A quest for social and environmental justice? The experience of citizens’ assemblies and participatory monitoring
Anna Berti Suman – Research Fellow, Luiss University & LabGov
Source: Unsplash, free image
Life in cities is often impacted by matters of concern – for example related to new infrastructural projects or emerging environmental issues – that mobilise city’s inhabitants. Ordinary people – that is, people who do not have professional qualifications – may turn to civic monitoring or to other, more structured ways to engage with the city’s socio-environmental issues (such as citizen assemblies) as they want to promote transformations.
These efforts are frequently coordinated by civic actors or non-profit organisations and rely on digital platforms as spaces for encounter and coordination. On this arena, platform communities are formed. Despite being digital, these platforms are very spatially and socially grounded, and are just coordination spaces for real-world gatherings. Platforms thus become a space for stimulating civic participation in environmental matters and for engaging them in socio-environmental transformations. This can also occur through practices of ‘commoning’ and co-governance.
A recent study published in the ‘Handbook of Platform Urbanism’, questions how civic environmental monitoring and citizens’ assemblies, can effectively steer and foster socio-environmental transformations in particular based on the experiences deployed in the city of Milan, Italy. These experiences are an occasion to question processes of inclusion and exclusion, the level of civic agency, and the actual impact on democratic decision-making.
The two practices discussed can be seen as an affirmation of environmental procedural rights, enshrined in the Aarhus Convention by UNECE (the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe), in particular the right to access to environmental information and to meaningfully participate in environmental decisions.
Citizens’ assemblies are a form of deliberative democracy in which a group of representative citizens are brought together to deliberate upon and make recommendations on a particular issue, including on climate law and policy for example. Civic environmental monitoring is a practice in which ordinary people collect environmental data, often to demand public interventions, such as environmental law enforcement.
The two forms of participation share common features and can have a complementary value. Both instruments can be useful in fostering an informed public opinion and facilitating collective decision-making processes. However, as the cited study argues, they have different influences on the implementation of the decisions taken. In the preliminary phase of the citizens’ assembly, civic monitoring could information for the collective deliberation and decision. Moreover, civic monitoring could be used to watch over the implementation of the decisions taken. Indeed, citizens’ assemblies have deliberative and, in some cases, binding powers, and have the mandate to translate civic inputs into concrete actions.
These less structured (civic monitoring) and more structured (citizens’ assemblies) instruments can be strategic to face collectively complex and divisive social and environmental justice matters. The synergy between these instruments can augment the social capital of a citizens’ assembly, developing the skills and competencies of the participants, and strengthening local knowledge, complementing technical and/or scientific knowledge on a certain topic with the socio-cultural context. In conclusion, city planners and decision-makers should look at these practices and their synergy as an opportunity to build better evidence on a certain matter and take decisions of better quality.