French Citizens' Convention for Climate (2019–2020)

In 2019, President Macron convened 150 randomly-selected citizens and gave them a daunting brief: propose how France could cut its greenhouse-gas emissions, “in a spirit of social justice.” Over nine months they produced 149 detailed measures — and a hard lesson in what happens to citizens’ proposals once they reach the political machine.

At a glance


Process type	Citizens’ convention (random selection / sortition)
When	October 2019 – June 2020
Where	France (Paris)
Convened by	President Emmanuel Macron; hosted by the CESE
Participants	150 citizens, randomly selected (stratified)
The question	How to cut France’s greenhouse-gas emissions by at least 40% by 2030, in a spirit of social justice
Output	149 proposals (a 460-page report), adopted 21 June 2020
Cost	Not published

What happened

The Convention Citoyenne pour le Climat split its 150 members into thematic groups — housing, transport, consumption, food, and work/production — who heard experts and deliberated across several sessions. On 21 June 2020 they adopted 149 proposals, around 95% in favour, in a 460-page report.

Inputs → outputs

In: the emissions-reduction mandate, expert testimony, and facilitated deliberation.

Out: 149 measures spanning the economy, plus a proposal to recognise the crime of ecocide. Macron initially promised to pass them “sans filtre” (unfiltered), setting aside only three.

Impact

The “unfiltered” promise didn’t hold. The ecocide proposal was dropped or heavily diluted, and many measures were weakened as they passed through government and parliament into the Climate and Resilience Law (2021) — which many Convention members and observers judged a watering-down of their work. The Convention is now cited both as a high point of climate deliberation and as a case study in the gap between what a citizens’ assembly recommends and what elected institutions actually enact.

How it went

The Convention is widely regarded as a serious, well-run deliberation that produced sophisticated, broadly-supported proposals from a representative group of citizens. Its disappointment is downstream: without a binding link to legislation, even a president’s convened assembly can see its work filtered, diluted, or shelved — exactly the tension Hélène Landemore points to when she argues citizens’ assemblies need real, not merely advisory, power.

Landemore adds two wrinkles to the standard “watered-down” story. First, the Convention came closer to legislating than is usually recognised: Macron had effectively outsourced legislative initiative to it, making the members de-facto citizen legislators — and a later recommendation-by-recommendation analysis by KNOCA found that, contrary to the popular narrative, most proposals did reach legislation in some form. Second, the assembly may have undercut itself: offered a path to a binding referendum, the members declined it, convinced the public would reject their work — even though polling showed 13 of their 14 headline proposals already had majority support. The lesson she draws is less “the system betrayed them” than that they hadn’t yet learned to trust their fellow citizens, or each other. See binding or advisory?.