A preliminary technical framing of climate change in the evidence of citizens' climate assemblies (CCAs) might lead to closing down policy options and ignoring other sides of climate change, such as questions of power. A limited range of frames can negatively impact epistemic conditions for deliberation and lead to decreased engagement by participants who do not share the values proposed by the dominant frames. As climate change framing can affect the policy recommendations participants produce, a dominating technical framing may reinforce narrow and incomplete views on climate change and reduce novel and potentially transformative policy ideas. I developed a framework to study climate change framing in CCAs and used it on general climate change and topic-specific (energy) information provided to UK, German and Global CCA participants. Although the three CCAs differed in many aspects, no major differences in the framing of climate change stood out. More differences in framing arose between different speaker types and between the written material of the Global assembly and speaker presentations across assemblies. Also, the framing within the topic group energy was more technical than in the general climate change information. In total, frames regarding human safety, governance issues, fairness between people and countries and technology and energy were used most in the general climate change information. There was little mention of the role of science, communication, economy, personal agency or human-nature relationship. Literature suggests that a technocratic view on climate change dominates the evidence of CCAs. However, my findings do not fully confirm that. Nevertheless, there remained room for improvement in applying a more diverse set of frames and including alternative and potentially transformative views in the three case studies. Future research can use my framework to systematically assess the framing of climate change in the evidence of CCAs.

Even though there is a strong public support for more ambitious policies to mitigate climate change, the politics do not yet follow. Climate assemblies (CA) have been suggested to improve climate change governance by bringing the citizens into the policymaking. However, in systems of representative democracy, the effect of CAs is largely decided by whether the politicians choose to follow the CA’s recommendations. Therefore, the politicians’ attitudes to CAs are of importance. This study is based on interviews with politicians in four Swedish municipalities who are about to conduct their first CA. The politicians’ attitudes to CAs are explored regarding how they view the democratic qualities of the CA and what their expectations are. The results show that CAs are mainly valued as a tool to create innovative policy proposals that are unlikely to stem out of the regular processes. Furthermore, the politicians see it as advantageous compared to regular citizen participation processes that the participants are well-informed and many social groups are represented. Regarding the role of the CA, the politicians frequently contrast the CA’s narrow focus on climate with their responsibility for the whole municipality. The argument is that the CA is not knowledgeable enough to make prioritisations concerning the whole municipality. Thus, the CA produces recommendations that the politicians will consider, but not necessarily follow. The study also highlights implications of the results for the design of CAs, for example in terms of recruitment and scope. There is no one size fits all approach, instead there are trade-offs that need to be acknowledged in the design to increase the chances of the CA to reach its set purpose.