The importance of asking good questions
A reflection on what makes citizens' assemblies successful
Dear reader,
As you will probably know, President Macron, partly in response to the yellow vest protests, took the fairly spectacular decision to organize a citizens’ assembly on climate change, tasked with formulating policy recommendations – recommendations Macron promised he would either directly adopt or send to parliament for review (while allowing for three wild cards – which he used). This has put the citizens’ assembly squarely in the lime-light, especially for climate and energy transitions.
In this piece here, Jelmer Mommers and Eva Rovers argue that it is indeed precisely the thing we need in order to address climate change: if done right (with a clear mandate and a representative sample of participants), it could generate the necessary trust that climate policies will be fair, while showing that the state trusts and recognizes the public. Furthermore, in terms of the recommendations we may expect from these assemblies, given that people on the whole agree that climate change is a serious issue, they will most likely recommend serious reduction in greenhouse gases (and of assaults on biodiversity, if that’s also on the table).
The article bespeaks of a great faith in ordinary folks’ ability to come up with reasonable compromises and sensible solutions for the public good. Most people are very capable citizens.
In the energy sector, that’s usually not the conception of people that carries the day. There might be increasing recognition of people’s (evolving) moral and meaningful relationship to energy, but at the end of the day, the engineers who are designing the flexible demand solutions of the future (solutions that may require some active involvement of regular energy consumers), do so based on this one metric: will it make people money? If it does, then maybe they’d be interested in participating and put up with being “bothered” by demand management. In other words, energy service developers think of people as consumers, rather than citizens.
Now, it’s not as if this consumer-view is entirely wrong. People, of course, do care about price.
The thing is, people wear different hats – depending on context, we make different sorts of evaluations. To show you how and why, I’ll review the article “Two souls are dwelling in my breast” – a poetic invocation of the dualism I just introduced. It is written by Rico Defila and his colleagues from the Program Man-Society-Environment at the University of Basel.
They devised a method to understand the different ways people can be triggered to think about the impact of potential energy policies. In so doing, it provides a sociological foundation for why citizens’ assemblies can work well, but it may also inspire professionals in the energy sector to ask different questions of (potential) customers about new energy products.
The Wheel of Impact
This is what the authors did: they took three energy policies from the Swiss “Energy Strategy 2050” – higher fuel prices, expansion of public transport and comprehensive management of parking lots –, used one for each of the 48 interviews, and then proceeded to ask the respondent about it in three consecutive ways:
1. They started out with an open question: how do you think this measure will impact your life?
2. Then they asked this same question, but now by using the “Future Wheel” method. This methods stems from the 1970s, and it consists of asking people first, second and third order effects of a policy or technology. In other words, it stimulates people to think more systematically about an issue.
3. For the final phase of the interview, the interviewers shifted gears and asked, if the policy was proposed to them for a vote (which, in Switzerland, is actually a realistic scenario), how would they vote?
The researchers were surprised to find that people responded quite differently to each set of prompts. The answer with the Future Wheel was vastly more comprehensive than to the open-ended prompt. In response to the third prompt, respondents seemingly ignored what they had just said in the Future Wheel exercise, employing a very different logic to formulate their answers.
In the Future Wheel exercise, respondents identified different life domains where they imagined they would feel the impact of the policy. In addition, they assessed the impacts in terms of their ability to lead a good life (enjoying well-being, freedom and relations with others), how it would affect their resources and how it would make them feel.
“our results show, firstly, that it is possible to uncover a broad range of impacts individuals anticipate from a consumer perspective, if this is adequately facilitated by applying a suited method” (160).
When asked how they would vote for the policy though, there was only a small overlap with their reasoning of just 5 minutes ago. Life domains were mostly absent. They did mention impact on the good life, but mostly that of others. In addition, they evaluated the process of the proposed law or policy: is it appropriate for its aim, is it feasible, what (undesirable) side-effects might it have?
The fact that the respondents-as-citizens didn’t seem to reason from the perspectives of their own lives is encouraging: it would confirm that people are able to stand behind Rawls’ famous veil of ignorance while in a citizen panel – that is to say, to evaluate policies from an impartial standpoint. Moreover, the vast majority evaluated the policy according to firmly social-democratic principles – basically, whether it would make people’s lives better (that doesn’t means they reached the same conclusion, just that they reasoned the same way.) (p. 160)
It’s an objection to citizen’s panels one might easily make: ‘people will just try to get the best out of it for themselves’. Mommers and Rovers also address this objection, from a slightly different angle:
Keep in mind that everyone who is selected as a participant has their own interests. One might be a homeowner, another might be on disability – whatever a person’s situation is can colour their considerations. But a homeowner is also probably something else – a mother, a doctor, a caregiver – as a result of which she will not be concerned with a single interest alone (unlike a lobbyist).
In other words, they’ll be able to see the thing from different perspectives.
Alright, so that’s an important conclusion, but that doesn’t address the problem I opened with – that people are both ‘consumers’ and ‘citizens’. In the latter role they might be able to see things impartially, but what about when they are acting in the former role? The matter is a little too unwieldy to settle here, but at the very least we can establish it is really important to know how to ask questions. What questions you ask does matter for how people respond.
Currently, politicians seem to rely a lot on polls. It is now clear why this is problematic: the results say as much about the poll as it does about where people’s minds are at, and it often isn’t clear which is which. Running a citizen’s assembly in that sense is not just about asking better questions but also understanding better where the answers come from.
A citizens’ assembly gives a much more reliable picture of public opinion because participants not only have the opportunity to inform themselves but can deliberate with each other. The result: workable, well-considered recommendations that are supported in society. (Mommers and Rovers)
Wishing you an informative and well-considered week,
Marten
Source
Defila, Rico, Giulio A. Di, and Schweizer C. Ruesch. "Two Souls Are Dwelling in My Breast: Uncovering How Individuals in Their Dual Role As Consumer-Citizen Perceive Future Energy Policies." Energy Research & Social Science. 35 (2018): 152-162.
Also cited
Smith, Graham. Citizens’ assembly: what we’ve learned about the kind of climate action the public wants to see. The Conversation (Sep 2020) https://theconversation.com/citizens-assembly-what-weve-learned-about-the-kind-of-climate-action-the-public-wants-to-see-146161