Southampton Citizens' Climate Assembly

Timeframe: late 2023 – March 2024

At the end of 2023, Southampton City Council ran its first ever citizens' assembly, focused on climate change and transport. It was delivered in partnership with the University of Southampton, the University of Oxford and the public participation charity Involve, and brought together a panel of residents who broadly reflected the city to weigh the question:

How do we ensure an accessible, affordable and connected transport system in the city, whilst reducing carbon emissions and meeting climate targets?

A face-to-face assembly, with an online presence

Citizens' assemblies do their deepest work in the room — but the people in the room are only ever a fraction of a city. Across 2023 and 2024, Southampton used our open-source Your Priorities platform to widen that circle: alongside the face-to-face sessions, residents who were not assembly members could share their experiences of transport in Southampton online, and some of those contributions were carried directly into the assembly's deliberations. The result was a hybrid process — the focus and rigour of a sortition-based assembly, with an open online front door so the wider public could shape the conversation too.

From the room to the city's plans

The assembly produced three outputs aimed at the next iteration of the council's Local Transport Plan: a vision statement for the future of transport in Southampton, recommendations on priority actions, and ideas on funding for the council to consider. The council committed to using the recommendations to inform the next Local Transport Plan, to share them with organisations and stakeholders across the city, and to use them as a guide for future engagement.

Members presented their recommendations to council leadership, businesses and community organisations at a launch event in March 2024. It's a clear example of the model we believe in: structured, representative deliberation, opened up with digital tools so a whole city — not just the people in the room — can help decide its future.

Read more on the Southampton City Council assembly page.