Introduction

As pointed out in previous chapters, the Finnish political system's capacity for future-regarding governance hinges on an advanced foresight system that includes experts and stakeholders in policymaking. Finnish citizens tend to have high levels of trust in experts and political institutions (Bäck and Kestilä-Kekkonen 2019), and this seems to be a crucial factor behind the success of Finland's elite-driven policymaking system. However, only cautious steps have been taken to make the Finnish policymaking system more participatory, and the country, more generally, seems to be lagging behind the ‘deliberative wave’ that has increased deliberative participation in other countries (OECD 2020). Against this backdrop, this chapter aims to calibrate the potential contributions of deliberative minipublics in policymaking processes on climate change in Finland.

Minipublics are small deliberative forums that consist of randomly selected participants who come together to engage in informed deliberations on specific policy issues. They are normally designed to represent the demographic or political diversity of the populations from which the participants are drawn (Setälä and Smith 2018). There are small-scale minipublics such as Citizens’ Juries and Consensus Conferences, which typically include only a few dozen participants, and large-scale minipublics such as Citizens’ Assemblies, which may include hundreds of participants. Previous studies show that participation in minipublics enhances learning (Setälä et al. 2010), understanding of different viewpoints (Luskin et al. 2014), empathy (Grönlund et al. 2017) and long-term thinking (Kulha et al. 2021). In this respect, minipublics have proved to be an effective way to involve citizens in policymaking on complex and long-term issues. However, there are many outstanding questions regarding the roles of deliberative minipublics in policymaking and the ways in which minipublics might be ‘coupled’ with other representative institutions (Hendriks 2016).

Climate change is a prime example of a future-regarding problem. In order to address climate change, policymakers must understand the future consequences of various policy options, and they must be able to forge long-term commitments among political elites, citizens and other stakeholder groups. In recent years, there has been a proliferation of deliberative minipublics on climate issues in various countries and at different levels of governance.