Southampton Climate Citizens’ Assembly
The City of Southampton is taking a long-term and slow-burn approach to a Citizens’ Assembly. Rather than focusing solely on a short-term assembly involving a handful of citizens, the project seeks to expand the influence and footprint of an assembly well beyond the end a handful of formal learning and decision meetings. This new model encourages many kinds of conversation from people from all walks of life embedding the assembly and its message within the fabric of the city itself. Assembly members will be supported to produce outputs to be shared across the city. All this will be done in preparation for citizens to contribute to the City Council’s Climate and Green policies.
The extended timeframe, and slower pace, seek to sustain Southampton’s Climate Assembly as a contribution to local discussions outside the regular political timeline. The project itself is not led by any political parties. Instead, it emerges from a partnership within the City between the University of Southampton led by the Rebooting Democracy Research Group, and the City’ Council’s Leadership and civil servants. Keeping the Assembly on a non-partisan footing is an essential balancing act. Assembly members will be drawn from across Southampton. The city’s wards will be used as focal points for discussions and meetings to present the Climate Assembly and secure support from across civil society. There is precedent for this kind of engagement. Southampton is a city that only recently saw a groundswell of support and cross-party engagement for its bid to be the UK’s City of Culture, there is clear appetite here for the role of the population in charting the city’s course.
Timeline
Over the spring and summer months several initiatives will take place across neighbourhoods within the city and online, allowing citizens to learn, deliberate and decide in ways that make sense to them. A diverse group of citizens will then convene in an assembly in the autumn to work with experts to recommend clever solutions to difficult problems which will be implemented and monitored over the coming months and years.
Our aim is to engage up to 5000 people in the process over the course of the next year.
The Citizen’s Climate Assembly will get underway through a series of Open and Closed meetings targeting different groups across the city. Ideas will be shared, experts consulted, with focus on the task of deciding Southampton’s future approaches to climate. In parallel across all the wards people will be brought together to discuss the outcomes, vote for priorities, and share its findings.
Contact :rebootingdemocracy@soton.ac.uk