Climate change assemblies as spaces for the potential mitigation of climate policy misperceptions: A survey experiment

Climate action stands as one of the paramount challenges in contemporary society. A significant impediment lies in the prevalence of misperceptions, notably the dissemination of narratives that either endorse climate policy delay or outright climate denial, often perpetuated by vested interests. The World Economic Forum, recognising the gravity of this issue, has underscored” misinformation and disinformation” as the preeminent global risk in the coming biennium, while the UN IPCC has stated that rampant disinformation is delaying climate action. Significantly, misinformation has been linked to climate misperceptions, for example, the belief in technological utopianism, for example, that climate change policies are ineffective and technological solutions will fix the problem in the future, which normalises acceptance of the status quo despite the urgent need for transformative actions. Recent scholarly literature posits that deliberative forums, commonly referred to as mini-publics, can contribute to mitigating such misperceptions while ensuring democratic legitimacy (Muradova et al. 2023) by informing the public. This paper contributes to the special issue on how Climate Change Assemblies (CAs) can contribute to reflexive environmental governance and help societies address the climate emergency, by exploring how CAs perform for the mitigation of climate policy misperceptions. In particular, we focus on whether communication about the procedural, aspects of citizen assemblies to the broader public emerges as a critical component. We understand these mechanisms to be contingent upon complex institutional dynamics, including mechanisms integral to their functioning such as the roles of representation, competence, and voice within assemblies. This empirical inquiry is situated within the framework of a survey experiment conducted across five European countries with varying climate policy salience and emissions levels. We find for most people reading about a climate citizens’ assembly makes little difference. We do find some minimal effects for the wider citizenry in general related to voice, although there are larger effects for some more sceptical cohorts, particularly for representation.