One hundred Berliners against inertia
What happens when people from a city of millions are selected by lot, given time, scientific information and a table around which to argue? Berlin’s Climate Citizens’ Assembly produced a remarkably clear programme: fewer cars, better public transport, more solar power, faster building renovation – and climate action that is socially just.
Politicians promised to listen carefully. Four years later, the difficult journey from citizens’ recommendations to government action has become clear.
When a hundred people agree
There are sentences that do not sound like compromises. Certainly not compromises between a hundred people who had never met before, from Reinickendorf and Neukölln, from Marzahn and Zehlendorf, young and old, with and without university degrees. And yet the first guiding principle adopted by Berlin’s Climate Citizens’ Assembly in the summer of 2022 read: “Climate action has top priority. It must be implemented swiftly, decisively and in a socially just manner.”
Ninety-seven per cent voted in favour. The second principle received even greater support: 98 per cent agreed that energy and resource consumption had to fall across government, business and society. Ninety-seven per cent called for accompanying advice and public information, while 94 per cent backed climate adaptation measures to protect the population and biodiversity.
One might say that Berlin had asked its population how much climate policy it was prepared to tolerate. The answer, surprisingly often, was: more.
The harder part begins
That, however, was where the more difficult part of the experiment began. A citizens’ assembly can advise. Others have to decide.
The Climate Citizens’ Assembly did not appear out of nowhere. It was prompted by a citizens’ initiative. Berlin had declared a climate emergency in 2019 and tightened its climate targets. At the same time, it was becoming increasingly obvious that climate policy is not simply a matter of abstract tonnes of CO₂. It reaches into everyday life: How do people travel to work? What happens to rents after energy-efficient renovation? Who pays for a new heating system? Who gets to use the street?
A citizens’ assembly as a response to political pressure
The then red-red-green Senate therefore launched an experiment unlike anything previously attempted at German state level. One hundred Berliners were to discuss which climate measures the population might be willing to support – and under what conditions they would consider them fair.
“Our goal is clear: we want Berlin to become climate-neutral by 2045 at the latest,” Green climate senator Bettina Jarasch said at the launch. Because the necessary measures would affect the everyday lives of a great many people, she argued, they had to be discussed “directly with citizens”.
Berlin in miniature
Selection began with the population register. The group was then stratified according to criteria including age, gender, educational background, migration experience and borough. The aim was not to assemble the politically engaged Berlin that already turns up at hearings and public meetings, but a miniature version of the city itself. Members were aged between 17 and 80 and came from all twelve boroughs.
That is the crucial difference between a citizens’ assembly and conventional public consultation: you do not ask who would like to attend. You select people by lot who might otherwise never have thought of involving themselves in climate policy at all.
Learning, deliberating, disagreeing
From late April to June 2022, those selected discussed mobility, buildings and heating, and energy. At the request of the participants themselves, consumption and green spaces were added as further topics. Scientists provided information, subject advisers accompanied the deliberations, and fact-checkers researched unresolved questions. The process was organised by the nexus Institute together with the then Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies and Klima-Mitbestimmung JETZT.
Christiane Dienel, managing director of the nexus Institute, described the task at the outset like this: “The female and male participants discuss how we want to and can live together in Berlin in the future.”
It sounds more harmonious than it apparently was.
The value of disagreement
In the citizens’ report, one member recalled the “quite controversial discussions”, which had been valuable precisely because they were contentious. Hearing the different needs of others had led to a greater understanding of their wishes. Recommendations were repeatedly revised, criticised in plenary sessions, sent back into small groups and tested for compromise.
That is the real point of such a process. A citizens’ assembly is not an opinion poll with longer answer boxes. Its participants must be allowed to change their minds.
“Politics must finally put climate action first”
Beatrice Al-Mardini-Krukow, then 68 and from Reinickendorf, later described the process in rather more vivid terms: “With so many different Berliners, of course there was disagreement from time to time.” But in the end, she said, the group agreed that far more had to be done on climate policy. “Politics must finally put climate action first.”
The assembly ended up with 47 recommendations.
Where climate policy hurts most
They were particularly interesting in the area where climate policy in Berlin traditionally becomes painful: transport.
The assembly called for more attractive and accessible public transport, particularly outside the S-Bahn ring. Buses and bicycles should be given priority over cars when street space is allocated. Parking should become more expensive. The assembly proposed car-free days with free public transport and an emissions-free inner city within the S-Bahn ring from 2030. A narrow majority supported more 30 km/h zones, while 59 per cent opposed further construction of the A100 motorway.
The surprising radicalism of ordinary citizens
That was striking. One argument sometimes made against citizens’ assemblies is that a randomly selected cross-section of the population will inevitably be more cautious about uncomfortable measures than environmental organisations or political parties. Berlin suggested otherwise. After receiving information and deliberating together, a majority was prepared to recommend measures that would intervene quite directly in everyday life.
On buildings, the assembly demanded faster energy-efficient renovation while at the same time protecting tenants from rising rents. Berlin should press for mandatory renovation requirements at federal level. New development should encourage different forms of housing, home swaps and multi-generational living.
Solar power, heating and skilled labour
Support was even stronger in the energy field. Bureaucratic obstacles to solar power should be removed, community energy made easier and small photovoltaic installations – including balcony systems – encouraged. Oil and gas heating should gradually disappear. And because a transition in heating is impossible without people capable of installing heat pumps and solar panels, the assembly also called for more training and university courses for the skilled workers required.
Other recommendations addressed food waste, climate-friendly consumption, the circular economy, green roofs and the removal of sealed surfaces in public spaces.
“Deal responsibly with our recommendations”
Malte Hally, then 27 and from Treptow-Köpenick, summed up the underlying idea by saying that what mattered were “socially just measures, information and dialogue between politics and the public”. The Senate, he said, now had to “deal responsibly with our recommendations”.
At that point, the citizens’ work was finished. The political test was beginning.
42 out of 47
At first, the outcome looked unusually successful.
On 20 December 2022, the Senate published its official response. It addressed every single recommendation. More importantly, 42 of the 47 proposals were incorporated, either wholly or in part, into the updated Berlin Energy and Climate Protection Programme, BEK 2030.
What the Senate accepted – and what it did not
Among the measures taken up were easier expansion of renewable energy, the gradual replacement of oil and gas heating and the prospect of a zero-emissions zone within the S-Bahn ring. The Senate declined, among other things, to adopt a congestion charge and the compulsory conversion of vacant buildings into housing.
On paper, that was an impressive proportion.
But putting a recommendation into a government programme is not the same thing as creating a bus lane, renovating a building or reducing car traffic.
Then the government changed
After Berlin’s repeat election in 2023, a Christian Democratic-Social Democratic coalition replaced the previous red-red-green government. That marked the beginning of the second story of the Climate Citizens’ Assembly: the story of implementation.
Some of its proposals remain part of BEK 2030. Berlin continues to support solar power, energy advice and climate education, and implementation of the Energy and Climate Protection Programme is tracked through a dedicated monitoring system. The 2023 monitoring report, for example, records ongoing projects on civic engagement and climate education.
The citizens’ assembly as a “guiding principle for action”
In solar policy in particular, the new Senate has explicitly continued to invoke the assembly. In November 2025, Berlin’s mayor and economics senator Franziska Giffey told the economic affairs committee that its recommendations were an “important guiding principle for action”. She referred to the expansion of small photovoltaic systems, the SolarZentrum advice service, digital advisory services, SolarPLUS funding and simplified approval procedures. At that point, she said, Berlin had around 53,000 solar installations.
A representative of the climate administration told the same meeting that the Senate decision of 2022 remained “guiding” and was still being implemented.
That is one interpretation.
The vanishing sense of commitment
The other is that the recommendations were indeed incorporated into a programme but were no longer pursued politically with the same determination with which they had originally been announced.
In 2025, the Greens therefore tabled a motion in the Berlin House of Representatives bearing the unmistakable title “Finally implement the recommendations of the Berlin Climate Citizens’ Assembly”. They demanded a concrete timetable and secure funding for the proposals that had been incorporated into BEK.
When participation appears to have no consequences
Green MP Stefan Taschner warned in November 2025 that anyone who took public participation seriously also had to respond to its results. Otherwise, he argued, there was a danger that such participation processes would no longer be taken seriously.
Michael Efler of the Left described the recommendations as “interesting, ambitious and in some cases surprising”. But after the change of government, he said, there had been no serious political engagement with them.
A party-political dispute
The Social Democrats partly rejected that criticism. MP Dunja Wolff said the citizens’ assembly had been “not unimportant” and had discussed many forward-looking ideas. At the same time, she argued that little had been implemented even while Jarasch was still in office.
The AfD, by contrast, rejected the process in principle. Its MP Frank-Christian Hansel criticised the involvement of civil society through councils and described the recommendations as ideological.
The economic affairs committee ultimately recommended rejecting the Greens’ motion.
Back to ordinary party politics
And so the Climate Citizens’ Assembly ended up where almost all climate policy eventually ends up: in the middle of ordinary party-political conflict.
The Berlin case also reveals a problem that extends far beyond the city. The question of whether citizens’ assembly recommendations have been “implemented” cannot be answered with a single figure.
What does “implemented” actually mean?
Forty-two of 47 recommendations were incorporated wholly or partly into BEK. That alone amounts to considerable political influence.
But “taken up” can mean many things. A recommendation may be adopted word for word, watered down, folded into an existing programme or merely mentioned as a long-term goal. And even a measure that sounds binding has not really been implemented until administration, budgets and political majorities have turned it into reality.
The difficult recommendations
That applies above all to the assembly’s most politically controversial proposals: less space for cars, higher parking charges, 30 km/h limits, an emissions-free inner city and opposition to further extension of the A100 motorway.
Here it would be difficult to argue that Berlin has since followed the programme of its citizens’ assembly. On important transport questions, the political direction of the Christian Democratic-Social Democratic Senate differs markedly from the preferences expressed by the assembly in 2022. The very fact that parliament debated a motion in 2025 calling for the recommendations to be “finally” implemented shows how unresolved the controversy remains.
Where the assembly has left its mark
In other areas – particularly solar power, public advice, climate education and individual elements of BEK – some of the recommendations have at least partly translated into concrete policy.
The verdict, therefore, is neither that the citizens’ assembly was ignored nor that the government implemented its recommendations.
It lies uncomfortably somewhere in between.
The democratic promise
Perhaps that is the most important lesson from Berlin.
The hundred citizens were not supposed to govern. Nobody had promised them that their 47 recommendations would become law. A citizens’ assembly replaces neither parliament nor government. But the process contained another, quieter promise: if citizens devote many hours of their free time to listening to experts, arguing with one another and negotiating compromises, politics will not treat their conclusions like the results of some inconsequential online survey.
Being heard is not the same as getting your way
At the handover, Bettina Jarasch had promised that the Senate and parliament would engage thoroughly with the assembly’s “clear and precise recommendations”.
Initially, that did happen. The Senate responded to all 47 proposals and incorporated most of them into its climate programme.
But that is precisely why implementation becomes a test of democracy itself.
What remains after the lottery
Citizens’ assemblies generate a peculiar form of political expectation. They take people out of their everyday lives, give them information, time and responsibility, and ask them to consider what might be good for everyone. If those same people later see their painstakingly negotiated recommendations disappear into government documents or lose political weight after an election, participation can turn into disappointment.
After eight weeks of disagreement and compromise, Beatrice Al-Mardini-Krukow formulated a simple sentence: “We cannot afford to hesitate.”
Years later, that sentence can also be read differently.
The real test
Not merely as a call for stronger climate action, but as a challenge to a democracy that asks its citizens for advice and must then explain what it has done with that advice.
Perhaps the success of a citizens’ assembly is not ultimately decided by whether politicians adopt every recommendation. Perhaps it is decided by whether those selected by lot can say at the end: We were heard – even where they chose not to follow us.