Notes from Vilnius’ first citizens’ assembly
How 39 residents reimagined their city’s transportation with 23 recommendations
“Participating in the citizens’ assembly was a unique and very meaningful experience for me. It not only enriched my knowledge, but also made me feel that each of us can have an impact on the city we live in.
It was important for me to hear different opinions – both from experts and other participants – and together to look for solutions that could actually improve the daily lives of Vilnius residents.
This assembly reinforced the belief that active engagement and dialogue between people and institutions can create a better, fairer, and more open community.” - Assembly member
Late last year, Lithuania’s first ever citizens’ assembly took place, setting a precedent for all levels of government in the country, and inspiring the municipality to consider how it will create a permanent model for citizen deliberation moving forward.
Vilnius, along with Kerewan, The Gambia, and Esch-sur-Alzette, Luxembourg were part of DemocracyNext’s Cities Programme, in which we worked closely with municipal staff and other key actors to build their knowledge and capacity to implement their first citizens’ assembly.
Drawing lessons from their experiences, each city is laying the groundwork to create an embedded model of citizen deliberation, where a randomly selected, broadly representative group of citizens is convened to guide decision making on key issues.
The Vilnius assembly
From September to December 2025, 39 Vilnius residents, selected by sortition to be broadly representative of the city’s diversity, gathered on the 20th floor of the city’s municipal headquarters to discuss a topic that affects all those who live in the capital city: the future of mobility.
The question they addressed was:
“How can we ensure that Vilnius residents more often choose public transport, walk, or cycle - regardless of where in the city they live?”
Assembly members discussed how Vilnius, which is increasingly congested with traffic, could develop equitable solutions to this controversial topic. Motor transport accounts for 38% of Vilnius’s total greenhouse gas emissions, making it the city’s single largest source of pollution.
Vilnius has a plan to address this: the Sustainable Mobility Plan 2030 has set a target of reducing car use to 30% of daily trips. But in 2024, cars still accounted for 49% of trips, leaving the city well off track.
Closing that gap requires difficult trade-offs about how people move around the city. The citizens’ assembly brought those decisions to residents themselves, not just politicians and experts.
”When I registered for the assembly, I didn’t really believe that I would be selected from many, so I was really surprised when I received an invitation. I honestly didn’t know what to expect from the assembly itself, its course and results. The assembly itself was organised perfectly, thought out practically down to the smallest detail. The assembly was an interesting learning journey that changed some of my thoughts and beliefs about mobility in Vilnius and, hopefully, a meaningful creative workshop that will allow us to improve mobility in the city.” - Assembly member
Facilitated by Gabrielė Janilionytė (Lead), Ugne Balciunaite, Rūta Lukošiūnaitė, Nikita Ščiupakov, and Emilija Blaškevičiūtė the assembly met seven times over the four months. They got to know one another, heard from a variety of experts including urban and landscape planners, social scientists, the city’s Chief City Architect, Laura Kairienė, and JUDU, Vilnius’s mobility department. Assembly members also spent a day traveling by public transport, visiting Vilnius’ Railway Museum and the “Smoke Factory”, hearing presentations from eight community representatives.
Three weeks before the final session, assembly members shared their draft recommendations with an internal working group at the municipality from the relevant departments that could act on them. The group gave detailed feedback on what the assembly members had produced so far. They identified whether the recommendations were something the municipality was already doing, if they needed greater clarity, if they were within the mandate of the municipality to act upon, or presented something new. This feedback was discussed during the last session and assembly members worked to fine tune the wording of the recommendations before voting on them.
They ultimately reached a minimum threshold of consensus of 70% on 23 recommendations. Assembly members presented them to the Vice Mayor and Chief City Architect of Vilnius on 10 December 2025 during a public event in the municipality’s legislative chambers.
The recommendations include a balance of immediate, actionable interventions with longer-term strategic planning, addressing both mobility infrastructure needs and behavioural change. They emphasise equity across different parts of the city, recognising that solutions must be tailored to the distinct characteristics of each neighbourhood.
The municipality wants to institutionalise citizen deliberation to address other key challenges in the city. Given the success and positive reception of this first assembly, there is strong internal support for more in the future. In an interview on Lithuanian radio, the Vice Mayor expressed his intent to implement more assemblies.
Meda Bagdonaitė has published ‘Exercising the democratic muscle’ on NARA documenting her experience of sitting in on the Vilnius citizens' assembly. In the article, she meets with assembly members to learn about the impact of being part of this momentous occasion.
Key details about the assembly process:
13,000 invites were sent at random to residents of Vilnius, with 731 positive responses (6% response rate, higher than the average EU response rate of 2-3%)
Demographic criteria: Gender, age, nationality, neighbourhood, socio-economic background, preferred mode of transport. Invitations were not limited to Lithuanian citizens but assembly members needed to be residents of Vilnius.
Assembly member selection: 54 citizens were randomly selected through a stratified random selection process using Panelot to mirror the demographics of Vilnius. Each was contacted by phone, and ultimately, 39 citizens took part in the assembly.
Assembly members met seven times between 24 September - 10 December 2025 for a total of 45 hours.
Evaluation: The assembly is being evaluated by Ieva Petronytė-Urbonavičienė and Rasa Bortkevičiūtė from the Institute of International Relations and Political Science at Vilnius University. The first response from the municipality is out now!
”Representing the needs of the city’s residents was something new for me. With this experience, I gained new knowledge and grew as a person. I also really liked that the balance between interactivity and the theoretical part was maintained during the sessions. Thank you again.” - Assembly member
Coming up next
This year, Vilnius City Municipality will publish two reports on the implementation of the assembly’s recommendations. The first report can be read here, and the second will be published towards the end of 2026.
The Vilnius citizens’ assembly also served as inspiration for two other municipalities in Lithuania to implement their first assemblies, one of which will take place in 2026. We’ll share more details as they become available!
There is also interest in a national-level assembly, and employees from the national government were able to attend and observe.
Team reflections
It has been an absolute pleasure to collaborate with Vilnius as part of our Cities Programme. Their ambition continues to inspire us.
It’s clear from their response to this first assembly and the conversations that have followed, Vilnius is serious about embedding citizen deliberation as part of their democratic infrastructure.
The training we organised in partnership with We Do Democracy has supported the emergence of a wider Lithuanian ecosystem - including the municipality, organisers of the assembly, and the group of facilitators.
We’re also happy to see how the Chief Architect, her advisors and organisers of the assembly, as well as the incredible team of facilitators, have become advocates for citizens’ assemblies more broadly.
While there are plenty of lessons from this first experience, the skills, knowledge, and capacity to implement citizens’ assemblies in Vilnius and in Lithuania are present and growing.
With the Vilnius citizens’ assembly, Lithuania joins the growing number of countries in Europe and around the world that are experimenting and innovating their local democracies by entrusting citizens with more power and transforming how we make decisions.
Politics Without Politicians
You may have come across Professor Hélène Landemore’s work in recent weeks — and if you haven’t, now is the time. Hélène is a political theorist at Yale University, a founding advisor to DemocracyNext, and one of the most important thinkers working on citizens’ assemblies and deliberative democracy today. Her latest book, Politics Without Politicians: The Case For Citizen Rule, published by Penguin in February, has been making waves.
From her contribution to The Globe and Mail (paywalled), to joining The Open Mind hosted by Alexander Heffner, Hélène’s thesis - or “radical proposal” as The Guardian puts it - has offered a wider audience a way of looking at the options our society has for citizen-led governance.
In No Shy Person Left Behind, published in the New York Times (paywalled), Hélène writes more deeply about what she has witnessed first hand in citizens’ assemblies:
“Critics sometimes dismiss citizens’ assemblies as naïve or impractical, arguing that ordinary people lack the expertise to make complex decisions. But this objection misunderstands both expertise and democracy. Assemblies do not replace experts; they hear from them... If we actually want a democracy that reflects the thoughts of the country as a whole and delivers for everyone, we need to stop designing institutions around the ‘natural leaders.’ Real societies are made up of introverts, listeners, followers and caretakers, too. They have things to say and many contributions to make. Our politics, like a jolly hostess, should make room for - and bring out - all of them.”
Earlier this month, Hélène joined Amol Rajan on his BBC podcast Radical, diagnosing the case for citizens’ assemblies and discussing their impact on both the citizens taking part and on society as a whole. Two moments stood out to us:
“If we were to run elections at the global level, you’d end up with a sample even less representative of humankind than our elected officials are of people at the national level. Contrary to popular belief, past a couple of million people, 1,000 people is enough to get a representative sample - whether for the planet or for France…
And on what participation actually feels like from the inside:
“People come for the money or the curiosity - many just to see how far it goes. And they stay for the friendship, the sense of belonging, the pride. People come angry and disaffected, nihilistic almost - and they leave healed. It is truly transformative.”
If you haven’t yet read Politics Without Politicians, we’d encourage you to do so. Share it, discuss it, and use it - it is exactly the kind of argument that moves people from curiosity about citizens’ assemblies to genuine belief in them.
🌊 On the radar
Claudia, has been selected for the Oversight Group on the UK People’s Panel on Digital ID. Read more about it here.
Tom Stafford’s Substack piece, ‘The wisdom of deliberative crowds’, is a great read for anyone interested in the science behind why deliberation works.
The latest issue of Journal of Sortition has been released and includes a number of exploratory articles including, ‘Governing Citizens’ Assemblies: Co-decision and power sharing in the French citizens’ conventions’, Authors: Landemore, Hélène; Lacelle-Webster, Antonin; Pénigaud de Mourgues, Théophile
NextCity reviews the recent Lexington, Kentucky (USA) civic assembly on affordable housing. Hannah Terry, Cities Programme Coordinator and native Kentuckian, also offered her thoughts on LinkedIn.
Following our interview with young people who have taken part in citizens’ assemblies, we came across this piece from The Loop on how the government should persuade young people that democracy is fair.
Moges Mekonnen writes ‘Ballots over Bullets’ for The Capital, explaining why ideas matter in Ethiopia’s democratic journey.
A welcome update on the work in Deschutes on youth homelessness, published in The Bulletin.
🗓️ Events
7-10 May, Athens, Greece
Claudia will be speaking at the World Beautiful Business Forum, the most human gathering for the more-than-human world, in various legs of the AI Democracy Marathon. DemocracyNext is proud to be a partner to the Forum. We hope to see many of you there!
14-16 May, London, UK
Lucy will be attending the afternoon sessions of the MOTH Festival of Ideas, exploring the rights and well-being of humans, nonhumans, and the web of life that sustains us all. If you’re going to be there, let us know!
11 June, online
Save the date for the launch of our newest resource written by Hugh Pope, author and DemocracyNext International Advisory Council Member. Exploring multilingual citizens’ assemblies, this short paper offers wonderful insight from interpreters, facilitators and assembly members.