In June, Islington Council’s Green Space & Leisure deputy, Andrew Bedford, agreed to address participants at the Islington Climate Centre in the first in a series of grassroots-organised People’s Assemblies dealing with specific climate-themed issues. We filmed at the event, which looked at ways to build community resilience from the bottom up in the face of future heatwaves.
The attendees also heard from Johanna Sutton who has been advising the GLA in developing policy as part of the Climate Resilience Review, along with Andy Love from Shade The UK, and Joseph Jones from London Tenants’ Federation.
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The theme of the next Assembly, taking place on Thursday, is flooding. Just a week after hundreds lost their lives and thousands face loss of homes, businesses, vehicles and income as a result of an extraordinary climate event in Valencia, Islington residents will share their experiences of recent flooding in the capital, and develop resilience measures to lessen the impact and prepare community response initiatives for the future.
The idea of People’s Assemblies reaches way back to the Ancient Greeks and beyond – a forum for ordinary citizens to hear each other and work out solutions to contentious issues where governments often fail. In a successful assembly, participants come from a wide and diverse range of backgrounds, and the process allows voices to be heard in an inclusive way, leading to thought-out solutions that work for a far larger majority than is typical in adversarial party politics.
Internationally, modern assemblies have come up with popular strategies to deal with complex and controversial issues. They were widely used in Australia to consider nuclear power and how to deal with nuclear waste. In Ireland, on the basis of referenda which had been designed by assemblies, the government ended up legalising gay marriage and abortion after a strong public majority vote.
People’s Assemblies openly invite participants, often giving them presentations from a handful of stakeholders and experts, and then encouraging ideas and conversation in small groups which then report back to the whole room. Citizen’s Assemblies further ensure truly democratic representation through a process named ‘sortition’, whereby participants are carefully selected from a larger random pool to reflect the local community by age, gender, ethnicity, religion, wealth, political leanings and so on.
(Watch our 2018 explainer video on sortition here).
Councils up and down the UK have begun using Citizen’s Assemblies to guide policy, as they have discovered they get much greater democratic feedback than through council meetings. Anyone attending council meetings will often see the same faces, the same pressure groups, lobbyists and activists pushing their own agendas, whereas an assembly called to discuss a particular issue will more likely draw a much wider range of views and more constructive, and indeed truly popular, outcomes.
Local People’s Assemblies, such as those organised by Islington Climate Centre, aren’t just about guiding policy. They seed real grassroots initiatives and mutual aid – essential in a crisis when governments so often let communities down (as seen very clearly in Spain recently).
The Islington Climate Centre’s HEATWAVE assembly earlier this year produced initiatives such as identifying vulnerable communities and pairing them with suitable cooler spaces,
for instance moving primary school classes into cool church buildings, and painting roofs white together with planting more trees. Shade The UK has developed a guide to heat adaptation for homes with a whole load of advice and ideas.
Islington residents are welcomed on Thursday for the FLOODING assembly in Stroud Green, or to get involved with the Islington Climate Centre’s grassroots work generally.
More info: islingtonclimatecentre.co.uk
