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Abstract
The discourse on sustainability transformations moves beyond accommodationist, reformist framings of sustainability to imply a radical, systemic shift toward new sustainable trajectories. While democracy has been accorded a central role in sustainability governance of most kinds, this emphasis on systemic transformation, and the new context of existential ecological threat, prompt a reconsideration of the kind of democracy that would provide a political foundation for sustainability. Arguing that the politics of sustainability transformation inherently demand democratization – for both disruption (of established power structures) and normativity (in relation to the negotiated meaning of sustainability) – this article explores the potential of deliberation in particular to create these foundations. I contend that while the recent policy-oriented practice of deliberation has itself become overly accommodationist, the concept can equally encompass a more disruptive, yet still normatively driven form, the time for which might be just right.
Correction Statement
This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Ariane Götz, Boris Gotchev, and Ina Richter for the invitation to contribute to this special issue and for helpful comments on earlier versions of this article. Many thanks also to Amanda Machin for helpful comments on an earlier draft.
Notes
1 I am using the term deliberation as a normative concept; an ideal of democratic communication aspiring to which in political actors’ (citizens as much as politicians, organizations, and authorities) general behavior can bring about deliberative democracy at the level of the society and the political system as a whole.
2 Extinction Rebellion is an interesting case because it is the first to link environmental activism to the demand of a deliberative citizens’ assembly. This democratic commitment notwithstanding, however, co-founder Roger Hallam has used language similar to that of far-right activists and the camp traditionally associated with renouncing democracy in the face of as apocalyptic an emergency as the environmental crisis. In an interview with the German newspaper Die Zeit, Hallam relativized the Holocaust as “just another fuckery in human history” (Knuth Citation2019). In response, the respective heads of the movement in both Germany and the UK have explicitly distanced themselves and their branches of the movement from Hallam. In the end, the movement’s credibility and relationship with democracy will depend on its developing independently and in bottom-up fashion away from its original founders, as opposed to remaining associated with them as its central figureheads.
3 While the UK government has indeed orchestrated a citizens’ assembly, this is not taking place under the auspices of Extinction Rebellion, and is on the topic of how to achieve the UK’s target of net-zero carbon emissions by 2050 as opposed to Extinction Rebellion’s demand for an assembly on ecological and climate justice.
4 In that sense, this type of deliberation partly aligns with the more recent systemic perspective on deliberative democracy (Parkinson and Mansbridge Citation2012); but the focus is not on a functional division of the deliberative labor between different institutions or social spaces, but rather on an organic and bottom-up evolution of deliberation within the public sphere.