Catalonia to establish a Citizens’ Assembly for Climate

The new body will have between 100 and 150 from all walks of society and it will coin environmental proposals

The Government of Catalonia (Generalitat) has announced that it will establish a new body called Citizens’ Assembly for Climate with the express purpose of making the drafting of environmental policy more direct, participatory and democratic.

The Assembly, which is expected to be ready to meet in the first trimester of 2023, will have the role of generating ideas on how to tackle climate change. These ideas will be submitted to the executive branch, which will then pass them on to the regional parliament to debate whether to adopt them as laws.

Climate action and democracy coming together

The organization will be made up of between 100 and 150 people, who will be selected in such a way as to constitute a representative sample of the Catalan population, in accordance with socio-economic and territorial stratification criteria. The choice of the people who participate in the Assembly must be random, according to the representativeness criteria established statistically.

An expert group will assist the Assembly to ensure that the design, implementation and development of the work it carries out is done in accordance with internationally accepted criteria. The experts will make sure that the proposals will have an impartial and independent manner that avoids possible biases that could adulterate the final result.

The work of the Assembly will be of a public nature and will be carried out through sessions that will be organized in three steps. A phase of making contact and providing its members with the information and basic training for their deliberations; a debate and discussion phase; and a phase of conclusions and proposals. 

The proposals finally agreed upon will have to be detailed in a report of recommendations that will be presented to the Government, which will send them to the Parliament, so that it takes the proposals into account and votes on them. The Assembly's proposals will also be made available to the public through the Generalitat's participation portal.