Do SYStem-dynamics models in Climate Assemblies (SYSCA) enhance deliberation and support transformative change?

How can democratic societies support the transformative policies needed for sustainability?

Politicised debates rarely grasp complex societal and environmental interactions, especially with rising polarization and misinformation.Citizens’ climate assemblies aim to inject an informed, but democratically legitimate voice into climate politics. In such assemblies, randomly-selected citizens get evidence and facilitated deliberation.

This supports sophisticated, integrative, and less polarised thinking, which have led to ambitious policy proposals.

However, it is unclear whether assemblies grasp the systemic complexity, and crucially, if their learning and deliberation can diffuse out to broader publics.This project studies an innovation in climate assemblies: incorporating system-dynamics models that transparently represent complex society-wide interactions and tradeoffs.

Can participatory simulation with such models can support systems-thinking in assemblies?

Moreover, can this learning diffuse out to broader publics, and build support for transformative policies?The team gathers leading researchers from deliberative democracy, public opinion and earth system modelling.

Methods include observations and experiments, both during a national Swedish climate assembly, and through surveys of the Swedish population.

Results will inform future citizen assemblies and participatory modelling, and their contribution to democratically-grounded transformations towards sustainability.