Ordinary citizens out-ambition governments on climate, but politicians rarely listen

When randomly selected citizens are brought together to deliberate on climate policy, something remarkable tends to happen: they consistently demand more ambitious action than the governments that commissioned them. That is the central finding of a sweeping new study published in Nature Climate Change, which for the first time systematically and counterfactually assessed the policy influence of climate citizens’ assemblies across Western Europe. The research, led by Janosch Pfeffer and Jens Newig of Leuphana University Lüneburg together with colleagues, analysed 488 individual policy recommendations from six assemblies—five national ones in Austria, France, Germany and the United Kingdom, plus Scotland, and one subnational assembly in Berlin. The verdict is double-edged. Ordinary citizens, freed from electoral pressures and equipped with expert testimony, reliably propose bolder climate measures than their elected representatives. Yet translating those proposals into binding political decisions remains the exception rather than the rule, and it happened convincingly in only one case: France.

The methodological rigour of the study sets it apart from earlier, largely anecdotal assessments. The research team drew on more than 410 documents, including laws, decrees, government response documents and press releases, and combined this documentary evidence with interviews and surveys involving 74 experts, among them ministry officials directly responsible for formulating policy responses to the assemblies. Crucially, the team adopted a counterfactual approach to causality, asking in each case whether the corresponding policy decision would have been identical had the assembly never taken place. A recommendation was counted as impactful only if it could be regarded as a necessary condition for a specific decision. The analysis followed the logic of Bayesian qualitative causal inference, in which coders weighed the probability of the evidence under competing hypotheses of impact and no impact, updating plausibility as documents and expert testimony accumulated. Each recommendation’s ambition and impact were coded independently by two coders, with disputed cases deliberated in team meetings.

On the question of ambition, the results were strikingly uniform. Of the 488 recommendations examined, 327—67 per cent—demanded action clearly beyond existing government policy, while a further 133, or 27 per cent, were neither more nor less ambitious than what governments had already enacted or planned. Not a single recommendation was clearly weaker than prevailing policy. The pattern held across all six cases, from the French Convention Citoyenne pour le Climat’s call to ban domestic flights where rail alternatives exist, to Austria’s demand to retrofit every home by 2030, to Scotland’s proposals for raising awareness of localized living. This consistency suggests that the phenomenon is not a quirk of any single national political culture but a systematic feature of deliberation itself, arising whenever citizens are asked to formulate climate solutions after structured learning.

Why do assemblies out-ambition their governments? The authors point to several mechanisms, some normatively comforting and others more troubling. Deliberation exposes participants to factual learning and to the arguments of fellow citizens, which can align values, facts and policy preferences and heighten the salience of pro-environmental commitments. Unlike politicians, assembly members face no electoral cycles, no partisan discipline and no media pressure, allowing them to endorse measures that elected officials shun. But the researchers also flag a subtler possibility: agenda framing. When citizens are tasked with proposing climate ‘solutions’, recommending weaker action is counter-intuitive, so participants may simply omit measures they dislike—as the French assembly notably did with carbon taxation. Ambition may also partly reflect biases in the selection of experts or the framing of evidence, an issue the authors describe as still under-examined empirically.

Ambition, however, proved far easier to generate than influence. In Germany, Scotland and the United Kingdom, not one of the assembly’s recommendations could be shown to have causally altered a political decision. In Austria, a single recommendation—1 per cent—produced decisional change, and in Berlin only two, or 4 per cent. France stood alone: 48 recommendations, one-third of its total, demonstrably shaped decisions that would not otherwise have occurred. A further 62 recommendations across the cases, 13 per cent, were classified as high uncertainty because the evidence was contradictory or insufficient. The study also dissected why recommendations failed. Some 284, or 57 per cent, fell into the ‘no uptake’ category—ignored or rejected by governments—while 211, or 43 per cent, added nothing beyond existing or planned policy. In Berlin, the government claimed that 43 of 47 recommendations had been fully or partially taken up, yet the counterfactual analysis found genuine causal impact for only two, a textbook case of what critics call window-dressing.

Where impact did occur, it took characteristic forms. Recommendations most often enriched existing initiatives by adding substantial new elements, or fortified them by reinforcing momentum and accelerating administrative action—each mechanism observed 29 times. Eight recommendations introduced genuinely novel ideas that policymakers had never debated, and seven helped break political deadlocks. The researchers found no evidence that assemblies stopped planned policies or fundamentally shifted government positions. The French case offers vivid illustrations. The assembly’s recommendation on land take, or artificialization, was transformed into law requiring France to achieve net zero land take by 2050 and to halve its rate of soil sealing compared with the previous decade. Experts told the researchers that the recommendation turned a long-lost battle into a won interministerial decision, strengthening the government against opposition from mayors and businesses and moving the debate forward, in one expert’s estimation, by ten years. Another interviewee, a ministry official, described how the Convention’s endorsement of pre-existing ideas created a powerful acceleration effect, allowing the Ministry of Ecological Transition to win interministerial arbitrages against the Ministry of Economy that it would probably otherwise have lost.

Even in France, however, success came with dilution. The assembly called for banning domestic flights where a rail alternative of under four hours exists; the final legislation restricted the ban to routes with alternatives under two and a half hours, covering only a handful of connections. Ministerial experts acknowledged that most recommendations had been watered down, yet defended their significance, arguing that the assembly was the first in many areas to shift the boundaries of what is considered politically normal. At the recommendation level, the experts cited opposition from interest groups, ministries and parliamentarians as the most frequent killer of proposals, with one official noting bluntly that the fate of recommendations depended largely on whether the opposition was strong enough for the government to drop them. Practical barriers also mattered: some recommendations lacked novelty, conflicted with constitutional or European Union frameworks, or were too vague to implement, while others foundered on political opposition grounded in perceived unfeasibility or unconsidered trade-offs.

The starkest lesson of the study concerns political context rather than deliberative design. France’s exceptional impact flowed from an interplay of unusually high political leadership, genuine delegation of power, and the public pressure these generated. President Emmanuel Macron granted the assembly a ‘co-governance’ role, promising to transmit its legislative proposals to Parliament or a referendum ‘without filter’, and instructed the government to draft a new law—the Loi Climat et Résilience—based directly on its recommendations. This quasi-legislative mandate attracted exceptional media attention and scrutiny from NGOs, journalists and opposition parties, scrutiny that intensified as the government diluted parts of the package, and it helped tip backstage negotiations within the state. Elsewhere, the political scaffolding was absent or fragmented. The German assembly was a civil-society initiative without institutional anchoring, launched shortly before a national election. The UK assembly was a parliamentary process with limited government engagement. Austria’s assembly became seen as a Green Party project openly criticized by its Conservative coalition partners. Scotland’s was commissioned by the government but initiated by Parliament, breeding suspicion. Berlin’s minister used it chiefly as a lever against coalition partners, and the assembly struggled to add value amid parallel expert processes.

The authors conclude that under the current ad hoc advisory model, citizens’ assemblies can raise the ambition of climate policy but depend on unusually favourable political conditions to convert proposals into decisions—conditions that sophisticated procedural design alone cannot supply. They suggest that realizing the full potential of these institutions may require granting them greater institutionalized authority alongside electoral institutions, ensuring their visibility, and reducing their dependence on politicians constrained by party politics and electoral incentives. Such a step, they caution, would demand a broader societal debate about what constitutes legitimate representative democracy. The study’s limitations are acknowledged: it did not assess the substantive content of recommendations or their expected emission reductions, focused on decision-making rather than long-term policy effects, and is confined to Western Europe. Yet its core message is likely to resonate far beyond the six cases examined. Deliberative democracy has proven it can imagine a bolder climate future than elected governments dare to propose; the unfinished experiment is whether political systems will let that imagination govern.

Subject of Research: Policy impact and ambition of climate citizens' assemblies in Western Europe

Article Title: Citizens’ assemblies propose ambitious climate policy but impacts remain limited

Article References: Citizens’ assemblies propose ambitious climate policy but impacts remain limited. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-026-02755-1

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1038/s41558-026-02755-1

Keywords: citizens' assemblies, climate policy, deliberative democracy, policy impact, France, Nature Climate Change, counterfactual analysis, minipublics, climate governance, political leadership, public participation, Europe