Climate Democracy: Climate Turbulence, Justice, and Democratic Experimentation

This paper addresses the increase in climate change turbulence, and how such disruptions are both an injustice and a motivator for a range of democratic responses. The reality of climate turbulence has created converging, overlapping, intersecting crises, increasingly understood as the polycrisis. Beyond such complexity, turbulence is disruptive and unjust in numerous ways – it is about the constant disruption and displacement of connections to place, to immersive and entangled environments – the experience of being unsettled. In response, many communities have developed forms of democratic innovation and experimentation fit to address such climate turbulence and experience. I examine examples of democratic engagement and practice – climate democracy – developed in response to environmental crises, ecological alienation, and climate disasters. These forms range from climate assemblies, to community resilience organizing, to the design of multispecies transitions.