Advocating for transformative citizens’ assemblies in German politics

We are advocating for transformative citizens’ assemblies on sustainability issues. We, that is an independent organisation with no party affiliation made up of mostly young people dedicating approximately 50+ hours of mostly voluntary work per week in advancing our cause. 

Klimamitbestimmung was founded in 2019 and since then it is communicating the potentials and benefits of selecting citizens by lot and letting them deliberate about political solutions for complicated problems and value questions that are backed by majorities. We address the public, politicians and academic sphere with campaigns, studies, articles for academic journals, blogs, podcasts, educational or art projects as well as via our social media. Additionally, we talk to all democratic parties in the German parliament. 

Among our biggest successes are a 2021 petition with close to 70.000 signatories, a crowdfunding campaign in 2021 bringing us our first financial possibilities, and being tasked to carry out the public relations campaign for the local climate assembly in Berlin. Finally, we contributed to the efforts bringing citizens’ assemblies into the coalition contract and on the agenda of the current government of social democrats (SPD), greens (Bündnis 90/Die Grünen) and liberals (FDP). 

Our current work focuses on making the citizens’ assemblies, that will be instituted by the parliament between 2022 and 2024, a success. This includes educating politicians, multiplicators and the public on best practices and guidelines for topic selection as well as the importance of publicity campaigns and the inclusion of business and civil society organisations.