| dc.description.abstract | This thesis explores the transformative potential of citizens’ assemblies on climate change (climate assemblies). Citizens’ assemblies are a type of ‘deliberative mini-public’: a body of randomly selected citizens that learns and deliberates about public issues to then inform political decisions. Since participating citizens are not constrained by party politics nor influenced by the powerful lobby of vested interests, proponents of climate assemblies hope that they can help overcome the current political impasse in the climate debate. I am interested in the potential of climate assemblies to support and navigate transformations towards sustainability (i.e. far-reaching and systemic change), which involves the capacity to consciously rethink and remake unsustainable systems, structures, and practices, and to imagine alternatives. Therefore, there is a need for inclusive democratic spaces where different transformation pathways can be debated. I critically examine to what extent the design of the Irish Citizens’ Assembly’s sessions on climate change (2017) and the French Convention Citoyenne pour le Climat (2019) facilitated the rethinking of unsustainability by participants. Shortcomings found include inadequate support for deliberation on underlying values, limited space for dissenting views, lack of commitment from governments, and over-reliance on expertise at the expense of democratic debate and citizen empowerment. Based on these findings, I develop a proposal that envisions climate assemblies as imaginative spaces, that is, forums that are characterised by conscious reflection, creativity, and contestation of otherwise unquestioned narratives. Ultimately, I argue that the transformative potential of climate assemblies lies in their ability to provide a forum for reflection and debate, where citizens can deliberate about the future of their society. Yet, to harness this potential, climate assemblies would have to move away from the logic of solutionism and become more open-ended, disruptive, and imaginative. | eng |