| dc.description.abstract | Despite commitments to the Paris Agreement, no country currently has plans to meet its targets. This urgent issue requires political action, yet current democratic systems are struggling. Consequently, scholars are advocating for more deliberative democracy to give citizens’ a voice at the table when making climate policy decisions. The most visible and promising development are climate assemblies. They consist of a large number of quasi-randomly selected lay citizens partaking in a lengthy deliberative process on expert-provided information to produce recommendations by and for citizens aimed at informing decision-making. National climate assemblies have developed more ambitious and comprehensive responses to the climate crisis than their respective governments, emphasizing their potential to substantially advance the national and transversal policies essential to spur climate action. However, there is no neutral way of communicating about climate change. All information will be framed, communicating perspectives and assumptions, thus shaping how participants understand and decide upon climate change. There is a research gap concerning how climate change in framed within national climate assemblies. This research aims to fill the gap by developing an analytical tool for researchers and practitioners to be aware of and to identify how framing occurs in climate assemblies and provide additional empirical data on the subject. The research first explored what framing means for deliberative democracy and posited that acknowledging framing is key to uphold deliberative democracy ideals—this can be achieved by acknowledging frames through deliberative framing. Then, the research employed an abductive approach to develop an analytical framework by exploring a case study. The case study provided in-depth information about the phenomenon, demonstrating how the framing of climate change occurs in practice, and enabled the creation of a robust analytical framework grounded in empirical evidence. The results demonstrated the viability of the framework, depict the pervasiveness of framing within climate assemblies, and furthered the claim that deliberative framing can pave the way towards alternative framings and novel ideas, indicating that deliberative framing should be a key component of climate assemblies. Lastly, this enabled the formulation of a tool and practical recommendations for practitioners, to be aware of and to understand how framing occurs in assemblies. | |
