We can find two basic premises within the non-human turn in the social sciences (Grussin, 2015). The first would be the need to decentralize attention and the fundamental role of humans, directing our attention to the diverse field of the non-human (which includes plants, objects, technologies, non-human animals, etc.). The second, dependent on the first, refers to the fact that the problems we currently face are directly related to the non-human. These questions lead us directly to the question of how we can broaden the margins of politics and democracy to actively incorporate the non-human, that is, how to transform our human democracies into multi-species democracies (Donaldson, Vink and Gagnon, 2021).
However, the potential impact of the non-human turn or the concept of multi-species democracy on democratic innovation is being significantly constrained by two factors. Firstly, there is a prevailing view within the discourse of ecological democracy that addressing the complexity of the current scenario is primarily a human right and responsibility, and that this is the framework within which the inclusion of future generations or non-human animals is considered (Stevenson and Dryzek, 2014). Secondly, some of the proposals that attempt to challenge the centrality of the human are hindered by zoocentrism, which "reinforces the privilege of animals as sentient, intelligent and mobile, at the same time as it contributes to the marginalization of plants as relatively passive life forms" (Gagliano, Ryan and Vieira, 2017; vii). In this way, reflections on inclusion in contemporary democracies are being limited fundamentally to animals, making plants little more than the stage for interactions between animals and humans (Flemming, 2017).
In this scenario, Critical Plant Studies seek to change the ways in which plants are represented and seek to broaden the frameworks of politics to make them participants in it (Gagliano, Ryan and Vieira, 2017; Lawrence, 2022; Myers, 2019). This effort faces an obvious situation: plants are excluded from deliberation or political participation. This exclusion has deep epistemological roots and constitutes a clear example of epistemic injustice (Fricker, 2007). But that is not the only exclusion that plants (and the non-human universe in general) face. We start from a conception of politics and deliberation based on the possession and circulation of a set of skills based on language (logos) and rationality as the foundation of interaction in public space (Cavarero, 2003; Bennett , 2022). The CPS not only seek to decenter the human as the place from which politics is thought (Mbembe, 2023), they also show important progress when it comes to incorporating other interaction repertoires.
This text proposes to review the implications that CSPs may have for the development of multi-species democracies, focusing on two questions: a) how the most characteristic forms of inclusion in democracy are questioned and b) ) how the CSPs are related to the debates on the different repertoires that go beyond the verbal/ rational forms of communication (Fabrino, Ercan and Rosenbaum, 2020) to build and legitimize different forms of knowledge and interaction.
