Conference Agenda

The Anthropocene condition comes with multiple crises leaving us unprepared for uncertain futures. These multiple crises include not only environmental problems such as biodiversity loss and the extinction crisis, climate change, extreme weather events and disasters, unexpected droughts, famines, and other scarcities, but also crises emerging from our responses to these challenges, from the ways in which the technology and knowledge production of our time handles the ecological crises and anxieties of today (such as geo-engineering, transitions to clean/less polluting energy, transport, and food systems). The survival of human and more-than-human life in the Anthropocene will require different systems than what we have now, and different responses than those we have in our policy toolboxes. Accordingly, the political system that can address the challenges of the Anthropocene must be radically different from today’s governance architecture. But what kind of politics and institutions can address the emergent/future sustainability challenges while furthering (even radicalising) democratic norms and values?

This panel gathers papers and presentations on the future(s) of democracy in the Anthropocene, regardless of their empirical focus. We are particularly interested in transdisciplinary dialogues and academic papers on future democratic institutions, imaginaries, values and practices, democratic legitimacy, democratic knowledge-production, experimentation, innovation and exnovation. The questions around which we have invited papers were:

What kind of democracies can address future sustainability challenges?

Which, among the current shifts and changes in democratic practices, promise to address the challenges of future societies better?

Do bottom-up, experimental, deliberative practices provide better ways to address future and more-than-human changes?

Can (and should) democracies of different scales be re-imagined for future democratic ESG?

Are recent experimentations with future-making a suitable method to re/construct new democratic norms and values?

What is the role of knowledge production in safeguarding democratic and epistemic justice in the Anthropocene?

Fundamental to the models of growth, progress, and governance in Western systems is an extractive relationship with other animals, forests, rivers, oceans and soils, (collectively the ‘more-than-human’). The polycrisis, including climate change, deforestation, pandemics, biodiversity loss, inequity, and crises of food, energy and clean water, all demonstrate the highly negative outcomes this normalised extractive relationship generates, not only for beings other than humans but also for humans. To address this problem, democratic decision-making, at multiple levels, must be informed by an understanding of the fundamental connection between human and more-than-human interests. In institutional terms, this requires is a shift in the practices of representation to include representation of the more-than-human. This paper lays out a set of justifications and designs for the institutionalization of the inclusion of beings other than humans as subjects of justice in decision-making forums. We explore practical models that can be used in different forums and at different scales, and discuss three potential experimental designs: for a corporate board, a local government (in particular for resilience and adaptation planning), and a broader deliberative process (such as a citizen’s climate assembly).

Politically, the Anthropocene is less about the ubiquity or scale of human impacts on the environment as it is on the highly dispersed agency that such decisions involve and the spatial and temporal distance between decision and outcome. Ironically, since the Anthropocene is named after the dominance of human influence over environmental conditions everywhere on the planet, the ability of each delimited human political community to control its environment is shrinking while the force of undifferentiated and undirected human agency grows. Choosing the sustainable path when others decline to do so becomes consequently far more challenging for those determined to exercise some measure of control over their environmental futures. Whereas Malthus worried about population growing faster than food supplies, the larger problem may be that the scope and scale of human agency over the environment grew larger and faster than did our political institutions, leaving us now with numerous global-scale problems that result from our undirected and oafish anthropogenic agency but no institutional means of directing it.

In this paper, I take up the challenge of identifying and explicating what Jedidiah Purdy called the democratic Anthropocene; that because “global ecology is everyone’s” the governance of earth systems “should be everyone’s authorship politically.” In particular, I look at the role that has been played by deliberative mini-publics and other deliberative bodies in the development of local, national, and international responses to climate change. Utilizing case study research on several experiments in this innovative democratic form (all from the United States) as well as the incorporation of deliberative elements into more traditional social movement organizations, and engaging normative and empirical analyses of its role in popular mobilization toward sustainable transition (at scales from local to global), I aim to explore and assess the potential for such efforts and organizations in shaping a just, democratic and sustainable future, where democracy is understood in terms of inclusive authorship of shared planetary ecology and is oriented toward maintaining space for future ecological self-determination.

At present, there is a particular scholarly interest in studying deliberative mini-publics (DMPs) to understand if DMPs might be able to reshape democracy to address sustainability challenges and guide societies to a more sustainable and just future. Researchers working on the democratization of sustainability transformations have pointed out that there is a need for more collaboration between researchers on democracy and researchers who study the dimensions of sustainability transformation. Thus, this thesis aims to answer the following overarching research question:

What are the synergies and tensions of scholarships of deliberative democracy and transformation to sustainability and justice?

A selected sample of both the literature on deliberative democracy and transformations to sustainability and justice is inductively analyzed to develop a conceptual map. Then, concepts of deliberative democracy are integrated into a transformation framework to shed light on the transformative potential of DMP cases. To validate both the conceptual map and the framework, 10 researchers with expert knowledge on transformations to sustainability and justice and deliberative democracy were interviewed to gain further insights into their knowledge of possibly existing synergies or tensions between these two bodies of literature. I could identify synergies and tensions on a conceptual level, different underlying assumptions of both literature, and possible synergies between practical implementations of both deliberative democracy (DMPs) and transformations to sustainability and justice (t-labs).

By finding synergies and tensions between both DMPs- and transformations to sustainability and justice literature, this thesis offers an entry point for more collaboration between scholars working on deliberative democratic practices and scholars studying just transformations to sustainability. The identified common or contrasting components can be a starting point for further discussions between the different scholars.

In face of the climate crisis, climate movements are key actors pressuring for a fundamental transformation of politics, economy and society. The scale of the catastrophe that looms, particularly in formerly colonised countries in the Global South, puts into question the state’s capacity to protect its citizens, and thereby to fulfil its central obligation under the social contract. This condition has been called “climate coloniality” (Sultana 2022), under which those facing the worst effects of climate change while having done the least to cause it. Climate coloniality is a central challenge for any designs for democratic futures in the Anthropocene, since models of global and planetary governance and the emphasis on the more-than-human frequently leads to side-lining past and present violences of colonial extractivism. Climate coloniality has become an analytical concept and a political project advanced by groups that seek to shape democratic futures where ecological concerns are not instrumentalised to delay or postpone questions of social, racial and cognitive justice.

This paper seeks to trace one such group, the Extinction Rebellion Being the Change Affinity Network (BCAN), where climate activists, ecofeminists and abolitionists are exploring democratic ways of decision making, practical solidarity and world-making that address climate coloniality as an intersectional polycrisis. The contribution traces the different forms of knowledge production that are used in this process, from trauma work, “co-liberation”, emancipatory education to decolonial theory, and how cognitive and epistemic justice is linked to climate and ecological justice. The paper will build on the concept of climate coloniality and refine its analytical focus by centring the question of democracy and political subjectivity. The paper contributes to the debate on more-than-human democratic governances by using the ideas of an emergent grassroots movement to explore pathways to address climate coloniality in conceptions of democratic futures. The research is based on two years of ethnographic fieldwork and 80 interviews with activists in the Europe, North America and Africa, which will provide fresh empirical grounding for the theoretical explorations of core elements of democracy, including legitimacy, subjectivity and decolonial agency.