Each deliberative mini-public is an opportunity for Deliberativa and for the vast majority of practitioners in the field to improve the methodologies associated with civic lottery and deliberation, and therefore to improve the process and its results. The Horizon CLIMAS project in which we have participated has also been a great opportunity to think about the whole chain leading to the organization of a deliberative mini-public and the implementation of its recommendations, from the establishment of a governance of the process, to the definition of the follow-up mechanisms.
In the field of civic lottery, a substantial improvement was introduced a few years ago with the integration of an attitudinal criterion (in addition to the traditional criteria of age, sex/gender, location, education level / employment type), which allowed to attenuate or eliminate the bias towards people who might be particularly interested in the question posed, or related to the political color that activated the mini-public (although there is a plural governance, the color of the convener is usually the most visible).
One of the main challenges we continue to work on is what we call the “provision of content”, i.e. information that is at once accessible, diverse and balanced, to which the mini-audience must have access; we are also concerned that the recommendations made should have maximum impact.
In this area, we are trying to move from information shared in silos, from different experts, to integrated information in extreme scenarios, which give an understanding of the major options, with their positive and negative impacts and their trade-offs. We are also trying to move from vertical sharing, in lecture format, to quick dialogues, in which experts move from table to table responding to questions and concerns from mini-public members. We are also looking to integrate more voices of first-person affected citizens in all their diversity, as well as civil society.
The challenge is especially immense in the case of the Global Civic Assembly (GCA) on food systems, which starts in January 2026 and brings together 105 people online, representing the diversity of the planet. Less than 5% of the Assembly has a university degree, it is essential to adapt the level of information to the profiles of the Assembly members without sacrificing the complexity of the content shared.
For this project, and in line with the CLIMAS methodology, we are using dials. A dial is a deliberative tool that simplifies a complex decision by turning it into a graduated axis of options, where moving the marker to one side or the other makes visible, in an immediate way, the trade-offs (i.e. situations in which, by choosing one option, you must give up another because it is not possible to have both at the same time), as well as the consequences and compensations associated with each collective choice.
A specific example for the GCA is the overconsumption and land use dial. This dial represents a collective decision about how much of the world’s population can sustain diets high in animal products, showing how that level of consumption conditions land use, climate stability and the resilience of the global food system. This dial helps global deliberation because it turns an abstract and highly unequal problem – the relationship between diet, land use and climate – into an understandable, explicit and comparable collective decision, forcing everyone to reason about realtrade-offs in a common framework.
By fixing a single axis and holding other key assumptions constant, the dial avoids fragmented technical debates and allows people from very different contexts to discuss fairness, responsibility and long-term consequences from the same information base. It thus shifts the conversation from individual or national preferences to structural questions about what level of consumption is defensible for a minority if it puts the climate and food stability of the global majority at risk, facilitating agreements that are not mere moral aspirations, but conscious choices about shared trade-offs and costs.
The learnings from the Global Civic Assembly will nurture the following mini-publics. An exciting and never-ending task.