Polis & the Austrian Citizens’ Climate Council

By Andy Paice, CII Board member

This year two CII colleagues, Martin Rausch and myself, were part of a big prototyping initiative on a national scale in Austria: linking a nationwide digital conversation to its citizens’ climate assembly.

This was a fantastic experience working with an international team to bring the groundbreaking digital democracy tool Polis with its capacity for fostering collective wisdom, for the first time to a national citizens’ assembly.

And the results were mixed…

An academic evaluation interviewed members of the Climate Council who “evaluated it exclusively critically. While the basic idea to involve the public was praised…”

From our perspective at CII there are incredible learnings from the project which we feel can be of great value to an ecosystem of democracy changemakers using Polis, which currently has much interest globally.

So that future projects connecting Polis to in-person dialogue and deliberation can benefit from these experiences, we’ve created a detailed case study which you’ll find linked below.

[READ CASE STUDY PDF]