Analysing the Global Assembly’s influence: The challenges of linking to the deliberative system of global climate governance

While there has been a proliferation of climate assemblies in recent years at national and sub-national levels, 2021 saw the world’s first global-scale citizens’ assembly bringing together 100 citizens from across the globe to deliberate about the climate and ecological crisis and present their conclusions at COP26 in Glasgow. The Global Assembly (GA) thus offers a unique chance to examine the opportunities and challenges for a global mini-public seeking to achieve influence in global climate governance. While the GA’s internal qualities have been analysed elsewhere, this paper evaluates the extent to which it achieved its ‘external’ goal of giving ordinary people a voice in global climate governance. Initial verdicts were that it had limited impact, partly due to the logistics of operationalising such an ambitious event and the complexities of global climate governance. Yet these challenges remain, and we argue that any future GA would benefit from a clearer sense of what ‘influence’ means in this global context and the nature of institutional links it requires. This paper compares the organizers’ and assembly members’ perceptions of influence with analysis of the GA’s actual influence, by examining the GA’s efforts to ‘couple’ with institutions of global climate governance, and its contribution to deliberation-making, legitimacy-seeking, and deliberative capacity-building. We conclude that any future global climate assembly needs to recognise global climate governance as a deliberative system, conceptualise dynamics of influence in systemic terms, and seek to build multi-directional links across this system. • The first Global Assembly is an important case for deliberative systems theory. • We adapt existing theories of a mini-public’s ‘external quality’ to the global scale. • The Global Assembly relied too heavily on ‘unidirectional coupling’ with the UNFCCC. • While the Global Assembly lacked direct policy impact, it generated valuable lessons. • Future global assemblies should conceptualise influence in systemic terms.