Towards a Global Climate Citizenship?: Focused on “World Wide Views on Climate and Energy 2015” in Korea

What is a global climate citizenship, and how can it be formed? This paper tries to answer the question based on a citizens' participation project on a global level, “World Wide Views on Climate and Energy ( WWViews) in 2015”, where I served as a national project manager in Korea. WWViews is a multisite citizen consultation on global issues such as biodiversity or climate change. The core of WWViews method is to have citizens at multiple sites deliberate the same issue on the same day. The theoretical framework upon which WWViews is based is deliberative democracy. The WWviews public consultation method is a kind of mixture of some deliberative forums like consensus conference and deliberative polling.

10,000 citizens from 76 countries including Korea participated in the WWViews event on climate change on the same day, 6^th June in 2015. In Korea 70 randomly selected citizens around the whole country participated in the one-day long deliberations on climate change issue along with other global citizens. The day was divided into 5 thematic sessions, where 13 small groups composed of 5-8 citizens deliberated on the issue assisted by a trained facilitator. After the deliberation, citizens voted individually on the prepared questions related to the issue. Votes were then collected and reported to the World Wide Views website, where results could be compared as they arrived throughout the day – starting in Fiji in Pacific Ocean and finishing on the American West Coast.

It can be said that WWViews is one example of how new, collaborative networks on the global issues can be established globally. This paper will try to scrutinize how much has “World Wide Views on Climate and Energy 2015” contributed to the formation of “global climate citizenship” on a global issue like climate change through analyzing WWViews experience in Korea 2015.