Academics, civil society leaders, and politicians gather at Oxford University to advance a permanent Global Citizens’ Assembly
Iswe Foundation and partners launched the first iteration of a new permanent global citizens’ assembly at the UN Summit of the Future in September 2024.
With the Brazilian government’s support, The Global Citizens’ Assembly for People and Planet will dock with COP30 in Belém. At the same time, it will empower communities to lead local action and call on leaders for change. It will also galvanise non-state actors - including civil society organisations, local governments, faith groups, and more - to make progress, independent of multilateral negotiations.
This is the second in an ongoing series of updates covering the run-up to Belèm and beyond. To keep updated, sign up to the mailing list for the Coalition for a Global Citizens’ Assembly. Journalists wishing to cover the Assembly can also email aish.machani@iswe.org.
This third update covers a a recent conference at Oxford University, which brought together more than 150 senior representatives of a wide variety of organisations, to explore next steps in establishing the permanent global citizens’ assembly.
On July 18th, Iswe Foundation and Oxford University’s Department of Politics and International Relations brought together academics and practitioners working across the fields of global governance and public policy, as well as representatives of social movements. Together, we explored how best to establish a permanent global citizens’ assembly as a fixture of international governance.
Participants gave their views on what a permanent global citizens’ assembly might need to look like to make a meaningful difference to global governance, considered next steps for advancing assemblies on climate, health, and AI, and discussed Iswe’s latest proposals for a Global Citizens’ Assembly for People and Planet: a global citizens’ assembly for COP30 and beyond.
More about this Assembly is available in the ‘Learn more’ section at the end of this update and will be covered in future updates. For now, here’s a high-level low down.
The Assembly will have three components:
a core assembly of citizens, demographically representative of the global population, docking with multilateral decision-making institutions including COPs,
community assemblies: smaller local deliberations across the world, producing vast data that inform the core assembly, and produce local action plans,
a campaign, in which cultural influencers engage 10 million people globally by 2030, cultivating social legitimacy for the Assembly’s conclusions and actions,
The Assembly will also be supported by a coalition of state and non-state actors that will support the Assembly by raising its profile, scaling participation in community assemblies, and implementing the Assembly’s recommendations.
Conference discussions were incredibly helpful in stress-testing and refining plans for and governance of the Assembly. Highlights include:
Iswe received widespread positive feedback for treating the Assembly’s development as a co-creative process of iterative innovation. The recently established Global Citizens Assembly Network will continue to be responsible for embedding independent and global learning throughout, ensuring equitable governance and co-creation between global north and south.
Plans to co-create with social movements and indigenous groups were strongly supported, with multiple participants emphasising a particular need to work closely with Brazilian communities in the lead-up to COP30.
Community assemblies were repeatedly identified as a critical component of the Assembly for driving meaningful impact. Professor Nicole Curato (Centre for Deliberative Democracy and Governance, University of Canberra) discussed how communities from across the world could deliberate in synchrony to design bottom-up, translocal action on key issues. Natalie Samarasinghe (Advisor, Global Challenges Foundation) felt that their simultaneous substantive influence on transnational deliberations can also help arrest the crisis in trust that is limiting the political space for transformative action on other crises.
Throughout the conference, there was a consistent emphasis on the need for substantial resources into awareness-raising and coalition-building across broad demographics for the assembly to have legitimacy and power.
The health-focused breakout session revealed clear consensus that resources should be devoted to integrating health equity as a central theme of the climate-focused assembly planned for COP30 (and indeed any subsequent assembly on an intersecting issue), rather than to organising a health-focused assembly. Read the recent paper by Iswe Foundation and Wellcome Trust on ‘Integrating health into a global citizens’ assembly’ to learn more.
Many contributors highlighted that just as the Lima-Paris Action Agenda COP20-21 opened the door for non-state actors to become active participants at COPs, COP30 could make citizens an ongoing part of COPs hereon in. This received wide ranging support, including from government representatives.
Gustavo Westmann, Brazil’s Special Advisor for International Affairs (COP30), stated that Brazil is committed to creating a permanent mechanism for civil society to meaningfully input into UNFCCC processes, and that he considers the Global Citizens’ Assembly a key aspect of that. He concluded by saying, “count on our support, and let’s build this together.”
If you want to support the Assembly going forward, there are a number of actions you can take:
If you’re an organisation, you can learn more about applying to join the Coalition for a Global Citizens’ Assembly here.
If you’re an individual, sign up to the mailing list of the Coalition for a Global Citizens’ Assembly, where you’ll be kept in the loop on plans for the Assembly and opportunities for you to contribute.
That’s all for now. Look out for our next update later this month when we’ll be sharing more information about the digital platform that will facilitate community assemblies across the world, informing the core assembly’s deliberations and fostering local action that bring our future further into the hands of citizens.
Learn more about the Global Citizens’ Assembly for People and Planet
In 2021, Iswe and a global network of organisations and individuals ran the world’s first global citizens’ assembly. It brought together a snapshot of the human family to deliberate on the climate and ecological emergency, decide what they want to happen, and present these proposals to leaders at COP26.
Iswe has since been building on this work, convening collaborative efforts to design permanent governance infrastructure that allows citizens meaningful and lasting impact on civilisational challenges, from local to global scales. The Global Citizens’ Assembly for People and Planet is the result of this work. Watch the presentation by Rich Wilson, Chief Enabling Officer at Iswe Foundation, from our recent launch event or read the summary below for more information about the Assembly.
The Assembly will have three components: a core assembly of globally representative citizens, community assemblies open to anyone, and a broader campaign to engage 10 million people globally by 2030, A multi-stakeholder coalition will also support the campaign and implement the Assembly’s recommendations. Governance and evaluation of the Assembly will be guided by the Global Citizens’ Assembly Network (GloCAN).
The Assembly will drive five key impacts: institutional actions, citizen actions, local and global solidarity, learning at scale, and inclusion. Each has its own evaluation metric.
Key goals for COP30 are:
Make COP30 The People’s COP - support thousands, maybe millions, of people to shape the discourse around COP30, through new translocal civic infrastructure.
Improve COP30’s ability to accelerate climate action and justice - drive mass mobilisation behind global priorities and accelerate locally-led mass citizen action
Create an enduring legacy of citizen influence by instituting permanent infrastructure that irrevocably elevates the voice of people in multilateral fora.
See our newsletter archive for a growing repository of deeper dives into every aspect of the Global Citizens’ Assembly, and sign up to the Coalition mailing list to be updated when the next update is published.