Communicating Climate Assemblies – Launch of New KNOCA Guidance

The increased commissioning of climate assemblies – and citizens’ assemblies more generally – has not been matched by an increase in their visibility and resonance among broader publics and key stakeholders. This is deeply problematic because communication is widely recognised as a key enabler of impact for climate assemblies. Communication is still too often an afterthought: not prioritised, limited budgets and timelines, weak capacity, and a reactive approach that rarely fits the news cycle.‍

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Communicating Climate Assemblies, the latest KNOCA guidance, takes a first step towards a more comprehensive approach to communication, pulling together the diverse experiences of assembly practitioners and organisers. The guidance provides a practical toolkit for designing a communication strategy, acknowledging that each climate assembly is unique and answers to its own set of context-based challenges. It follows a series of steps across an assembly’s lifecycle - before, during and after – helping communicators connect their objectives to the larger question of impact and translating those into a coherent strategy.

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For this launch event, we were joined by Camille Dobler, author of Communicating Climate Assemblies to present the key elements of the guidance. Camille was joined by Tessa Dunlop from the Joint Research Centre and Jamie Kelsey Fry from One World or None who offered their thoughts on the guidance and the challenges that remain for communicating climate assemblies.

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You can find the guidance doument here.

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