...and what does democracy look like in a time of ecological crisis?
Democracy, if it is to lead us out of the climate crisis, must evolve.
It must go deeper than votes and beyond short-term cycles.
It must become participatory, resilient, local, and bold enough to confront the systems that brought us here.
This report sets out the context of Lough Neagh (page 8) and how we have begun that conversation about democratic futures through our event ‘Who Speaks for the Lough?’ (page 11) ; commentary from a range of people on the need for deeper and more inclusive conversations (page 15), and how a Lough Neagh Assembly can change the story from one of fractured interests to one where collective wisdom shapes a fair and sustainable future (page 30)
Who speaks for Lough Neagh? Executive Summary
In a time of ecological crisis, democracy must evolve beyond elections and short-term cycles. It must become participatory, inclusive, and bold enough to challenge the systems that have led us here.
Lough Neagh, Ireland and the UK’s largest lake and source of over 40% of its drinking water, is in crisisecologically, institutionally, and democratically. Pollution, climate change, contested ownership, and fragmented governance have left the Lough vulnerable, while the voices of local communities and the natural world itself remain largely unheard in institutional decision making.
In response, Involve and partners brought together community groups, environmental NGOs, and democracy practitioners for the event “Who Speaks for the Lough?” in March 2025. Participants explored how a citizens’ assembly - a proven, inclusive democratic process — could help chart a shared, sustainable future for the Lough
Key reflections emerged:
Trust and inclusion matter. People felt heard, safe, and respected in the deliberative space, reinforcing the power of open, intentional dialogue.
Conventional governance is failing. The complexity of the Lough’s crisis - pollution, contested ownership, ecological decline - cannot be addressed through traditional, top-down approaches alone.
The possibility of a citizens’ assembly offers hope. By bringing together a diverse, randomly selected group of people to learn, deliberate, and co-create recommendations, an assembly can build legitimacy, unlock new solutions, and bridge the gap between citizens, experts, and policymakers.
Nature’s voice must be heard. There was a shared sense that the Lough is not just a resource to manage but a living entity deserving protection and representation.
Why now?
The Lough Neagh crisis meets the criteria for a citizens’ assembly: complex trade-offs, deep ethical questions, contested interests, and a historic deficit in meaningful public participation. The appetite for change is clear; what’s missing is a democratic process capable of matching the scale of the challenge.
Next steps:
Involve proposes the creation of a Lough Neagh Assembly: a citizens’ assembly co-designed over the next year with communities, landowners, statutory bodies, environmental groups, and others.
This collaborative approach will ensure the assembly’s remit, design, and outcomes have credibility, legitimacy, and real impact.
Context
reciprocity rather than extraction.
The story of Lough Neagh is not yet finished, and in that not-knowing lies possibility.
Who speaks for the Lough?
Event summary
In December 2024, Involve began hearing from groups who have long raised concerns about the lack of meaningful participation, transparency, and accountability in decisions relating to the Lough. Trust in the responsible bodies is low.
Despite mounting pressure to address this through more openness and transparency, DAERA has shown little willingness to depart from the status quo: engagement that focuses on stakeholders (as distinct from the general public) and the use of consultative (as distinct from collaborative) methodologies.
In this context, interest has grown in the idea of a Citizens’ Assembly as a way to reimagine how decisions about the Lough are made - putting people and place at the heart of the conversation. Yet, while the idea has traction, there is currently no shared understanding of what this would involve, how it would be run, or what would give its outcomes legitimacy and impact.
This is where we knew we could help. We know citizens’ assemblies — their essential features and creative possibilities, the standards that uphold their legitimacy, and their capacity to hold space for the more-than-human, making room for other ways of knowing, relating, and belonging.
We wanted to start with a conversation, so we organised a workshop and panel discussion that was held on the shores of Lough Neagh on Friday 21 March 2025.
The workshop was about Lough Neagh, but it was also about democracy. It explored the complex and urgent intersection where these two realities meet: the ecological crisis of a place ancient and alive, and the struggle to reshape the ways we make decisions together.
The day began with an invitation to reconnectwith the lake, with each other, with curiosity itself. Each participants’ name tag named a unique species found in the Lough or on its shores, and invited everyone to reflect on how the voices of those more-than-human beings can be heard in decisions about their future (see page 48 for a list of those species).
We offered this invitation to participants: Show up with openness. Hold the problem in front of us, not between us.
Embrace the multiplicity of voices, knowing that many perspectives help us see the whole. Accept that none of us has all the answers, but together we have much wisdom. And remember those who cannot speak today - the creatures, the ancestors, the future generations - whose voices we must make space for.
At the start of the day, we stood together on the Lough’s shore, the sounds of water gently lapping, the calls of mallards overheard, with an encouragement to engage with deep time and complex histories.
Participants moved from reflection to curiosity to dialogue, hearing from a panel of democracy elders from across Ireland and Scotland, people who have witnessed the power of citizens’ assemblies and juries to bring communities together around the urgent challenges of nature and climate.
The workshop also revealed the gap between promise and practice. Despite commitments made under New Decade, New Approach in 2020 to hold at least one citizens’ assembly annually in Northern Ireland, none have yet been convened.
Elsewhere, in the UK, and in Scotland, Wales, and Ireland, these democratic experiments are flourishing, proving that when people are given space, support and respect, they can shape the future in ways no politician or agency can alone.
Northern Ireland stands alone as the only part of these islands where citizens have not been invited into decision making in this way.
This report is not just the summary of an event. It is a call — to recognise that the future of Lough Neagh depends on our willingness to listen deeply and act together. It invites us to imagine governance that is biocentric, transparent, inclusive — one that honours the lake’s voice alongside our own.
And if we are willing to step into the conversation with openness and courage, perhaps the lake will teach us what democracy can be.
Participantreflections
Pooja Sharma, Earth Law Centre
The Who Speaks for the Lough event highlighted one simple but necessary belief in deliberative democracy: Trust.
This was a result of deliberative care, openness, and intentional listening in the facilitated space.
Diverse stakeholders and direct, and indirect, interested parties felt safe in their honesty and advocacy. Lough Neagh holds such a personal, deep relationship with the surrounding community, and the desire to protect and advocate for Her wellbeing was clear from the first activity of stepping outside and listening to the habitat.
This event reminded us how and why citizen assemblies work effectively — with extended time to learn and build trust, relational magic can create harmony.
Victoria
McGreehan,
National Trust
I came along to the event curious about how citizen voice can play a role in effecting change to support the restoration of Lough Neagh.
It was both refreshing and fascinating to hear the experiences of professionals who have played a part in supporting citizen assemblies in other jurisdictions and to learn about the models they used and impacts they've had.
I came away convinced that civic engagement has a key role to play in the future health and well being of the Lough and its communities.
More hopeful that an assembly exploring the complex environmental and social issues could be part of the shared journey of making things better for the Lough, its wildlife and its people.
Suzie Cahn, iCommunity
The event brought clarity to the challenges posed by the polluted, privately owned Lough Neagh— an archetypal “wicked problem” marked by contested ownership, ecological degradation, and a lack of effective state response.
With multiple stakeholders, overlapping interests, and no clear route to resolution, Lough Neagh illustrates the limits of conventional governance in the face of deep environmental and human complexity.
What stood out was the experience shared by practitioners involved in citizen assemblies, particularly those referencing specific Citizens’ Assemblies. These forums, when well-designed, can create conditions for inclusive, reflective decision making—offering legitimacy where formal institutions struggle to act.
Rather than promising neat solutions, presenters emphasised the value of collective reasoning, trustbuilding, and the ability of citizens to grapple openly with uncertainty and trade-offs.
Speakers urged for a broader ethical frame —one that considers the lough not simply as a resource to be managed, but as a living entity with its own needs and entitlements. Including this perspective within deliberative processes, would deepen democratic practice and reconnect human and ecological well-being in future policies.
The combination of democratic innovation and ecological ethics felt both pragmatic and quietly transformative—a way forward for places where state and other approaches have been in conflict. For me a powerful thread running through the event was the integration of nature's own perspective.
This led me afterwards to look at examples and found New Zealand’s legal recognition of the Whanganui River as a legal person. I wondered if we could ever achieve such a transformative approach on the island of Ireland.
The event has galvanised our belief that a citizens’ assembly will help address ongoing public participation deficits and ensure that citizens have a meaningful say in what happens next.
EJNI’s analysis of environmental injustice at Lough Neagh highlighted a very significant gap in the various responses to the ecological crisis so far.
This gap relates to transparency and meaningful public participation in developing sustainable solutions that attract public buy-in from society in Northern Ireland and on the island of Ireland.
The ‘Who speaks for the Lough?’ event reaffirmed to me not only the need for a participative and deliberative approach to addressing the root causes of environmental injustice present at Lough Neagh, but also highlighted the appetite for an initiative that fills the current participation gap.
Pádraig Mac Niocaill, Save Lough Neagh Campaign
A large consequence of the crisis at Lough Neagh is distrust in our governing bodies, particularly due to the lack of transparency on the crisis.
This one of the reasons Involve’s meeting on the concept of a citizens’ assembly was important, to challenge the top down structure that has persisted in regards to the crisis, and that citizens, not ‘experts’ or ‘stakeholders’ should be the only people at the table.
Everyone from swimmers, fishermen, to casual walkers have been impacted by this ecocide and having those voices amplified matters more than ever.
James Orr, Friends of the Earth Northern Ireland
The framing and tone of the event, ‘Who Speaks for the Loug’h, spoke with integrity on the need for more participation and much greater openness. The title of event, the Linked In piece written by Rebekah before the event and the facilitation for the day provided fresh insights and is offering new pathways on what a democratic Lough Neagh could look like.
The speakers were the right speakers and the grounding exercises worked to put people at their ease.
Even before we move into a robust deliberative process for Lough Neagh we are seeing the ripples of the event in other initiatives, encouraging many to consider that whilst the Lough has many problems perhaps the most important and the most challenging has been the historical democratic deficit around Who Speaks for the Lough?
Bernadette Devlin McAliskey, Lough Neagh Development Trust
My lasting impression was the joyful hope, hopeful joy and energy of the whole day.
My key take away was the affirmation that deliberate democracy is essential, not a timeconsuming, inconvenient, and unnecessary addon to 'representative democracy.
It was so good to feel less alone in that belief.
Next steps: to begin some serious collaborative work on embedding the concept in the ongoing discussions, and developments on the future of Lough Neagh and her surrounding communities.
Rory Crawford, National Trust
Lough Neagh’s challenges originate and are felt locally, but I left ‘Who Speaks for the Lough’ feeling like they are a microcosm of the challenges we face globally in protecting our shared home.
And without sounding too grandiose, this is about one of the fundamentals of life: water.
We need it, nature needs it - isn’t that something that a representative group of people should have a say on?
This is a situation ripe for public participation to set a new, equitable and more positive course for this incredibly important Lough and the life it sustains.
Next
Towards a more democratic future for Lough Neagh
steps
We are calling for a Lough Neagh Assembly — a new democratic intervention to create positive change.
The ecological crisis at Lough Neagh is not only a local emergency, it reflects deeper, systemic failures in environmental governance across Northern Ireland.
We need new democratic innovations to really address those failures and build new ways of addressing the crises we face.
Trust in political institutions across society in Northern Ireland is already at historic lows. The way decisions are made, disconnected from the people and places they affect, is simply not working.
If we are to repair that trust, decision makers must take bold steps toward building new forms of governance: ones that are participatory, robust, transparent, and just.
A citizens’ assembly offers one such path. It is a tried and tested democratic mechanism designed specifically for complex, contested, and longstanding issues like those facing Lough Neagh.
A citizens’ assembly brings together a diverse group of people, supports them with evidence and multiple perspectives, and creates space for deliberation.
Together, they weigh options, grapple with tradeoffs, and co-create recommendations in the shared interests of both people and the natural world.
Citizens’ assemblies have been used across the UK, Ireland, and internationally to break political deadlock, unlock bold policy responses, build public consensus, and empower politicians to act with confidence and legitimacy on difficult issues.
Key Features of a Citizens’ Assembly
Diverse: Assembly members are selected by a process of random stratified selection (known as sortition) to reflect the demographic diversity of the population across age, gender, geography, background, and so on.
Deliberative: Assemblies are not about snap opinions; they are about informed, collective judgement built through listening, questioning, and reasoning together.
Time-rich: Participants are given the space and time to understand the issue in depth, challenge their own assumptions, and develop their thinking before reaching conclusions.
Informed: Participants hear from a wide range of experts, practitioners, and people with lived experience. They leave as well-informed contributors to public policy.
Imaginative: Citizens’ Assemblies can bring a wide range of voices, knowledge, evidence and wisdom, including the more than human, into how we think about the world and imagine possible futures.
Independent: Recommendations are authored by assembly members, not officials or politicians. They are published transparently and responded to formally by decision-makers.
Professionally facilitated: Assemblies are designed and delivered with impartiality, care, and rigour. Skilled facilitation ensures that every participant can contribute meaningfully and be heard.
When done well, a citizens’ assembly can deliver a set of benefits that are especially relevant to the challenges at Lough Neagh:
What difference can a Citizens’ Assemblies make?
Stronger decisions: Participants wrestle with complexity and tradeoffs, helping to generate thoughtful, practical, and workable recommendations. Assemblies may also surface insights and local knowledge previously overlooked by institutions.
Democratic mandate for action: When elected representatives act on citizens’ assembly recommendations, they do so with greater legitimacy and public backing.
Transparency and integrity: Assemblies are insulated from lobbying, electoral pressure, or the influence of vested interests. They centre sound information and public-spirited deliberation.
Inclusion and fairness: Assemblies are designed to include voices not typically heard in public decisionmaking. This diversity enhances both legitimacy and the quality of outcomes.
Political equality: Random selection gives every citizen an equal chance of taking part, echoing the principle of ‘one person, one vote’.
Civic empowerment: Assemblies invest in the agency, confidence, and capacity of citizens. They can spark long-term engagement with democratic life and community action.
Skills for democracy: Through participation, individuals gain democratic skills, develop trust in each other and in institutions, and strengthen social cohesion.
At Involve, we are leaders in the design and delivery of citizens’ assemblies. Because of that, we advocate their use sparingly and only when appropriate.
Based on the evidence and conditions, we believe Lough Neagh is one such case.
The situation meets the criteria for a citizens’ assembly:
A decision is needed, but no option is clearly preferable
The issue involves ethical dilemmas, competing interests, and complex trade-offs
New thinking and diverse perspectives are needed to unlock progress
Government or agency action carries reputational or financial risks, and politicians lack a clear mandate to act Short-term pressures and limited public understanding hinder long-term solutions
There is interest in, or commitment to, involving the public more meaningfully
There is long-term potential to embed participation more deeply across governance
There is a gap between public preferences and official decisions.
There is disagreement among stakeholders and uncertainty about broader public opinion
In short, Lough Neagh needs a new democratic approach.
A citizens’ assembly, rooted in transparency, care, and collective wisdom, offers a powerful way forward — for the Lough, for the communities who care for it, and for the democratic health of Northern Ireland.
A year.
To design an assembly together.
One grounded in trust.
Something everyone can believe in.
Something that can’t be ignored.
Because if we cannot make space for democracy here — on this shoreline, in this crisis
where can we?
Slow DemocracyCo-designing the Lough Neagh Assembly
Because if we cannot make space for democracy here — on this shoreline, in this crisiswhere can we?
We are now laying the foundations for the Lough Neagh Assemblya citizens’ assembly focused on the future of the Lough.
We want to begin with a year-long, collaborative process that brings together a wide range of people with an interest in the future of the Lough, to design, plan, advocate and secure funding for a full citizens’ assembly that everyone can get behind.
There are several ways to plan for and implement a citizens’ assembly. We have chosen an approach that centres on co-design.
As a neutral facilitator, we want to bring together a diverse coalition of landowners, researchers, statutory agencies, public officials, environmental organisations, and local communities to collectively shape the remit, structure, content and mandate of the Lough Neagh Assembly.
This must be a process that can repair divisions, shift power, strengthen stewardship, and build durable democratic accountability around Lough Neagh.
What’s at stake is more than just the health of the Lough — it is the democratic right of people in Northern Ireland to have a meaningful say in decisions that shape their environment and future.
A well-designed, well-supported citizens’ assembly - meaningfully connected to, but not directed by, decisionmakers - offers a powerful opportunity to begin restoring trust, building consensus, and stewarding this vital ecosystem together.
We are now seeking the time, space, and support to ask the right questions, carefully and collaboratively. To do the slow, necessary work of co-design: bringing people together not simply to talk, but to understand, deliberate, and decide.
Our
plan
A Co-Designed Lough Neagh Assembly
Through the summer of 2025, we will seek support to run a year-long co-design process. With adequate resourcing, this process will include:
A Series of Co-Design Workshops
These workshops will shape the design of the assembly by addressing key considerations such as:
Who should be eligible to participate (e.g. residents of Northern Ireland, those within the catchment area, inclusion of participants from the Republic of Ireland);
The scope and wording of the assembly’s guiding question;
The identification and curation of balanced and comprehensive evidence to support deliberation, including subject matter experts on ecology, water systems, law, economy and finance, as well as activists and advocates for various options; Balanced, independent oversight of the assembly process; How to secure political support and commitment;
How to ensure the assembly’s recommendations are impactful and heard.
Formation of a Stewarding Group
A representative working group including local residents, campaigners, NGOs, conservationists, researchers, and other key stakeholders to guide the process.
Fundraising and Resource
Mobilisation
To ensure the successful delivery of a full, highquality citizens’ assembly.
Public Engagement
Communication and public engagement activities to raise awareness about citizens’ assemblies, gather input from across society, and build a strong civic mandate for the process.
An Online Hub
A dedicated platform for sharing progress, materials, and opportunities for the public to feed in and stay informed.
This work will begin in Autumn 2025, with a view to launching the first full meeting of the Lough Neagh Assembly in 2026.
Acknowledgements
We would like to express our sincere thanks to James Orr and Deborah McLaughlin from Friends of the Earth Northern Ireland for initiating the important conversation about democratic futures and for their support in making the event possible. Our gratitude also to Derbhaile Bradley for support and inspiration to begin the workshop with a deep reconnection to place.
Without the support of Suzie Cahn of iCommunity, the video documentation and this report would not have been possible.
Thank you for the resources to make both possible.
Special thanks to activists from Save Lough Neagh, staff at the Lough Neagh Partnership, Dr Ciara Brennan from Environmental Justice NI, Dr Peter Doran from the School of Law at QUB, and journalist Tommy Greene for their time and generosity in helping us better understand the issues affecting the Lough in advance of the event.
Our sincere thanks to our Democracy Elders: Clodagh Harris, Suzie Townend and Rory Crawford, who shared their insight, experience and wisdom about citizens assemblies and the role they can play in making better decisions for and with nature.
eply grateful to all the participants who attended the event for bringing their energy, curiosity, and insight, and to those who contributed written reflections afterwards to include in this report.
We are also thankful to staff from the National Trust, Development Trusts NI, the Co-Centre for Climate, Biodiversity and Water at Queen’s University Belfast, and the Earth Law Centre for the valuable conversations that followed, which have helped shape our thinking about how we might continue to contribute to this conversation.
Finally, our thanks to Joe Laverty for the use of his photography to enable the Lough to appear in these pages.
All images are from Joe Laverty's long term Shallow Waters project on Lough Neagh.
Find out more the project here, visit his website here and follow Joe on Instagram: @joelavertyphotography
River lamprey
Shelduck
Dyschirus obscurus
Great crested grebe
Whooper swans
Stenus palposus
Teal
Pollan
Wigeon
Robin
Grey Heron
Great Egret
Bream
Wren
Little Egret
Warblers
Black headed gull
Hoverflies
Bewicks Swan
Coot
Gadwall
Fairy Flax
Flowering rush
Rook
Pike Flounder
Sticklebacks
Irish hare
Salmon
Badger
Common Buzzard
Wild pansy
Bullrush Molluscs Freshwater shrimp
Dragonfly
Snipe
Common Tern
Shoveler Redshank
Curlew Dollaghen
Great Cormorant
Pochard
Tufted duck
Otter
Nathusius Pipistrelle
Natterers bat
Forester moth
Brown long-eared bat
Spike rush
Song thrush
Marsh pea
Wood pigeon
Pennyroyal
Common chaffinch Sparrow Wagtail
Greater Spearwort
Cowbane
Water Fern
Eight stemmed waterwort
Chiff chaff
Silver eel
Mallard
Holly blue
November moth
Irish Ladies Tresses
Chironomid Redshank
Pondweed
Duckweeds
Yellow waterlily
Spider
Meadow brown
Small tortoiseshell
Many seeded goosefoot
Who was involved
Involve is the UK’s leading public participation charity. They develop, support and campaign for new ways to involve people in decisions that affect their lives.
Since 2003, they have been working with governments, parliaments, civil society, academics and the public to create and deliver new forms of public participation that re-vitalise democracy and improve decision making.
All-Island BetterDemocracy
Network is a programme of work by Involve to connect, amplify, and enable democracy work across the island of Ireland.
Friends of the Earth NI is a leading environmental organisation working to create a sustainable future. They fight for climate justice through grassroots campaigns and legal action. Whether that's using the law to stop fossil fuel projects, or pushing for greater rights to protect nature and our environment.
iCommunity is a joint initiative of The Wheel and NICVA (Northern Ireland Council for Voluntary Action), and is supported by the Shared Island Unit in the Department of the Taoiseach, the Department of Foreign Affairs Civic Fund.
All images are from Joe Laverty's long term Shallow Waters project on Lough Neagh.
Report written by Rebekah McCabe, Head of Northern Ireland for Involve
