Ireland's Deliberative Journey

Abstract Climate action stands as a paramount challenge in contemporary society, but solutions are often impeded by vested interests tied to electoral democracies. As a result, the past decade has witnessed a renewed interest in the practice of sortition—a variety of democracy that is not electoral but lottocratic—in Ireland, the United States, and in other venues from Belgium to Canada to India and South Korea. Recent scholarly literature, including the five-installment Common Knowledge symposium “Antipolitics,” to which this article is a contribution, argues that citizens’ juries and other such deliberative forums can clear a path for climate action. This essay examines one of the first assemblies chosen by lottery to attend purely to climate change and describes in detail how the assembly came about, how it operated, how it successfully influenced Irish government policy, and the possible applications beyond Ireland of lessons that have been learned from the experience.