While a town hall meeting may seem like an ideal venue for garnering support for local green energy projects, such a public gathering may not always yield the expected results.

Inviting individuals to engage in green energy projects, discuss them with developers, and propose ideas presupposes eventual project acceptance. However, participants’ values and their views on the proposed project significantly shape their willingness to partake in decision making processes.

Our research indicates that public participation varies, with attendance influenced by the project’s stage, ranging from abstract national visions to concrete local plans. In the early stages of decision-making, where broad climate visions are outlined, people with biospheric values who are concerned about the environment want to participate.

As projects become more tangible at a later stage, opponents in particular are more willing to participate than supporters. As a result, public participation is less effective because only specific groups are engaging, namely those who only want to say no to the project.

And timing matters a lot. Resistance develops if people feel they are only being consulted after pivotal decisions have already been made. This is known as “fake participation.” On the other hand, engaging people in the early, abstract decision making process might be challenging because people may not yet be motivated to participate.

Governments in many countries, including dozens across Europe, are trying to engage citizens early in decision-making in a new way: citizen assemblies. These events bring private citizens together to come up with guiding principles and priorities for future climate policy. We are still learning more about how the general public, both participants and nonparticipants, feel about them.

Initial findings show that when citizen assemblies are reflective of the general population and enable citizens to define their values at an early planning stage where their input can genuinely influence outcomes, they can be a promising approach for more engagement with public participation.