The Atelier Climat, a French citizen consultation process set up to promote sustainable development: a local democratic innovation?

Climate change is a global challenge that demands coordination at every level of action, raising new issues around the importance of the effective involvement of local populations who, in taking action, are no longer seen as being disconnected from politicians and academics. Citzens’ juries known as “citizen workshops” or “citizen conferences”—drawing on the principle of community information and discussion—are mushrooming in France. But what are public institutions seeking to achieve by setting up participatory processes of this kind, which take the form of democratic innovations? Study of the Atelier Climat (literally, “climate workshop”)—a French participatory democracy mechanism focusing on environmental issues—highlights the need for community validation in order to ensure the legitimacy of actions undertaken at the local level. This process can be viewed as a form of local democratic innovation, in its form, in its duration, and in the consultation that takes place between citizens and representatives, but one that nonetheless calls for geographical decentering and for collaboration between all actors in society in order to spread and be effective. It is a step-by-step innovation, conducive to the adoption of new practices—providing it is reappropriated, disseminated and imitated by everyone involved