Synthetic Participation: How Zoom Shaped the Experience of Participation in the Danish Climate Assembly

Abstract

As part of the Danish Climate Act of 2019, the government established a Climate Citizens’ Assembly to secure public participation in the formulation of climate policy. Due to COVID-19, the Assembly was moved online to the virtual meeting platform Zoom. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, this article examines what happens when such participatory processes are conducted digitally, asking how the digital mediation of the Assembly shaped both facilitation practices and participants’ experiences of participation. Combining Knorr Cetina's notion of the “synthetic situation” with Kelty's concept of “formatted participation,” we argue that participation in the Assembly became “synthetic,” both because digital mediation created forms of estrangement and because the online format required greater procedural rigidity, replacing engaged discussion with a demanding, highly structured writing process. The analysis extends theoretical discussions of synthetic and formatted participation to digitally mediated democratic experiments, demonstrating that the medium of participation—while easily overlooked—can fundamentally reshape the character and quality of public deliberation and citizen participation.