Concept

Vision

 

The Academic Citizens’ Assembly is a governance process, improving direct democracy and complementary to representative democracy (parliament), focusing on the most pressing issues, building awareness, knowledge and empathy.

It is suitable for all levels of government: communal, cantonal, and national.

The process and duration depends on the issues to be decided, and could last several days, allowing time for learning in seminars and workshops (awareness and education), deliberation with like- and opposite-minded people (consolidating knowledge, building empathy), and the final anonymous vote.

Goal

ACA aims to become truly inclusive. This means that ACA will invite ALL legal residents from the age of 14, engaging millions of participants when fully deployed.

When the goal of inclusiveness has been reached, like initiatives today, ACA can legitimately provide a mandate to the legislative power, for instance the Federal Parliament, to examine and/or apply. In addition to legitimacy, adapting the current legislation would be needed.

Process

 

The ACA process will develop in several steps, from the small-scale, one-day June 2021 prototype, becoming broader, more representative, as well as including longer learning and deliberation phases.

Like other assemblies, participation is voluntary, but is a precondition for informed voting. The Assembly should achieve well-reflected, representative and legitimate decisions, but also significantly contribute to more knowledgeable citizens, more open to each other, and less open to conspiracies, fake news, and lobbies.

it will be first deployed in communal / municipal or cantonal decisions, before a country-wide application.

The Academic Citizens’ Assembly is innovative at several levels:

 

  1. Universal participation, instead of usual representative assemblies involving 100-150 people; i.e. ALL legal residents over 14 are invited to participate

    • All legal residents are included, independent of nationality

    • Children from age 14 are invited, as the group most concerned by far-reaching decisions

  2. Takes place once per year, focused of the one most pressing issue of society

  3. Entirely designed to work as digital and/or in-person, in any combination, allowing rapid scaling

  4. Scientifically sound, unbiased materials prepared by the academic community (instead of usual interest or lobbying groups preparing materials)

  5. Combines application topics, transition process elements, and scenario planning to bring latest policy frameworks and complex topics to a non-specialist broad audience

  6. Generates significant co-benefits beyond making well-reflected legitimate decisions: a deeper understanding of most pressing issues of society, a genuine level of empathy developed in wide-scale deliberation, and ultimately a higher cohesion of society.

Background

 

Over the past 30 years, there has been a substantial shift towards sustainability in institutional and corporate discourse, as well as in public awareness, and a major improvement in scientific understanding especially of the human impact on ecosystems. Yet during this same period, almost every metric of environmental sustainability has been getting worse, from the material and energy metabolism of humanity, to the visible acceleration of the climate crisis, and to biodiversity loss and its main drivers such as habitat loss, pollution, overexploitation.

Additionally, covid-19 has exposed how our complex, non-resilient socio-economic system failed at multiple levels to prevent massive needless human suffering, through (1) non-linear acceleration of zoonotic diseases from continued destruction of habitats, (2) excessive air travel spreading the virus worldwide in just three weeks from 19.02.2020, and (3) vulnerable strata of society resulting from decades of wrong priorities, aggravating factors such as inequality, obesity, chronic diseases, poor (access to) health care, precarity of exposed essential workers, or environmental factors like air pollution.

Facts show that we are collectively going in the wrong direction, time is running out. While fully aware of both, today’s institutions seem totally incapable of acting at anywhere near the required scale.

This Academic Citizens’ Assembly is an experiment to test a new governance model better suited to solving today’s challenges.

The concept and framework of this assembly could be applied internally in academic organizations or companies as a powerful ideation tool to generate impactful action proposals.