Location: Globe. WWViews used a common process simultaneously at 44 sites in 38 nations spanning 6 continents. The 38 nations represented were: Australia, Austria, Bangladesh, Belgium (Flanders), Bolivia, Brazil, Cameroon, Canada, Chile, China, Denmark, Egypt, Ethiopia, Finland, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Malawi, The Maldives, Mali, Mozambique, Netherlands, Norway, Russia, Saint Lucia, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, Uganda, United Kingdom, United States, Uruguay, and Vietnam. In most countries the citizen consultations took place in main cities or the capital.
Time span: Late 2007 (initial conception) – Dec. 2009. Within this total project time span, the WWViews global day of deliberation was on Sept. 26, 2009.
Initiated by: Danish Board of Technology (DBT), Copenhagen, Denmark, www.tekno.dk. The DBT is an advisory agency to the Danish Parliament and government on technology-and-society issues. The DBT is situated administratively under the Danish Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation.
Financed by: The coordination of WWViews was financed primarily by the Danish Board of Technology itself. Some specific costs (for example an international training seminar for project managers, preparation of a final report, and presentation of results at the United Nations COP15 Climate Summit) were funded by the Danish and Norwegian Foreign Ministries. A short documentary was funded by US partners and donors. The 44 citizen meetings in 38 countries were funded in different ways. Some partners funded their own meeting. Some received research grants that also covered the citizen meeting. Some received a grant from foundations. Some received grants from embassies (of DK, N, NL or UK) or foreign aid/democracy programs (of DK or N). Some partners in low income nations were paid for by other partners from higher income nations. In addition, local partners provided considerable in-kind support, most of it in the form of volunteer labor. In the US, for example, the value of this contribution was approximately US$300,000. In Uganda, the project manager cancelled his vacation and instead drove to villages to recruit participants.
Operated by: Same as initiator.

As policymaking becomes global in scale, the distance between citizens and policymakers increases, diminishing citizens’ influence. This creates a need for initiatives to bridge the widening democratic gap. The World Wide Views on Global Warming project (WWViews) addressed this need, establishing a model for including the world’s citizens in global policymaking. The novel and cost-effective project design makes it potentially possible for all nations on Earth to take part and to produce comparable results that can be clearly communicated to policymakers. WWViews enabled everyday citizens from all over the world to define and communicate their positions on issues central to the United Nations Climate Change negotiations (COP15), which took place in Copenhagen in December 2009. On 26 September 2009 – six weeks in advance of the COP15 summit – WWViews national partners hosted daylong, face-to-face deliberations at 44 sites in 38 nations spanning six continents. Each WWViews deliberation included on average 90 laypeople (totaling roughly 4,000 participants worldwide), chosen to reflect their nation’s or region’s demographic diversity, who gathered to engage in a structured dialogue. Participants from across the globe received the same balanced scientific information material, addressed and voted on an identical set of questions, and formulated their own action recommendations.

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Problem and objective

Everyone on our planet will experience the repercussions of global warming and the consequences of climate policies. Yet as with many other global issues, prior to the organization of World Wide Views on Global Warming (WWViews) there was no avenue through which the perspectives of everyday people from across the world could become known, much less influential, within global policymaking processes such as the UN climate change negotiations.

Instead, thousands of stakeholder groups – predominantly representing corporations, environmentalists, and the scientific community – organized to lobby the UN COP15 delegations, each group claiming to represent the global common good. Within this context there was an urgent need – both moral and practical – for an independent process, such as WWViews, that could represent the informed views of the billions of everyday people who are neither members of, nor represented by, these self-selected stakeholder organizations.

The truth is that, without a structured process for cultivating, integrating and communicating the considered views of ordinary people from around the Earth, no one – neither social scientists, journalists, stakeholder lobbyists, UN delegates nor other policy makers – can formulate a compelling representation of the overall global public interest, even with the best of intentions.

For instance, researchers can give us their best estimates of the environmental and economic consequences of global warming. But they cannot judge, interpret or ethically rank the human meaning of those consequences, nor devise culturally sensitive action responses, in a manner faithfully reflecting the life-experiences and social values of everyday people from La Paz, Bolivia to Niamey, Niger, and from Sofia, Bulgaria to Beijing, China (just a few of the 44 localities worldwide that hosted WWViews deliberations).

Collectively, non-experts are uniquely qualified to evaluate technological and political options from moral, social and cultural perspectives.

This explains the compelling moral and informational reasons for undertaking WWViews. But there were also practical political reasons.

The main mechanisms for orchestrating citizen influence within the UN COP climate change negotiations have been public opinion polls, the collectivity of stakeholder groups, or mass mobilization activities (such as those of 350.org or the Alliance for Climate Protection).

Each of these mechanisms has value. But they are subject to important strategic vulnerabilities. For instance, the results of public opinion polls can be discounted as reflecting the views of relatively uninformed people. Stakeholder and mass mobilization groups, in contrast, bring to bear the strength of large numbers of relatively informed and passionate people. But their corresponding strategic vulnerability is that – however large, noisy and visible their membership – they can be discounted as the voices of a minority of self-selected or self-interested actors.

WWViews complemented these more common public opinion mechanisms by providing a unique window into the informed views of a broad demographic sample of non-self-selected, ordinary people from all over the earth. In this way the WWViews results can function as unique and vitally needed political capital, of long-enduring value to many different actors in climate change politics, ranging from policy analysts to stakeholder groups, journalists, COP delegates, and other political leaders.

Structure and process

THE WWVIEWS DESIGN
Early 2008 and onwards

The cornerstones of the WWViews method were laid down at an early stage in a workshop with the first WWViews partners. The design of WWViews was developed in response to the practical challenges the partners faced:

• Cheap and easy: The method had to be feasible for potentially all countries in the world to participate, regardless of financial income and general education level.

• Transparent: The method needed to be described publicly and in detail so that it could be understood and scrutinized by any interested person or party.

• Clear link to policymaking: It had to address issues of immediate relevance to policy-makers.

• Both global and national: It had to be salient to both national and global decision making.

• Clear and comparable results: Results had to be comparable across countries and regions and they had to be easy to communicate to policy-makers.

• Informed citizens: Citizens had to be provided with the balanced information necessary in order to understand the issues debated.

• Deliberation: Citizens should be given the opportunity to discuss their views with each other before defining their own standpoints.

• Qualitative and quantitative: The citizens should have opportunity to phrase their own recommendations as well as voting on alternative answers to predefined questions.

On this basis, it was decided to have large groups of citizens (roughly 100) meet in each of their respective countries or regions to deliberate on an identical set of questions, using identical meeting designs, and then connect these meetings and their results through web technology. In practice, the average WWViews meeting size turned out to include 90 citizens.

The WWViews method differs in important ways from conventional opinion polls. Although the sample size of 90 per country or region somewhat limits the national statistical validity of the results, it is nonetheless large and diverse enough to give a sense of general trends in national and international opinion. Unlike opinion polls, the WWViews method provides respondents with balanced and scientifically based information, as well as an opportunity to deliberate for a full day with other citizens prior to rendering their judgements. It thus allows for more detailed questions and well-considered responses, and the WWViews results can be interpreted as a leading indicator for what conventional opinion polls will likely find in the future, as populations gradually learn more about climate change.

SELECTING THE PARTNERS
2008 – May 2009

The WWViews national institutional partners have been responsible for organizing WWViews meetings in their respective countries or regions. To become partners they should preferably

• have some experience with citizen participation methods

• be unbiased with regards to climate change

• be able to follow the common guidelines

• self-finance their participation in WWViews

Contacts were made to established networks that helped distribute the call and to identify potential institutional partners. In the end, over 50 partners joined forces to arrange 44 deliberations in 38 countries spanning six continents. The partners typically include public councils, parliamentary technology assessment institutions, non-governmental civil society organizations, and universities. Most partners were self-financed but several partners, especially from developing countries, received support from sponsors. Despite high motivation, several potential partners were not able to join, due to lack of financing. Had additional funding been available, the global coverage of WWViews could have been significantly expanded.

The WWViews partners include a dozen countries, most of them in the developing world, where there is practically no previous information on citizen views toward climate change.

QUESTIONS AND INFORMATION MATERIAL FOR THE CITIZENS
Mid 2008 and onwards

The questions put to the citizens worldwide were chosen to be of direct relevance to the COP15 negotiations. They had to be identical in all countries in order to allow for cross-national comparisons. To ensure clear communication to policy-makers, the questions were predefined with alternative answer options. The 12 questions chosen were clustered in 4 themes:

• Climate change and its consequences

• Long-term climate goal and urgency

• Dealing with greenhouse gas emissions

• The economy of technology and adaptation

To compensate for the restricted format of predefined questions, the meetings also included time for the citizens to formulate and vote on their own action recommendations addressed to the COP15 negotiators.

An information booklet of 40 pages was produced with background information about climate change (drawing on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s fourth assessment report) and the COP15 negotiation issues.

Information videos (each 5-12 minutes long) were made for each of the four themes, repeating the most essential information available in the booklet and ensuring that all citizens would participate in the meetings with the necessary information. All WWViews information material was translated into local languages.

In some countries, WWViews partners decided to gather the citizens the day before the meeting in order to allow time to familiarize themselves with the information material.

The questions and information material were developed in close cooperation between the WWViews partners. An international scientific advisory board was responsible for assuring the quality of the material, and it was all tested before completion by focus groups in different parts of the world.

THE WEB TOOL
Late 2008 and onwards

A special web tool was designed for the purpose of near-instant collection and presentation of the results from the WWViews meetings. The tool allows for statistical presentation and comparison of results between countries/regions and various international groupings (i.e. continents, Annex 1 countries, non-Annex 1 countries, low income countries, high income countries).

TRAINING SEMINAR
March 23-25, 2009

Most of the project managers from the WWViews national partner institutions met in Copenhagen half a year prior to WWViews Day for a training seminar. The purpose of the seminar was to ensure a common understanding of the project, uniformity of method implementation and procedural solutions for culturally specific challenges. Partners joining WWViews later than this date came to Copenhagen for individual training sessions.

SELECTING THE PARTICIPATING CITIZENS
May – August 2009

Guidelines for selecting the participating citizens were made in order to ensure the reliability of the results: The citizens at each meeting should reflect the demographic distribution in their country or region with regards to age, gender, occupation, education, and geographical zone of residency (i.e. city and countryside). A further criterion was that they should not be experts on climate change, neither as scientists nor stakeholders. Where appropriate, national partners added additional demographic criteria, which were relevant to their national context; for example race or ethnic groups

Based on reports from the partners, the guidelines have been followed, albeit with some local variation due to economic or practical limitations. A tendency towards under-representation of the lowest educated can be seen in many countries. Some countries ended up with fewer than 100 citizens (a few considerably lower). Some countries or regions recruited citizens from their entire geographical area, whereas others recruited from a smaller area in order to cut expenses.

The sample of citizens consulted in WWViews is large and diverse enough to give a sense of general trends in national and international opinion.

WWVIEWS DAY
September 26, 2009

The World

On September 26, 2009 the first WWViews meeting started at 9 am in Australia. The last two finished 36 hours later in Arizona and California, USA. As the day progressed, citizens voted on alternative answers to the predefined questions and developed their own recommendations. These results were instantly reported on www.WWViews.org, so that anyone with Internet access could – and they still can – compare answers to the various questions across countries, regions, political and economic groupings, etc.

An auto-generated summary of all the latest results was also instantly available.

Photos and videos from the various meetings were continuously uploaded to a media share server. Video interviews with citizens were made available as well.

Some countries arranged to link up via Internet videoconferences. Others presented pictures and results from other countries to their participants.

The 38 nations represented in WWViews were:

• Africa: Cameroon, Egypt, Ethiopia, Malawi, Mali, Mozambique, South Africa, and Uganda

• Asia: Bangladesh, China, India, Indonesia, Japan, The Maldives, Taiwan, and Vietnam

• Australia and Oceania: Australia

• Europe: Austria, Belgium (Flanders), Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Russia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and United Kingdom

• North America: Canada and United States

• South America: Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Saint Lucia, and Uruguay

The Meeting

All meetings followed the same schedule: The gathered citizens, divided into tables of 5-8 people, were led by a head facilitator and group moderators through a programme divided into four thematic sessions and a recommendation session.

During the thematic sessions, citizens voted on alternative answers to a total of 12 questions, thus making international, quantitative comparisons possible. Each thematic session was introduced by the facilitator and an information video.

The participants then engaged in moderated discussion at their tables, the purpose of which was to give all participants time to listen to other opinions and reflect prior to voting. Moderators were trained in advance to provide unbiased facilitation at the tables. Each thematic session concluded with citizens casting their votes anonymously on two to four questions. Votes were counted first at the tables, then by the staff and immediately reported to www.WWViews.org.

During the recommendation session, citizens were encouraged to write in their own words what they believed to be the most important recommendation to pass on to COP15 negotiators. Each table produced one top recommendation and all citizens then voted for the one from all the tables that they found most important, resulting in a prioritised list of recommendations, also reported to www.WWViews.org.

Most meetings were either opened or closed by ministers, COP15 negotiators or other government officials.

MAKING THE CITIZENS’ VIEWS HEARD

The target groups for receiving the WWViews results were politicians, negotiators and interest groups engaged in the UN climate negotiations leading up to COP15 and beyond. The WWViews results are especially significant for climate policy makers because they reflect the informed and considered views of a broad range of citizens across the world about the complex issues that were addressed at COP15 in December 2009.

In order to disseminate the views of the citizens, all national and regional WWViews partners made and implemented plans for how to reach these target groups. The goal was to make them aware of results and ensure that they take them into consideration.

EVALUATION

A number of the national partners in WWViews have also participated in documenting and evaluating the WWViews process and its results. Their results are scheduled to be published as Mikko Rask, Richard Worthington and Minna Lammi, eds., Global Deliberation: A World of Opportunity (Helsinki: National Consumer Research Center, forthcoming September 2010).

This book includes 14 original contributions on WWViews in Europe, North America, Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean, as well as introductory and concluding chapters. The topics addressed include the trend toward international deliberation, process and results of the deliberation, political and cultural variation across countries, and relevance to climate change policy and action. The authors include university professors as well as practitioners of deliberative democracy operating in an action research mode where the intervention in society is studied by those involved in the intervention.

Impact

The impact on political decisions was to give voice to ordinary citizens from around the world on an urgent global policy issue where this voice had never been expressed, and to amplify that voice through policy networks.

WWViews participants embraced their role as citizen advisors enthusiastically and seriously. Here are some of the key results:

• Around the world, nine out of ten participants voted that it was urgent for the UN COP15 climate summit to reach a new international agreement in 2009.

• Worldwide, 89 percent wanted that deal to reduce year 2020 greenhouse gas emissions for developed nations 25-40 percent or more beneath 1990 levels. That’s more ambitious than proposals that were on the table for the COP15 meeting.

• Globally, 88 percent favored holding global warming to within 2 degrees Celsius of pre-industrial levels. Half the participants, especially in countries predicted to be hardest hit by climate change, wanted to maintain global temperatures at the current level or bring them down to pre-industrial levels.

• There is strong consensus for sharing the burdens of mitigating and adapting to climate change, with 76 percent favoring 2020 emissions reduction targets for fast-growing economies like India, China, and Brazil. Among the 38 represented countries, Chinese participants were the least inclined to introduce 2020 targets for fast-growing economies; even so, 45 percent supported such reductions, another 52 percent supported limiting growth in emissions in fast-growing economies, and none believed that there should be no commitment to control such emissions.

Poignantly, citizens from the lowest-income nations – which have contributed the least to global warming but stand to suffer some of the worst consequences – were generally more willing to limit their own national greenhouse gas emissions than citizens from wealthier nations would consider asking them to.

Moreover, participants generally showed themselves willing to put their own money on the line to limit global warming. Worldwide, 74 percent said that fossil fuel prices should be increased in developed nations.

In addition, 86 percent of participants favored creating a new global financial mechanism to assist developing nations in limiting their carbon footprints and adapting to climate change.

What of nations that don’t meet their obligations under a new climate deal? 83 percent said that non-complying countries should be subject to significant or severe economic sanctions.

Extensive additional results are available online at www.wwviews.org/node/287.

Budget limitations prevented full implementation of the intended WWViews media and dissemination strategy. Yet even with a much reduced budget, the project achieved appreciable global media coverage, including:

• Canada: CBC News, television, September 27 and 28

• Chile: 24 Horas, television, September 29.

• Denmark: DR1, national television - 7 minutes, on September 27, 2009 ( feature articles in 3 of 4 major national newspapers and an 8-minute background story on national radio)

• France: Le Monde, international newspaper in French -1 page spread, on September 29

• Germany: Dadische Neuste Nachrichten, newspaper, September 28

• India: The Times of India, national newspaper, October 24, 2009

• Japan: NHK, national public television - 1 hour documentary broadcast in January 2010 based on news reporting from WWViews sites in Denmark, India, Japan, Maldives and US; plus a simultaneous panel of WWViews participants in India, Japan, Maldives and U.S. conducted in January 2010.

• Sweden, Dagens Nyheter, national news paper, September 27

• Taiwan, The China Post - Taiwan, newspaper, October 12

• Uganda, Monitor Daily, newspaper, October 7.

• UK: Channel 4 News, national television, on October 18

• US: Reuters news agency and Yahoo! Politics, October 26; Public Broadcasting System – Horizon Segment, Phoenix channel 8, September 26; extensive coverage in specialized press, e.g., GreenBiz, Worldwatch Institute

WWViews also publicized results immediately via the World Wide Web. In addition WWViews institutional partners and the Danish Board of Technology communicated the results directly to national delegations to the COP15 summit, as well as to national politicians and stakeholder groups. Evaluation research at COP15 indicates that up to 20% of observers and delegates at COP15 knew about the WWViews project and/or results.

Ambassadors from China, India, Sweden, Chile and Uganda participated in a panel discussion about WWViews in the Danish Parliament on 19 November. The Mayor of Sydney Australia promoted the results of WWViews actively within the COP15 mayors’ summit. Current and former delegates to United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, in addition to a sample of WWViews citizen participants, appeared on two public panels during the climate summit, one at the COP 15 site and the other at the Klimaforum conference held in Copenhagen during COP 15.

We know that WWViews results were taken seriously on a ministerial level in Australia, Austria, Bolivia, Chile, Denmark, Finland, Japan, Norway and Sweden – and quite likely, based on WWViews National Partner dissemination plans, in many other nations. Project results were also handed directly to the President of Chile and to the Prime Minister of Saint Lucia, who was point person to COP15 for the Caribbean Community & Common Market.

In many participating countries briefing meetings have been held with governmental offices. For example, in the United States WWViews results were presented in a briefing to staff of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) and of the White House Council on Environmental Quality, conveyed by OSTP to staff of the White House Office of Energy and Climate Change Policy and communicated to staff of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and of the State Department’s Special Envoy for Climate Change.

The significance of the OSTP briefing a few weeks before COP 15 was described by one of the recipients in a follow-up interview for evaluation research as follows:

“There was this fear that perhaps all the people going to Copenhagen [i.e., the U.S. delegation] were getting ahead of the public or going in a different direction, and it’s good to have that reassurance that we’re not. That’s the primary value for policy makers, because policy makers want to be representing the people and don’t want to be going in the opposite direction of the people. . . . [S]ometimes policy makers have to act with a long term view even if big segments of the public aren’t ready for it, but other times one wants to represent what a thoughtful group of citizens would do, and the idea that in going to Copenhagen the Administration position is fairly close to what an informed group of citizens would do is . . . a powerful reassurance [that] we’re not making this up.”

Broader context
WWViews was designed to inform national and global policymaking on climate change, particularly the Dec. 2009 UN COP15 climate summit. However, WWViews did not have a formal relationship to the COP15 process.


Type of contribution by participants
They determined the outcomes of the project

Target group
Most directly national and international policymakers on climate change. Also journalists, scholars and policy analysts concerned with climate change.

Indirectly, it was intended that the project would set a precedent for introducing citizen participation and democratic deliberation on other global issues.

Total number of active participants (approx.)
4,000

Specific effort made to include disadvantaged groups
Some effort to address disadvantaged groups

Please see the section titled "Inclusion of Marginalized Groups" in the answer to question 12, above.

Specific effort made to strengthen democratic capacities
Very much so. This is addressed in the answers to questions 10, 11 and 12, above.

Adoption by others
In some cases

Costs
Roughly US$3.5 million.

Time and working days
Roughly 20 person-years.

Extensive documentation, information and results from WWViews are available online at Link

For instance:

The final project report from WWViews is online at Link

A brief project video documentary is online at Link

The informational booklet given to the citizen participants in WWViews is online at Link

The informational videos shown during the WWViews meetings on Sept. 26, 2009 are online at Link

The results reached at each WWViews meeting site can be found via Link

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