From Climate Crisis to Climate Democracy?

Continuing climate crisis politicises socio-ecological relations, and creates new fields of socio-political contention. In the first instance, energy becomes a key site of political advocacy, controversy and claim-making. As the crisis forces emission reduction into the political process, state structures are disrupted, and a cascade of democratising forces emerges. The paper explores this changing relationship between climate and democracy. First, at one level, climate change is immediately de-democratising, both in terms of negating living environments and inviting ‘emergency’ and exclusion. Against securitisation there is a politicization of impacts, notably though labour unions and also, especially, indigenous peoples organisations. Second, failing policy exposes the limits of political institutions, as public authorities display a structural incapacity to act in the general interest, against the dominant fossil fuel sector. Deep contradictions erupt at the centre of the formal political process, and in the institutions of the state, especially between climate and energy policy. Third, and more dialectically, failing policy politicizes the carbon cycle, across extraction, burning, impacts and sinks. Social mobilisations proliferate, creating new subjectivities, constituencies and blocs, articulating new demands and normative visions. These find traction for instance in the social relations of energy transition, around concepts of ‘just transition’, ‘energy justice’ and ‘energy democracy'. Fourth, the persistent and intensifying crisis politicizes climate itself, as a social product. Here a wider agenda for ecological democracy comes into view. The exercise of intentional climate agency, made necessary by climate change, politicizes social relations with climate. A new and dynamic of contention opens up, posing concepts of de-growth, bio-civilisation and living well against the received wisdom of the ‘green economy’, ‘global resource management’ and ‘earth systems governance’. The paper surveys developments across these four levels of climate democracy, reflecting on its distinct character and implications for broader dynamics of socio-political change.