Global Deliberative Democracy and Climate Change: Insights from World Wide Views on Global Warming in Australia

On 26 September 2009, approximately 4,000 citizens in 38 countries participated in World Wide Views on Global Warming (WWViews). WWViews was an ambitious first attempt to convene a deliberative mini-public at a global scale, giving people from around the world an opportunity to deliberate on international climate policy and to make recommendations to the decision-makers meeting at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen (COP-15) in December 2009. In this paper, we examine the role that deliberative mini-publics can play in facilitating the emergence of a global deliberative system for climate change response. We pursue this intent through a reflective evaluation of the Australian component of the World Wide Views on Global Warming project (WWViews). Our evaluation of WWViews is mixed. The Australian event was delivered with integrity and feedback from Australian participants was almost universally positive. Globally, WWViews demonstrated that it is feasible to convene a global mini-public to deliberate on issues of global relevance, such as climate change. On the other hand, the contribution of WWViews towards the emergence of a global deliberative system for climate change response was limited and it achieved little influence on global climate change policy. We identify lessons for future global mini-publics, including the need to prioritise the quality of deliberation and provide flexibility to respond to cultural and political contexts in different parts of the world. Future global mini-publics may be more influential if they seek to represent discourse diversity in addition to demographic profiles, use designs that maximise the potential for transmission from public to empowered space, run over longer time periods to build momentum for change and experiment with ways of bringing global citizens together in a single process instead of discrete national events

Interior Transformation on the Pathway to a Viable Future

[[abstract]]A common response to the global sustainability crisis is to argue that human values and culture need to transform. However, the nature of this interior transformation is rarely explored in any detail. Instead, transformation is held up uncritically as the saviour that can get us out of trouble. In this paper, I apply a personal causal layered analysis (CLA) to tease out the dimensions of interior transformation for a viable future in more detail. The analysis draws out competing narratives of interior transformation and explores the potential of these narratives to facilitate transformation of values and consciousness. A story of a thriving Earth emerges as a key cultural resource for interior transformation

Action Researchers Book++ Review

We are innovating with a new approach to book reviewing for the ARJ journal. Good books and excellent digital media are clearly invaluable inputs to our work as action researchers. But in a world awash with excellent content, how does the ARTist find gold? Our aim with the journal itself is to support action researchers in their transformative work of creating sustainable and regenerative societies, places to live and work and of course to protect our planet (Bradbury, Waddell et al., 2019a). For this, we have elaborated seven quality choicepoints that guide a lot of what we do at the journal (Bradbury, Glenzer et al., 2019b) and in our ART more generally