World Wide Views

About Resource

World Wide Views (WWViews) is a global effort to engage people nationally and internationally, created in response to the growing gap between global policymakers and those who will be affected by their decisions. To date, WWViews has conducted three major programs: 1) Global Warming, 2) Biodiversity, and 3) Climate Change and Energy. 

Participating countries convene diverse voices representative of their country’s demographics (typically around 100 citizens per site) to join in sessions with stakeholders and policymakers. For example, the Climate and Energy Forum held in 2015 engaged participants in more than 70 countries. The groups discuss and deliberate on four to five thematic issues. WWViews created a web tool that could be used to instantly collect and present the results from the meeting. Throughout the day-long session, participants had facilitated discussions on five themes related to the larger topic. These discussions took place in small groups and were led by a moderator. At the end of the sessions, the participants are able to vote on answers to questions and the data is uploaded for analysis to the WWViews website that houses global results. After the Climate and Energy Forum, the data were collected, analyzed, and shared via the website with policymakers around the world. 

The results of these deliberations have informed policymaking at local, national, and international levels. The Expert and Citizen Assessment of Science and Technology (ECAST) network, which partnered with WWViews on the 2012 World Wide Views on Biodiversity, authored a report that proposes how the WWViews method might be expanded to inform policymaking in the United States.