Building a new political community for a new democracy in the ecological transition and environmental crisis

Environmental crisis and democracy are strongly related, on both the practical and theoretical levels. On the one hand, the need for all the governments at all the level of the public decision making (UN, EU, National, Local) to urgently act to address the challenges posed by climate change, highlights diverse threats for the contemporary national democratic processes. Policy initiatives are at risk of being not fully democratic from two main different perspective: procedural, as they don’t sufficiently engage social actors affected by the policies in their definition and implementation; distributional, as they don’t adequately take into account the balance among benefits and costs for the entire reference community. In short, pressured by the complexity of the challenge and the urgency of the decision, the way adopted to respond to the environmental crisis might lack of democracy both in its process and its results. On the other hand, these threats open the room to discuss and reconsider, in view of the new challenges, to what extent the contemporary dominant approaches to democracy are still valid and sufficient to govern an increasingly complex world dominated by uncertainty and fragmentation and , even behind, if the current concept of democracy is sufficient to represent the diversity of the emergent situations to be governed and actors to be considered. Within this framework, the contribution aims at answering a few questions: ▪️ Can the process and the results of the policy initiatives to face the climate imperative be considered as fully democratic? Is there a risk for the environmental policies not to be fully effective in their impact if they are not fully democratic in their processes? ▪️ Beyond the current concept of democracy, do we need a renewed definition of democracy based on the joint consideration of the historical limits of the liberal democracy and the new challenges posed by the environmental crisis? ▪️ Can be established a “political community” complementary but deeply diverse from the modern state to be activated in a shared process of decision making able to establish a form of ‘insurgent democracy’? ▪️ More practically, can be identified alternative ways of deciding and implementing policies and projects able to operationalize this ‘insurgent democracy’ and promote the actual inclusion of the community as an alternative to the authorative decision-making process? In order to answer these questions, the paper provides both theoretical insights and qualitative evidences of possible alternatives to the current liberal and representative democratic approach by focusing the emergence, establishment and interaction of Collective Action Initiatives (CAIs) in the energy field and their potential in producing and managing common goods. A number of case studies of CAIs will be presented in order to shade a light on both possible practical solutions to address the challenge of balancing the urgency of climate imperative with the maintenance and reinforcement of a full democratic system and to highlight a few open issues for this process to be further explored and fostered.