The Public Engagement Observatory is actively exploring how new approaches to mapping diverse forms of public engagement across systems can make a difference in practice to energy and climate-related decisions, innovations and new forms of participation.
This briefing reports on one such experiment that explored how the Observatory’s approach might contribute to new democratic innovations. Members of the Observatory team collaborated with partners from the Climate Citizens project at Lancaster University, the Climate Change Committee, and Shared Future, who were undertaking a citizens’ panel on home energy decarbonisation.
The collaborative experiment is one of the first attempts to explore how emerging approaches to mapping public engagement can shape democratic innovations in practice. In addition, it involved exploring new ways of considering the quality of public participation processes like citizens’ panels and citizens’ assemblies. This included asking how these discrete forms of participation are situated in wider systems of public engagement, focusing on questions of exclusion in addition to the usual emphasis on inclusion in evaluations of participation, and adopting a more formative, reflexive and anticipatory approach to evaluation.