Background independence and asymptotic safety in conformally reduced gravity

We analyze the conceptual role of background independence in the application of the effective average action to quantum gravity. Insisting on a background independent renormalization group (RG) flow the coarse graining operation must be defined in terms of an unspecified variable metric since no rigid metric of a fixed background spacetime is available. This leads to an extra field dependence in the functional RG equation and a significantly different RG flow in comparison to the standard flow equation with a rigid metric in the mode cutoff. The background independent RG flow can possess a non-Gaussian fixed point, for instance, even though the corresponding standard one does not. We demonstrate the importance of this universal, essentially kinematical effect by computing the RG flow of quantum Einstein gravity in the ``conformally reduced'' Einstein-Hilbert approximation which discards all degrees of freedom contained in the metric except the conformal one. Without the extra field dependence the resulting RG flow is that of a simple ^4 theory. By including it one obtains a flow with exactly the same qualitative properties as in the full Einstein-Hilbert truncation. In particular it possesses the non-Gaussian fixed point which is necessary for asymptotic safety.