This book analyses the experiences and lessons from an event in 2009, when in thirty-eight countries around the world, 4,000 ordinary citizens gathered to discuss the future of climate policy. This project, ‘WWViews’, was the first-ever global democratic deliberation – an attempt to enable ordinary people to reach informed decisions on and impact the global policy process.
This book marks the beginning of a new kind of democratic politics, providing practical lessons on how to increase the impact of global deliberation projects within the media and on official policy processes. The authors explore important themes for participatory approaches from the local to the global:
- the role of deliberation within global governance
- methodology and practice
- participant selection; policy impacts
- engaging the media
- how policy culture affects deliberation uptake
- capacity building and knowledge transfer
- process evaluation
- content and argumentation analysis
- gender, race and class aspects
The global aims of the ‘WWViews project’, along with the opportunity to evaluate the same process in different national and cultural contexts, makes this a hugely valuable and informative study for all those interested in democratic deliberation and environmental governance from the small to the international scale.
