Climate jury with immigrants
For the first time, a Citizens' Jury has been held in Berlin exclusively with new Berliners. Participants included people who had moved to Berlin from Syria, Morocco, Iran, Afghanistan and Ukraine and who had been selected at random.
The discussions were held in Arabic, Farsi, Ukrainian, German and English. Of the 26 participants in the New Berliners Jury, 17 spoke neither German nor English. From 12 to 18 July 2024, the focus was on what measures the city of Berlin should take to achieve sustainable, climate-friendly mobility. What the 30 participants particularly emphasised was that, for once, they were not asked about migration-specific issues, as is often the case, but about a topic that affects us all in society.
Videos from Climate Assembly
The 15-minute presentations from the Citizens' Assembly on Climate Change held in Berlin in 2022 were available in the form of YouTube videos on the topics of climate change, mobility and the climate policy measures of the city of Berlin, so that the participants of the New Berliners Jury heard exactly the same presentations on certain selected topics as the participants of the Climate Assembly.
The videos were translated and subtitled in advance in the three languages. Since it was not technically possible to transmit the subtitled videos on three different screens, the organisers from the Technical University of Berlin provided the participants with ten iPads, which the respective language groups could gather around, in addition to the original lecture being projected onto a screen.
Exchange with experts
The experts whose presentations had been selected by the Citizens‘ Jury organisers were invited to 15- to 30-minute question-and-answer sessions to give participants the opportunity to ask questions and experience the experts live. After the presentations, the participants discussed specific questions and scenarios presented by the mini-public organisers in six groups and then discussed the results of these discussions in plenary sessions. Headphones were provided for the plenary sessions and the question-and-answer sessions with the invited experts. Three translators simultaneously interpreted all contributions live.
On 17 July, two virtual reality bicycles were provided to provide information for possible future scenarios. With the help of the VR equipment, the cyclists were able to take a virtual tour through Berlin in the year 2037. This gave the participants the opportunity to experience many of the discussed measures in the city and to be inspired by new ideas.
Goal climate-neutral Berlin in 2045
Divided into six small groups, they had discussed the future of mobility in Berlin, sometimes monolingually and sometimes in several languages, always based on the overarching goal of a climate-neutral Berlin in 2045.
After the participants had initially formulated their own recommendations on the last day of the meeting, they then looked at the recommendations on the topic of mobility from the 2022 Climate Assembly. On this basis, they finally agreed on their own recommendations. Some of these are formulated as additions to the recommendations of the Climate Assembly, some are completely new. All of the recommendations - their own and those from 2022 - were voted on at the end.
Differences between mini-publics
Some differences compared to the climate citizens’ assembly can be seen in the recommendations of the New Berliners Jury and in the voting behaviour. As also became clear in the group and plenary discussions, the issue of racism in public space plays a major role and influences the sense of security, which is reflected, among other things, in the demand to introduce ticket barriers on the underground and suburban railways. The New Berliners‘ Jury takes a different view of the importance of cars. The citizens’ jury rejects car-free zones, for example. In addition, a fundamental tendency is emerging: incentives tend to meet with approval rather than bans.
By contrast, most recommendations of the Climate Assembly met with broad approval, including permanently low ticket prices and a clear pricing structure, a user-friendly linking of different means of transport, and the barrier-free expansion of public transport.
16 recommendations
The 16 recommendations of the New Berliners Jury include the creation of more parking spaces for bicycles, including their monitoring. In addition, training should be offered to those who find it difficult to switch to cycling. There should be uniform prices for public transport throughout the city, and the price zones should be abolished. Sensitivity and racism training is proposed for public transport employees. Public announcements and information should be multilingual.
In addition, the New Berliners propose to lower the price of the Deutschlandticket to 9 euros. Bus and train in Berlin should be cheaper overall and there should be a family ticket. The safety of cyclists should be increased by widening cycle paths and improving infrastructure; in addition, penalties for motorists who obstruct cyclists/cause accidents should be tightened.
Great enthusiasm for the citizens‘ jury
A bonus system is being proposed for people who use bicycles and public transport. The share of renewable energies in public transport is to be increased by installing solar panels on the roofs of trains, trams and public transport buildings. To create more space on the roads, the jury members propose developing a drone delivery system for small packages.
In follow-up surveys and interviews, the New Berliners Jury participants showed great enthusiasm for the mini-public. It became clear that the composition of the team that prepared, organised and conducted the New Berliners JUry contributed significantly to its success. Culture- and language-sensitive issues were easily resolved before and during the event because eight of the 13 people on the team are immigrants themselves and were able to contribute not only their language skills but also their cultural expertise.
Involving crisis-prone groups
The framework of the New Berliners Jury was provided by the EU Interreg project on participatory governance, GEtCoheSive: twelve partners from seven cities in Italy, Slovenia, Austria and Germany are working to improve participation, particularly with regard to the inclusion of crisis-prone groups.
These population groups include women, children and young people, people with disabilities, people on the run, LGBTIQ+ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex, queer and questioning people and other gender identities), and ethnic and religious minorities.
Selection Criteria
For the New Berliners Jury, people who had moved to Berlin since 2015 were selected according to certain criteria and in a two-stage process. One focus was on the question: Can the willingness of migrants to participate in a citizens' jury be increased by addressing them in their respective languages of origin?
When preselecting the groups to be involved, the mini-public organisers had roughly followed the immigration figures: since, according to the statistics, by far the largest number of people came to Berlin from Syria and Afghanistan at the time of the random selection for the New Berliners’ Jury, they initially concentrated on the languages Arabic and Farsi. Since 2022, a large number of Ukrainian refugees had also arrived.
When putting together the New Berliners Jury, the criteria of age, origin and gender, as well as education, current occupation and language skills in German and English, were taken into account, in addition to the Berlin district in which the prospective members lived.
Support services
One challenge of the procedure, the accessibility of less educated sections of the population, could only be partially solved by the citizens' jury organisers with their approach of addressing people in their respective languages of origin. An above-average number of registrations for the New Berliners Jury came from people with higher educational qualifications.
In order to keep the threshold as low as possible, the mini-public organisers made it clear in the invitation that they would provide additional help: barrier-free access, childcare and the (usually not provided for in the citizens’ jury) possibility of being accompanied by a trusted person, provided that the accompanying persons themselves do not actively participate in the citizens' jury. Several of those invited took advantage of this support and registered the need for childcare or asked to be accompanied by a family member.
Of the 806 invitations sent out, 74 people responded, a particularly high number of whom were Ukrainians and Farsi speakers, but fewer Arabic speakers.
Recommendations to Senator for Climate Protection
The New Berliners Jury was organised by the Technical University of Berlin in cooperation with the Berlin Senate Commissioner for Participation, Integration and Migration. The Nexus Institute was entrusted with the implementation.
On 14 October 2025, the participants of the New Berliners Jury were invited to the Senate Department for Mobility, Transport, Climate Protection and the Environment to present the recommendations they had drawn up in July to Senator Bonde as an additional vote on the 2022 Climate Citizens' Assembly. The Senator read out all 16 recommendations, which had been presented to her in a citizens' report by two members of the mini-public, and promised to invite the New Berliners Jury again in around a year's time to report on the status of Berlin's transport policy.