On the Republican Capability of Political Judgement Formation as Key to the Implementation of Sustainability through Participation in Liberal (Post-)Democracies

Implementing sustainability depends on changing the consumption-driven lifestyle of the Global North. Said change requires the implementation of republican environmental citizenship and its understanding of civic participation, seen as an opportunity to develop and extend (“green”) civic virtues and to transform environmentally harmful attitudes. However, this kind of participation is highly demanding and does not automatically translate to “sustainable” results. A confrontation of the hopes placed in active citizenship participation with findings on obstacles of citizen participation by participatory researchers evokes questions: Does active citizen participation in processes aiming at sustainability truly have the assumed positive effects? Do actively participating citizens start subordinating their personal interests? Do citizens of different backgrounds participate or is there an exclusion of certain perspectives? I argue for focusing on political judgement of citizens in participatory processes to answer these questions. My starting point is the hypothesis that the numerous positive effects attributed to citizen participation are exactly the features characterizing “good” political judgement. Political judgement describes the ability to decide about the right course of action in a particular situation, to make this decision with a view to collective interests and without having a fixed set of criteria to base one’s decision on. Political judgement builds on knowledge and empathy and requires deliberative institutions to be learned. Summing up, political judgement bundles up the assumed positive effects of active citizen participation. Focusing on citizens’ political judgements under the conditions of local participatory processes will allow for answering the aforementioned questions concerning the effects of participation. In my paper, I develop the argument outlined here by connecting republican environmental citizenship, findings of participatory research and the concept of political judgement thus contributing to closing research gaps regarding the implementation of republican environmental citizenship and to the evaluation of its potential for a sustainability transformation.