In this three-part series that reflects conversations had at the launch of Public Deliberation on Climate Change and explored in the book, we will feature the successes, lessons, and a few answers to relevant FAQs. For this post, panellists from the Citizens’ Panel on Edmonton’s Energy and Climate Challenges—an initiative that was part of a five-year public deliberation project called Alberta Climate Dialogue (ABCD)—answered questions about the Citizens’ Panel or public deliberation processes in general.
Some FAQs
How was the panel selected?
A public polling firm with an extensive bank of demographic data on Edmontonians was used. Citizens were cold called at random and asked if they would be involved. There were some additional screens. ABCD wanted people from every ward, a certain number of people whose livelihoods were dependent on the energy industry, some climate skeptics, etc. For more information about how people were selected, please see Chapter 4 in Public Deliberation on Climate Change.
How do you bring everyone up to speed on such a complex topic so that everyone has the same information and it isn’t perceived as bias?
Lorelei Hanson answered this question from the audience:
You don’t! Information was given in all sorts of formats, however, there were still participants who didn’t fully understand the issues. Climate change is a complex problem and there’s no way we can all be scientific experts about it. However, we make choices every day about all kinds of important things that we don’t a completely understand. That’s why values were the starting point in the discussions.
Because people make choices based upon their values every day, it was a focus on the values underpinning the discussion that allowed participants to reach consensus. The goal was not to make every participant energy literate. Educating people about climate change won’t make them change their minds or understand the situation fully. We have to make fundamental changes very quickly and accessing citizens’ value systems can help people understand.
How did the City of Edmonton build new initiatives around the recommendations put forward by the Citizens’ Panel?
There are few initiatives that the City of Edmonton has been working on that show how it is responding to the recommendations received. For example, the Home EnerGuide initiative helps citizens make their homes more sustainable and energy efficient and the Change for Climate campaign provides many resources for citizens to take action on climate change, acknowledging that different values motivate citizens to respond and resources provided by governments should reflect that difference.
Can public deliberation be used for less charged issues?
People can get heated about pretty much anything and public deliberation can be a scalable tool for a number of situations. There are a lot of different ways to do public involvement so leaders need to be clear about their goals and match the process to them. Public deliberation isn’t appropriate for every issue but it works well when the issue is complex, there’s no easy answer, the stakes are high, it’s value-based, and there’s an opening for the public to influence an outcome whether that’s in terms of policy or some other opportunity.
I don’t think it’s hard to engage citizens in the big project of how we want to live together. However, we must treat people as adults and with respect. We must have empathy and we must engage all of the community. And we need to ask our citizens to do more—they want to do more. It’s their society and they care about it. –Mary Pat MacKinnon
