Conference Agenda

In light of today’s multiple, interlinked crises, new visions of democracy are needed that can stimulate sustainability transformations, while allowing for more inclusive and empowering processes. A diversity of democratic grassroots initiatives is already experimenting with alternative ways of thinking and practicing democracy. These range from transition towns and ecovillages, alternative food initiatives, commons-based initiatives, social movements, urban squats or protest camps. Also described as ‘real utopias’, democratic experiments show that alternative ways of organizing society, economic and human-nature relationships and practicing more collective forms of governance are possible. They counter narratives of ‘there is no alternative’, which are strong mechanisms for keeping dominant structures and power hierarchies in place. Promoting inspiring stories and imaginaries can be an effective way in mobilizing change and affecting policies, as well as challenging dominant narratives of growth. Yet, wider justice and sustainability implications of often local experiments require more in-depth evaluation.

This panel invites theoretical and empirical contributions that review forms of democratic experimentation at various scales and how they relate to wider sustainability transformations.

We invite contributions that explore one or several of the following questions:

• Which alternative visions are promoted by democratic (grassroot) experiments? How are alternative visions embedded in the practices of democratic experiments?

• (How) Are alternative democratic practices challenging dominant unsustainable logics and narratives?

• What are conditions for democratic experiments to contribute to sustainability? (How) Can such bottom-up democratic experiments promote more sustainable practices and materiality?

• What are wider justice and power implications of democratic experiments?

• How do alternative democratic practices relate to one another, how can (and should?) they be connected and promote more democratic systems across (translocal) space and scales?

• How can we link democratic experiments to policy domains?

• What can be learned from democratic grassroot initiatives for governance at global or state levels?

Conventional responses aimed at the mitigation and adaptation to socio-environmental destabilisation too frequently reinscribe unhelpful, disempowering, and alienating imaginaries for collective action. The dominant social imaginaries of a climate-changed future currently circulating in capitalist societies fail to afford the ways of thinking and feeling that will encourage and enable effective action, rather engendering disengagement, apathy, fantastical thinking, hopelessness and inaction. In the face of climate change and its immediate impact on communities globally, we examine how communities’ praxes might contribute to shifting the dominant imaginaries for a climate changed future. In an initial examination of grassroots community responses and renewals in both India and Australia, this paper seeks to present some of our empirical fundings about how communities are responding to the effects of climate change on the basic systems that support their lives, and reflect on how those praxes are altering the communities’ own future imaginaries and how they might contribute to shifting climate imaginaries more broadly. The paper begins with an analysis of the weakness of three key contemporary climate imaginaries – business as usual, doomism, and technofix – and our discussion of the concept of ‘grounded imaginaries’ of lived practice. After a description of our field-based research methodology, we present some examples from the field of a range of communities that are imagining and practicing material transformations in everyday life. Finally, we reflect on some of the key themes emerging from our examinations of community efforts, and their implications for how communities’ praxes might alter future climate imaginaries.

Democratic processes are often perceived as conflicting with the need for rapid and fundamental transformations. Scholars argue that central aspects of liberal democracies hinder their ability to effectively address environmental challenges, including short-term electoral cycles and the lacking representation of non-humans. At the same time, political satisfaction and trust in representative, party-based democracies are declining, while nationalist populism and authoritarian rule are rising. This calls for new visions of democracy that can stimulate sustainability transformations, while enhancing inclusion and empowerment.

This paper studies ‘real utopian’ visions and practices of experiments in radical democracy that combine autonomous, community-based self-governance and direct, highly inclusive forms of decision-making with a strong emphasis on ecological considerations. ‘Real utopias’ bring potential visions of future democracies into the here and now. By living the change that they want to see in the world, these initiatives show that egalitarian ways of organizing society and human-nature relationships are indeed feasible and already in place. However, their relationship to wider state structures and implications for wider transformations are not yet well understood.

To tackle this research gap, this paper explores the relation between radical democracy and sustainability transformations and between radical democracy and the state, by conducting a meta-study of cases of radical democratic experiments on the basis of a systematic literature review. A focus is on how these initiatives contribute to shifts in dominant logics or paradigms, from materialistic culture and growth toward post-capitalist perspectives, from control of humans over nature toward reconnecting human-non-human relationships, and from expert to pluralist understandings of knowledge.

This paper derives hindering and enabling conditions for radical democracies to contribute to sustainability transformations, and hypotheses on the role of the state in these processes. Moreover, it reviews proposals and implications from the literature for transforming state-level democracies to be more supportive of radical democracies, as well as proposals beyond the state.

In doing so, this research also bridges literature of ecological and radical democracy. Ecological democracy proposes transforming state democracies toward less anthropocentric forms of governance, for instance by granting legal rights to nature or assuring representation of future generations in decision-making. It also shows the positive impact radical democracies can have on sustainability. Radical democracy literature emphasizes the decisive, but highly ambiguous and contentious role of the state for the preservation of radical grassroot democracies. Connecting these approaches and embedding them a wider meta study can serve to address respective blind spots.

Solving climate change has never been more urgent, illuminating the need for social science and involvement of people in addressing socio-technical barriers in decarbonization of energy and power production systems. Renewable energy, new technology (including carbon capture utilization and storage (CCUS) and next generation nuclear technologies), and innovative combinations of existing technologies (distributed systems of prosumers) provide a smorgasbord of possibilities and choices in effecting mitigation. Solving the puzzle of decarbonization and achieving zero carbon emissions in power production systems at the scale and pace needed to achieve Paris commitments is stymied not only by barriers relating to built vested? Infrastructure of power plants and their transmission and distribution system, but also the practices and expectations of people and their communities (thus a socio-technical system problem). Promising methods of addressing this problem involve community engaged co-created visions and action based futurities that consider the problem holistically.

This paper reviews methods of engaging with the public in solving climate change and achieving net zero GHG emissions. Results reported focus on a province in Canada that achieved the first post combustion CCS power production facility and where nuclear power production does not currently exist but an increase in support for next generation nuclear technology of Small Modular Reactors (SMRs) has occurred over the past few years. This paper reports on results from eight citizen juries, numerous focus groups, and experimental survey designs conducted since 2017 co constructing imagined net zero power production futures. Aspects of these methods including virtual versus in person, values versus technology discussions, focus groups with industry and mining, and survey with business are described and their results provided. Over the last several years providing information to people about innovative technology and practices has improved people’s perceptions and resulted in social learning and increased participation in discussion and expectations of involvement in decision making. However, as awareness increases it is not a given that this approach will continue to have these results. Important consideration of context or geography (how people earn their livelihood), the method of engaging with people including the research questions, and the industry and sector make a difference.

There is an urgent need to accelerate transitions toward sustainable futures in a wide range of societal systems. Such endeavors beg for transformative governance approaches that are pluriform, adaptive and experimental in nature. In addition, scholars have argued that governing transformation in deeply democratic ways (beyond mere representative democracies) is crucial in addressing and articulating different societal perspectives and voices in the development and implementation of transition pathways. This requires governance strategies to be both directive in light of urgency for transformation, as well as pluriform and open-ended through deliberative practices. At the same time, however, recent scholarship has increasingly pointed out the different ways in which transition dynamics (and relatedly: governance efforts) are connected across space and scale through translocal dynamics. While such dynamics are considered valuable in light of translocal diffusion of innovations, and translocal empowerment of sustainability initiatives and movements, or in connecting transition experiments across space and scale, scholars have also stressed that translocal dynamics can reinforce unsustainable and unjust dynamics across space and scale. In addition, the translocal character of transition dynamics and governance raises questions on legitimacy, accountability and responsibility of governance interventions across space and scale. In this paper, we thus set out to further explore the opportunities and challenges for democratic and experimental governance approaches in light of translocal transition dynamics. After introducing the turn towards and the promises of democratic and experimental governance approaches, as well as the translocal nature of transition dynamics, in our analysis we highlight (1) challenges; (2) opportunities and (3) governance implications of institutionalizing and implementing deeply democratic governance approaches in translocal times. While our contribution is mostly conceptual, throughout our work we draw on empirical insights from several transition-oriented (policy) programs in the Netherlands and the EU in the field of food and agriculture. By concluding our work with implications for policy we hope our work can also help policy actors to navigate the (political) challenges involved in governing societal transformations.