The lay citizens, the major stakeholders of the climate change issue, have completed been excluded from the process of global decision-making on it. Recently, many attempts have been made to raise a question on this injustice and to deliver the voices...
The lay citizens, the major stakeholders of the climate change issue, have completed been excluded from the process of global decision-making on it. Recently, many attempts have been made to raise a question on this injustice and to deliver the voices of global citizens to dealing with the governance of climate change we face today. A case in point is the ‘The World Wide Views on Climate and Energy’ held in 77 countries around the world, including Korea on June 6, 2015.
The World Wide Views has expanded the scope of citizen participation to the worldwide level and dealt with a typical scientific-technological issue of climate change by adopting the method of deliberation to have the public opinions of global citizens properly heard. Therefore, the World Wide Views involves three major agendas of a new design approach of citizen participation model, realization of the value of deliberative democracy, and democratization of science and technology. Against this backdrop, this study aims to assess the success status of the World Wide Views on these agendas and to identify the implications involved in it and the future potentials. A variety of research techniques, including participant observation, literature study, survey, focus group interview and individual interview have been utilized as the methods of study.
First, examination of the structural characteristics of the World Wide Views indicates that the key components of the citizen participation model have been thoroughly standardized. This study has found this standardization strategy inevitable in the process of the expanding the scope of citizen participation to the global scale.
The criteria to evaluate the World Wide Views from the perspective of deliberative democracy include representativeness, democracy, and deliberation. This study has acknowledged that the World Wide Views has successfully implemented the value of deliberative democracy while managing to meet the requirements of the relevant standards. However, there were several issues that are found to require further discussions. For example, no assurance has been made as to participation of participants in determining meeting agendas, rules and the method of progress and a low level of acceptance of information booklets distributed to the citizens is something to be desired in terms of ensuring democracy in the deliberative democratic model that encourages voluntary citizen participation. In addition, lack of debate and discussion time can be pointed out as an area for further improvement from the deliberative perspective. All of these are the drawbacks incurred by the standardized design model.
The evaluation on the World Wide Views from the perspective of scientific and technologic democratization has been made based on technological citizenship, manifestation of lay knowledge, and influence. First, participants in the World Wide Views have shown that they have the potential to demonstrate their technological citizenship in a positive manner. In addition, the influence aspect of the World Wide Views has obtained a positive evaluation except the lack of influence on policy-making on a national level. However, failure to present alternatives for the issue of lay knowledge not being able to compete or exceed the professionalism in science and technology field has left something to be desired. This study has found these drawbacks are also attributed to standardizing the deliberation process. After all, the World Wide Views provides meaningful opportunities and venues for scientific and technological democratization but falls short of achieving the advancement of being able to reinterpret today’s climate change issue from the perspective of global citizens. The overall summary of these research findings is as follows. First of all, the World Wide Views has a structure that allows the citizen society to effectively respond to the global scale issue, and has adopted the method of being able to realize the value of deliberative democracy in terms of its procedural characteristics although it fails to attain sufficient accomplishments as an attempt to democratize science and technology in its content aspect. This study has also found that some drawbacks of the World Wide Views have been attributed to standardizing the deliberation process. However, considering that fact that this standardization is inevitable, consistent supportive efforts will be required while keeping the key principle of model design intact. On top of it, any improvement effort in designing the operation and management of the World Wide Views should be directed toward enhancing the deliberation more than anything else as it is likely to implement the value of deliberative democracy while making a positive impact on the attempt to democratize science and technology as well.