The Politics of Sustainability: Democracy and the Limits of Policy Action (2014) (original) (raw)
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Democracy Versus Sustainability
Democracy Versus Sustainability: Inequality, Material Footprints and Post-Carbon Futures, 2021
In Democracy Versus Sustainability, Boris Frankel provides a detailed analysis of how various mainstream and alternative parties, business groups, social movements, policymakers, and others are engaged in a struggle to shape emerging post-carbon societies. Will these post-carbon societies be new forms of capitalism with classes and social relations similar to existing ones but based on green growth modernisation? Or will we see the creation of post-carbon democracies that are post-capitalist and take diverse eco-socialist, post-growth and other forms? Given the current political impasse, will these socio-political changes occur within parliamentary institutions or be established in opposition to existing practices of representative democracy? There is a profound lack of awareness about the coming struggle over national and individual material footprints. Any significant but necessary changes to the way material resources are currently used will alter political and socio-economic alignments of both democratic and anti-democratic parties and movements across the political spectrum. Moreover, these struggles are likely to change global geo-political relations, and affect current levels and forms of extraction, production, trade, consumption, and employment. We face volatile and unpredictable times. These and many other issues are discussed with reference to a wide range of political movements, policy proposals and debates over cultural and political economic practices. It is the conflict between various institutional practices and conceptions of ‘democracy’ and ‘environmental sustainability’ that will help shape future levels of equality or social justice across the world. CONTENTS Preface ix Introduction 1 From Carbon Capitalism to Post-Carbon Democracies 26 Intellectuals, Networks, Culture: Shaping Future Post-Carbon Societies 60 The Political Struggle Over National and Per Capita Material Footprints 95 Degrowth: Direct Democracy in a Political Economic Vacuum 134 Searching for a Mode of Politics to Break the Impasse 173 Alternatives to Welfare States: Beyond 'Dependent Beggars and Wage Slaves' 211 Conclusion 252 Notes 265 Index 285
Democracy, A Tale of Sustainability
Global societies are facing a vast amount of environmental and social problems based on resource deprivation and climate change. Many systemic forces, mechanisms and organizations struggle to deal with these problems in very specific ways with the heritage of ideas such as growth, progress and development in a broader discursive context to drive them. The term sustainability has become a key concept of theoretical discussions and practical applications in the modern ideological landscape.The way that sustainability is used it is embedded to a very specific individual and societal imaginary connected to capitalism and the neoliberal paradigm.
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As environmental crises, most notably climate change, become ever more severe, voices are reappearing that call for authoritarian solutions: Democracy, so the argument goes, has proven to be too slow to respond to urgent threats, and so a stronger, authoritarian hand is needed to push through the necessary socio-political changes. In this paper, we respond to this charge by revisiting the role of democracy within a transition to sustainable prosperity. We argue it is not democracy as such that is the problem, but rather democracy in its current form is itself constrained by structural and discursive forces including the almost hegemonic status of capitalist politico-economic discourses and tendencies towards short-termism in political decision-making. Thus, instead of advocating further constraints on democracy, we explore new institutional and societal spaces that can revitalise democracy, ameliorating existing constraints and infusing sustainability politics with new ways of thinking. In particular we highlight the potential promise of participatory and deliberative innovations, prefigurative politics, reform of established structures and institutions, and deliberative systems and cultural change. The paper acts as an introduction to some of the political theory and political science aspects of the research programme of the Centre for the Understanding of Sustainable Prosperity (CUSP).
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The aim of this essay is to examine if and how it is possible for the political system of democracy to effectively tackle long-term public problems that are wicked in nature, taking climate crisis as an example. It consists of four sections. The first section is devoted to a brief historical overview of the conflict between eco-authoritarianism and ecological democracy. The following section examines if and to what extent "environmental pessimism"disillusionment with the ability of liberal/capitalist democracies to effectively tackle long-term environmental problemswhich has made a remarkable comeback since late 1980s, is empirically grounded, on the basis of performance evaluation of the contracting parties to the Kyoto Protocol (adopted on 11 December 1997 and entered into force on 16 February 2005), and the Climate Change Performance Index that evaluates and ranks the climate mitigation performance of 58 countries responsible for over 90 per cent of global energy-related CO 2 emissions, released every year by Germanwatch and Climate Action Network Europe. The third section focuses on more theoretical/normative issues, critically examining the cogency of a claim, made by no small number of environmental pessimists, that democratic institutions, due to their myopic tendencies, usually work systematically to the disadvantage of future generations. The last section is devoted to the examination of measures thus far advocated and partly put into practice for correcting the myopic tendencies of democracy, emphasizing the vital need for non-representative measures, or self-restraint mechanisms built into democracy itself, whose primary function lies in preventing democracy from degenerating due to the influence of the myopic majority, thereby protecting ecological sustainability and the well-being of future generations.
This chapter argues that attention to environmental action forces us to revise conventional democratic theory. Democratic theory depends upon suppositions exploded by environmental issues: on a discrete identifiable citizenry making decisions for itself, for example, or on the revisability of policy decisions. Democracy constrains environmental action while environmental challenges constrain democracy itself. The answer, however, is not less democracy, as there is no alternative to democracy if we seek justice in a plural world. Simple democratic assumptions are the best candidates for general adjudication of differences. Rather than turn away from democratic theory, we must return to its majoritarian essence. Thus the chapter sketches a democratic approach that enables rather than constrains environmental possibilities by refocusing democratic theory on protecting majority interests and reframing environmental issues in terms of protecting majority interest in sustainability from minority interests in extraction. In environmental political theory only the literature on environmental justice has understood that we must attend to real conflicts of interest among groups of human beings; building on work in environmental justice we can revise democratic theory to reflect people's interests in justice.
How Democracy Survives. Global Challenges in the Anthropocene. Michael Holm, R. S. Deese, eds. , 2022
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