Jake Ainscough (pictured on the left) is a Senior Research Associate on the Climate Citizens project at Lancaster University. Climate Citizens is a research project exploring options for opening up climate policy making to the public. He interviewed Chris Stark (pictured on the right), the CEO of the Climate Change Committee for FDSD’s Winter 2022 newsletter to find out about the Committee’s recent experiments with deliberative research.
Earlier this year, I was part of a team at Lancaster University that ran a deliberative citizens panel on home energy decarbonisation in partnership with the Climate Change Committee (CCC). The CCC was created by an Act passed by the UK Parliament in 2008 to give independent advice to government on emission reduction targets and adaptation to climate change. Although the UK Government isn’t obliged to take its advice, they are obliged to listen, and the CCC has become a crucial part of the UK’s governance framework for addressing climate change. To date, the government has always accepted the advice of the CCC when setting long and short-term decarbonisation targets. Our work with the CCC focused on policies for decarbonising home heating. However, it’s not the first deliberative process in which the CCC has been involved. They supported the nation-wide Climate Assembly UK, a deliberative process commissioned by six Parliamentary Committees to assess public opinion on decarbonisation policy.
I interviewed the CEO of the CCC, Chris Stark, to talk about why the CCC has started to use deliberative research; how he sees this fitting into its wider approaches to analysis and evidence gathering; and some of the challenges he has faced as he has sought to expand the use of deliberation at the CCC.
Jake: To start with, could you explain in basic terms why it’s important for the CCC to talk with the general public?
The next phase of climate policy-making involves people having to change what they do, which the last phase did not – such as how people travel, how they heat their homes, and what they consume. We need to make sure we stay live and responsive to that. These new challenges are often framed as being difficult, but they needn’t be if we construct policy in the right way. Lessons from recent history tell you that, generally, involving people in designing policies helps to construct policies that work. If we are not interested in the changes in people’s everyday lives, and how you get policies to work for those people, then we’re not going to be very successful as independent advisors.
Jake: You were involved as an expert lead in Climate Assembly UK. Could you talk about how you became involved in that process, and how it shaped your thinking on the role of deliberation in policy making?
Chris: My career began in the Treasury, where you deal with big numbers, across the whole economy. That takes you away from the experience of people’s lives. What something like Climate Assembly UK does is to start at the other end of that scale. This wasn’t totally new to me. At various stages of my career I have done things to broaden out beyond the typical approach to gathering evidence you’re taught in ‘civil service finishing school’. But I came into the CCC thinking I wouldn’t do any of that. I knew the CCC to be a technical, numerate, quantitative organization.
One of my first tasks as Chief Executive was to look at whether we had the right 2050 emissions target (80% reduction at the time). After that enormous piece of technical work, we recommended, and government then implemented, a new target for net zero emissions by 2050. I felt pretty proud of that. Then six select committees decided they didn’t know enough about policy for net zero to provide scrutiny. They wanted to do a piece of qualitative research, which turned into Climate Assembly UK, and I was asked to be an expert lead.
I don’t mind saying I went into Climate Assembly UK with some trepidation. I only accepted the invitation because Westminster had requested it. But I had a totally game changing experience. It reminded me of all the things I’d been doing prior to the CCC. I felt we had a genuinely representative group of people and were taking them through some difficult issues, ones which we struggled with in the technical work.
At the end, the ideas that came out of that process were pretty similar to the work we’d done through the quantitative analysis. I’ve learned there is a way to combine these two seemingly distinct fields and create something even more useful.
Jake: You said you went into it with trepidation. Was that to do with how it would be seen politically, or did you think the ideas that came out of the process wouldn’t align with what the CCC was already saying?
Chris: It was a mixture of those things. But I think the dominant factor was just straightforward arrogance. A bit of humility from me would have been better at the time.
My main worry was that we’d already done this amazing piece of work, and I didn’t want to undermine it by being involved in something that came up with different conclusions. Plus, I was unsure whether it was possible to bring a group of people up to speed on those issues and allow them to make decisions. It turns out, it absolutely is.
Climate Assembly UK was great. A lot of resource, time and effort was poured into it, but I think to good effect. I don’t think we’ve used it enough actually. We have used it, but I don’t think the biggest political institutions took as much notice as they should have, including, interestingly, the select committees. Only one of them really picked it up. There is a political aspect to this resistance. It was slightly undermined by campaign groups who were asking for a citizens’ assembly with binding outputs. I make no real comment on that, except to say that some of the select committees were hesitant to work with the findings of Climate Assembly UK as a result.
Jake: Thanks. We might come back to the issue of how these processes are picked up and seen by politicians. But let’s continue for now with the CCC’s use of deliberative methods. We recently partnered with you to run a deliberative citizens panel on home energy decarbonisation. Could you talk about what it was like to do focused deliberative work on a specific policy area? And also talk about the reaction within the CCC?
Chris: To give some context, the success of the CCC as an organisation is based on very coherent technical analysis that has stood up to lots of criticism over the years. We have earned a position of trust in the discussion of climate policy. One of the things you feel when you’re the CEO of the CCC is that you don’t want to break that trust. So, I have taken a cautious approach to experimenting with deliberative processes. That said, I have also been one of the people in the CCC that is interested in broadening and complementing the work we are known for, with these deliberative processes. There are definitely people here who feel differently than I. That feels appropriate. We need some voices to keep bringing us back to what we’re good at.
A lot of the staff had a good experience during Climate Assembly UK. It’s worth saying they all did this on a voluntary basis in their own spare time. We were under a lot of scrutiny about how we were spending our time as a taxpayer-funded institution. But we are an institution that works to a committee – it’s in our name. Interestingly, the Committee itself didn’t have the same experience, as they weren’t directly involved. They often ask, when we talk about doing this work, can it stand up? Is the process as useful as you say? Those kinds of questions are really live internally when we have discussions about whether to do deliberation work. But the Committee have become more and more convinced that it is something we can do, and continue to be trusted with its outputs.
Something where we felt there was a real value in doing deliberative work was the heat transition. We knew there was very little policy. We didn’t really know what people thought, and polling on these issues isn’t actually very helpful. So it felt like a useful place for us to sponsor some work. At the end of that process, we’ve convinced ourselves even more that this is a valuable approach for us to be involved with. You can do these targeted deliberative processes to throw light on aspects of the net zero transition ahead of us.
Jake: Do you have a vision for where this kind of work goes within the CCC in the future?
Chris: After Climate Assembly UK there was a question of whether we might try and maintain that assembly and return to that group with new things. I wasn’t that keen, funnily enough. I’m more and more of the view that the style of work that we’ve just completed with home decarbonisation is more like what we should be doing. We should focus on instances where we identify a set of challenges that would lend themselves well to that style of work. Then we should sponsor it and use that work to inform policy advice to government, as well as the technical pathways that we periodically build for the government. I think that is the sweet spot for us.
Jake: That makes sense. Do you think that is now the dominant view at the CCC?
Chris: I think it is, though there are still many people in the CCC who are more suspicious than I, and rightfully so. The kind of question that comes up again and again is: “If the group is given time and space to think about these things, then are they genuinely reflecting the views of the country?”. I think we will continue to be cautious about drawing too many big conclusions from these pieces. With the heat decarbonisation work we did with you, there were earlier drafts of press releases which I did weigh in on to say: “We can’t say that, we don’t actually know that that’s the case for the whole of the UK just because we’ve done this piece of work”.
Jake: That’s a good point. You and I know there are all sorts of reasons why you can get insights from a small number of people that you can’t with a large one, but that tension is always there. This brings me to my next question. How do you see quantitative and qualitative methods relating to each other in how you evidence your policy advice?
Chris: To take a step back, in the past two years we have stopped looking just at emission reduction, which is a lagging indicator of progress. Instead, for each sector – farming, manufacturing, energy etc. – we have identified what drives emissions down. That’s more interesting because it’s a set of outcomes you can see ‘out there’. We then look at enablers for each of these outcomes, and we can put indicators against these. Then we can list policies that might drive the enablers.
Once we have that model – linking together outcomes, enablers, and policies within each sector – this raises an interesting set of questions about public opinion and public attitudes. We need to track these. But more than that, we are interested in how you might change them. We have created a framework which continues to be technical, but on what are sometimes called social attitude questions. This is really interesting for us. Deliberative methods are one way to stitch all this together – not the only way, polling is another. Ultimately, we want to further understand people. It’s pretty fundamental to some of the big shifts that lie ahead.
Jake: Does this new conceptual model you have built filter through into the way you are structured as an organisation?
Chris: It does. We have thought quite carefully about how we structure ourselves alongside the model. We still have teams based around sectors. That was a conscious decision. Each of those sector teams has some public attitudes they track. Then we have a team that lies across the sectoral work, focusing on public attitudes much more closely. This team will develop expertise in things like deliberative methods. That’s quite exciting for us because we’ll have technical expertise in each of the sectors and the ability to overlay some new techniques for gathering insights.
Jake: That’s really exciting to hear. To move back to the perception issue again, I wonder if you could flesh this out further. What sort of reactions do you get when you use evidence from deliberative processes in making arguments to policymakers?
Chris: The basic reaction you get from the policy profession is that this isn’t ‘real’ data. I think we in the CCC have that attitude as well – there’s no point denying it. I think that’s the hardest thing to overcome because it’s essentially cultural. Central government is even worse. It’s quite tricky to overcome, but I think it’s important that we try.
Jake: What would your message be for people who are supportive of these methods and want to see them used more. What do they need to do differently? And from the other side, what kind of changes do we need to see from within the policy community?
Chris: I don’t think we’ve had a moment yet where deliberation has proved itself. I think we probably need to have that. We need something that people like us, who care about seeing it used more widely, can point to as a really good example. Climate Assembly UK is often held up as that, and it was a great process. But it’s hard to say it was game changing in the end. I think it’s that last bit that’s missing. I would like to be able to say: “We went through a process, arrived at a really strong policy design, that was then implemented and was successful”. That’s not happened. We need that. Maybe there are examples in other fields of social policy, but not in climate.
Jake: I suppose it places quite a heavy burden on these processes, if you think about how rarely a single line of evidence goes directly through to changing policy.
Chris: I don’t know. I think there are lots of areas where the traditional approach to policy making just hasn’t worked. One case I have in mind is energy efficiency policy, which has been a disaster over the years and hasn’t really worked. It hasn’t worked because we haven’t understood people and supply chains – and supply chains are just people as well. This is an area where you could conceive of a really strong piece of work that could potentially result in a different kind of policy.
One of my worries is that we have been trying to consume the whole elephant. Remarkably they more or less did this with Climate Assembly UK, but I think it’s far too big a task to keep doing those things. You’re going to have to break it off into smaller chunks in the future.
Jake: That makes sense. I have one final question that takes us slightly away from narrow policy. Do you see a future where public deliberation is a greater part of our democracy overall, rather than just a specific policy-making tool?
Chris: I don’t really, I’m afraid to say. I think the closest you will get is something like Climate Assembly UK. And where Parliament, as the scrutiny body of the Government, uses these processes to inform more conventional democracy.
Within climate policy, there is a need for more regional discussions with particular groups of people. I think more deliberation here could be valuable. And there isn’t really the institutional set-up for that right now. So maybe that’s an area for some change. But it would still feed into decisions that are taken through conventional democratic structures. I have never really been of the view that deliberation is a revolutionary way of doing politics. I think it gathers insights that we don’t have otherwise. There is a role for that definitely, but it doesn’t replace representative democracy.
