The People’s Climate Tribunate: Addressing the Climate Emergency with Democratic Innovation

This paper shows how an approach to democratic innovations that takes inspiration from the people’s tribunate, which enabled the plebs to veto the actions of the elite-dominated senate in ancient Rome, may contribute to addressing the climate emergency. A key challenge of democratic responses to climate emergency is to find a way for measures addressing climate emergency to be less driven by elite moralization which drives a wedge between those most affected by both the measures against climate emergency and its consequences and economic and political elites as well as the affluent. What is needed are democratic institutions which can make visible the diversity of lines of conflict related to the existential challenge of addressing the climate emergency. We argue that a reinvented people’s tribunate could serve as a catalyst for helping to see more clearly the lines of conflict. The proposed reinvention of the tribunate deconstructs the homogenous understanding of class underlying its legacy of frustrating elite power to free up its potential with regard to the identification of conflict lines, agenda setting and creative experimentation. The reinvented tribunate would provide a new basis for solidarity between a wide range of non-elite groups which would be a key condition for getting beyond elite moralizing in addressing the climate emergency. The reinvented tribunate would not be bound by the limits of electoral jurisdictions and is therefore particularly capable of recognizing the global dimension of the challenges posed by climate emergency and realizable in the absence of a global electoral democracy.