This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5). This award supports experimental research on participation in climate change policy. The experiment, World Wide Views on Global Warming, is a day of deliberation by residents in 30 countries on climate change issues (September 26, 2009), which culminates in the compilation of their views on and prescriptions for policy. These results are shared with delegates to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change meeting in Copenhagen (COP 15) scheduled for December 2009, as well as with other interested parties and the general public.
This award supports research conducted by the United States WWViews affiliates in collaboration with the global project organizer, the Danish Board of Technology, and up to 5 additional partners at sites where WWViews deliberations are being held. Each participating team conducts deliberations that generate the experimental data for the research. The objectives of this research project are (1) contribute to the first ever global citizen deliberation exercise by conducting the U.S. deliberations in several regions of the country, introducing the informed views of a broad cross-section of laypeople from around the world into UN climate negotiations that are otherwise stakeholder driven; (2) assess policy learning by participants and the direct and indirect outcomes of WWViews in the COP 15 deliberations and its policy environment; (3) create an enduring network of institutions and trained project managers able to organize future WWViews deliberations on climate change or other global topics; and (4) expand participation by diverse members of the US public in science and technology policy. As the first-ever global citizen consultation, the project adds to existing knowledge of deliberative democracy and participatory technology assessment through a comparative analysis of experiences in different countries.
The methods used include documents and interview research on the policy context in different U.S. states and foreign countries; analysis of the demographics of participants in the deliberation; observations at the deliberations; a pre and post event survey; action research at the Copenhagen UN meeting; interviews of U.S. delegates to COP 15 after the UN meetings; media and documents content analyses; and participatory assessment by WWViews local citizens, elected officials, and other stakeholders.
The broader impacts of the project include training graduate and undergraduate students in research and practice of participatory technology assessment and deliberative democracy; expanding participation in science and technology by creating space for informed citizen voices in technoscientific policies and practices; building national and international networks of policy analysts, scholars, elected officials, and everyday citizens, and increasing their capacity for future participatory technology assessment; dissemination of results through local workshops as well as a project report and scholarly articles; and contributing to the development of a policy tool than can help citizens world wide participate effectively in addressing urgent global problems.
