Lessons around the impact of the global assembly

This paper focuses on the Global Assembly (GA) held before COP26 in Glasgow. It compares the organisers’ and assembly members’ perceptions of influence with analysis of the GA’s actual influence, by examining the GA’s efforts to ‘couple’ with institutions of global climate governance, and its contribution to deliberation-making, legitimacy-seeking, and deliberative capacity-building. It concludes that any future global climate assembly needs to recognise global climate governance as a deliberative system, conceptualise dynamics of influence in systemic terms, and seek to build multi-directional links across this system.