Facing systemic change together: Citizen deliberation in informed and just climate transitions

FACTOR explores ways in which citizens can engage in public deliberation on climate transitions, and how citizen deliberation can facilitate just and informed transition processes. Climate transitions are likely to raise legitimacy problems in representative democracies, which may delay the implementation of ambitious goals set by governments. These problems are aggravated by the fact that individual judgments regarding climate justice and climate facts are prone to biases and misperceptions, amplified by polarization and segmentation of public debate on climate change.

FACTOR’s key point of departure is that successful climate mitigation and adaptation policies must have a participatory and deliberative component in order to ensure fairness, legitimacy and resilience. For this purpose, FACTOR will organize so-called deliberative mini-publics, i.e. specific forums designed for informed and balanced citizen deliberation. Mini-publics will be used to help the general public and policymakers make informed judgments on the measures needed for effective and just climate transitions.

FACTOR's overarching hypothesis is that mini-publics are highly successful in dealing with information as well as moral and practical complexities of climate transitions. However, there may be challenges when it comes to the prospects of mini-publics to enhance climate responsibility and resilience among the public at large, as well as their capacity to influence policymakers’ willingness to take action for societal transitions.

FACTOR is a multidisciplinary consortium consisting of philosophers, political scientists and environmental scientists from Universities of Helsinki and Turku, Finnish Environment Institute, Natural Resources Institute Finland, and Finnish Meteorological Institute. FACTOR engages in transdisciplinary research to articulate context-sensitive normative criteria for just transitions. It organizes novel forms of Citizens' Juries in three different types of regions in order to enable citizen deliberation on regional road maps for climate transitions, and an online Deliberative Citizen Panel at the national level to develop the Climateguide.fi portal to better serve the various climate information needs of the society. FACTOR analyzes these processes of citizen deliberation and their outcomes. It conducts surveys, interviews and field experiments to gauge the effects of mini-publics among policymakers and the public at large.