Can climate assemblies lead to more ambitious climate policy?

As societies and governments around the world struggle to adequately address the climate crisis and its multiple challenges, there are growing calls for climate governance reforms. One idea is to involve citizens more in policymaking, and climate assemblies (CAs) seem a promising format for doing so. Here, a group of randomly selected lay participants deliberate on aspects of the climate crisis, resulting in recommendations for policymakers. However, it has become evident that the extent to which CAs lead to more ambitious climate policy is not certain. This study contributes to closing this research gap by analysing Scotland's Climate Assembly (SCA). Through a systematic analysis of the level of ambition and policy impact of each recommendation, this study finds that while most of the SCA's recommendations were more ambitious than existing policy, these recommendations had no impact on Scottish climate policy decisions. Some of the possible reasons for this rather sobering result seem to be the sometimes poor quality of the recommendations and, most importantly, insufficient support from the commissioning body. This finding is consistent with existing concerns about the lack of policy impact of CAs and related formats. However, this study argues that it would be wrong to conclude that CAs cannot lead to more ambitious climate policy. Rather, the results show that a more nuanced knowledge of the factors that hinder and promote the policy impact of CAs is needed to strategically influence them and thus realise the potential of CAs as a democratically valuable format in the fight against the climate crisis. This requires further, more differentiated analysis, as well as further experimentation and iterative practice.