The Global Assembly on the Climate and Ecological Crisis (2021)
In 2021, for the first time, a citizens’ assembly was convened not for a city or a country but for the whole planet: 100 people, randomly selected from across the world, deliberating the climate and ecological crisis alongside the COP26 summit in Glasgow.
At a glance
Section titled “At a glance”| Process type | Global citizens’ assembly (random selection / sortition), online |
| When | 2021 (timed with COP26) |
| Where | Worldwide / online |
| Convened by | The Global Assembly team (a civil-society coalition incl. the Iswe Foundation), independent of any single government |
| Participants | A Core Assembly of 100 citizens, randomly selected from around the world |
| The question | How can humanity address the climate and ecological crisis in a fair and effective way? |
| Cost | Not published |
What happened
Section titled “What happened”Because no government could convene it, the assembly was built from the ground up: organisers used geographic coordinates and local “community hosts” to reach a genuinely global, representative sample of 100 people — from Afghanistan to Brazil to China — and ran the deliberation online (on a small budget). Participants came less as representatives of their countries than as “representatives of Earth and of humanity.”
Inputs → outputs
Section titled “Inputs → outputs”In: a shared information booklet on the climate and ecological crisis, expert input, and facilitated online deliberation across many languages.
Out: a People’s Declaration for the Sustainable Future of Planet Earth, and recommendations — including that the crime of ecocide be enshrined in international and national law.
Impact
Section titled “Impact”The Declaration was presented at COP26, and the assembly proved that a planet-scale citizens’ assembly is possible. Its concrete influence on outcomes was limited — it had no formal standing in the negotiations — and researchers have studied exactly that gap between a global assembly’s legitimacy and its leverage. Still, it stands as a working prototype for democratic global governance not tied to nation-states.
How it went
Section titled “How it went”As a proof of concept it was striking: a demographically global sample deliberating constructively online on one of the hardest collective-action problems there is. Its limits are the ones every global-governance experiment faces — no institution was obliged to act on it. It’s a touchstone for the idea, raised by Hélène Landemore among others, that governance could be decoupled from territory.