Growing research on citizens’ assemblies has focused primarily on ‘frontstage’ standardization and deliberative quality, centering the experience of assembly members. Only very recently have studies and guidelines turned to the ‘backstage,’ considering who makes decisions and how when it comes to organizing and running citizens’ assemblies. This article provides four original contributions to this emerging line of inquiry. First, we identify three constitutive elements of governance: who governs (stakeholders), what (decision-making), and how (integrity). Second, we provide a working definition of governance as the negotiation of tensions between deliberative values and practical constraints in commissioning, designing, and delivering citizens’ assemblies. Third, we illustrate these findings with original focus group and interview data from the 2021 Global Assembly on Climate and Ecological Crisis, centering the experience of a global community of practice. Fourth, we reveal three key tensions at the core of governing citizens’ assemblies: (1) collaboration across diverse stakeholders, (2) grounding decision-making, and (3) balancing horizontal and vertical logics. These elements and tensions offer insights for both future research and practice.
Ross et al. (Tue,) studied this question.