables, leading to asymmetries in discussion and the difficulty to stay on topic. For example, some discussions became a dialogue between its most vocal citizens, with those feeling left out ending up using their smartphones out of boredom.

Third, inequality among invited experts and stakeholders can be observed. Some speakers like a representative of the Ministry of Ecology had 50 minutes to make their case in front of the whole assembly, while others like a representative from a think tank calling for de-growth was only given 5 minutes to address the assembly. Representatives of NGOs or businesses only had the opportunity to address a small sub-group. This hindered the citizens’ access to the panel, skewing the process to the benefit of some speakers by giving them more influence.

Fourth, a fair share of invited speakers did not engage in debate: they either agreed on the policies or failed to state their disagreements explicitly. This is problematic since it gave participants the impression that there was no political choice to be made, instead of highlighting the different and sometimes conflicting options and their trade-offs.

On the output side, the panel’s policy propositions must be consequential. The cherry-picking and watering down of the CCC’s recommendations show the need for a tighter coupling between deliberative panels, the political institutions, and the broader citizenry. A commitment from the start to a referendum on the whole citizen report, similar to the case of Canadian citizens’ assemblies, could have been a way to avoid those issues. Furthermore, the Irish case shows the importance of a referendum for the minipublic’s propositions to be democratically approved and implemented.

Despite its impressive size and quantity of recommendations, there are opportunities to do better than the CCC. Therefore, it is crucial to consider establishing fair deliberation, as well as to committing and respecting the fact that the process ought to have a significant impact on public policies. The connection between a citizens’ assembly and a referendum could ensure an inclusive deliberation, thus reaching society as a whole. Without these commitments, this grandiose exercise in democratic participation might tarnish the practice and reputation of deliberative politics.

About the Author

Dimitri Courant is a PhD candidate in political science at the University of Lausanne and University Paris 8. His research focuses on sortition and democracy through qualitative fieldworks comparing deliberative minipublics in Ireland, France and Switzerland. Learn more about Dimitri’s work here.