Stuart White, Associate Professor of Politics in the Department of Politics and International Relations (DPIR) at Oxford and Nicholas Drake Tutorial Fellow in Politics at Jesus College, is co-organising a conference at Jesus later this month that will explore the proposal for a permanent Global Citizens’ Assembly.    

The invitation-only conference – A Permanent Global Citizens’ Assembly: Adding humankind’s voice to world politics – on Thursday 18^th July, aims to investigate the arguments for a Global Citizens’ Assembly in the run-up to the UN Summit of the Future in September. It is a collaboration between the DPIR and ISWE Foundation – a social impact foundation dedicated to finding ways to put people at the heart of social and political decision making to solve some of society’s greatest challenges.

A Citizens’ Assembly (CA) is a body whose members are chosen on a near-random basis so as to be representative of the population, along chosen dimensions such as gender and race. CAs examine issues through a process of structured and supported deliberation. They have been widely, and successfully used at local and national levels in a number of countries in recent years to develop public policy, and assist constitutional change. The world’s first Global CA, with assembly members drawn from around the globe, was organised in 2021/22 on the topic of climate change. The conference on July 18 will explore the proposal to establish a permanent Global CA.

The agenda includes a keynote address on ‘The immediate political relevance of a permanent Global CA’ by Sandrine Dixson-Declève, Co-President of the Club of Rome. There will be panel discussions on the development and potential of the proposal, and breakout sessions to explore how a Global CA might accelerate action on urgent 21^st century challenges such as climate change, AI governance. and health.

Stuart says, “This conference will bring together academics and practitioners working across the fields of global governance and global public policy, and activists in social movements, to explore the potential for a permanent Global CA, and the critical areas where it might speed up action by democratic governments.’

The study of Citizens’ Assemblies forms part of Stuart’s own academic research. He has published several papers on the topic, including Citizens’ Assemblies and Republican Democracy (Bruno Leipold, Karma Nabulsi and Stuart White, eds., Radical Republicanism: Recovering the Tradition’s Popular Heritage, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 81-99. 2020) and Citizens’ Assemblies and Democratic Renewal (Working Paper for ENA (Institute for Alternative Policies), Centre for Political Theory, Athens. 2022.)

 The first Global CA was convened to raise community voices at a global level on the climate crisis, and led to the ‘People’s Declaration for the Sustainable Future of Planet Earth’, which was presented at COP26 in 2021. The declaration, produced by members of the assembly, and targeted at world leaders, set out seven steps towards addressing the world’s climate crisis in a fair and effective way.

The outcomes of next week’s conference will support further discussions on multilateral democratic reform at the UN Summit of the Future on 23-24 September in New York.