Climate justice movements as sources of democratic innovation in the EU: grassroots engagement and new languages of participation

The EU faces huge challenges in the era of polycrisis: climate and environmental crises, a geopolitical order characterised by war, the past Covid-19 emergency and the sociopolitical challenges of rising inequalities paired with the rise of far-right and populist parties. In this context, the effective implementation of fundamental policies like the European Green Deal (EGD) is being undermined or, at the very least, backsliding. Nevertheless, as the huge demonstrations against the Palestinian genocide across Europe attest, this does not necessarily mirror a general will. Throughout the EU, we find increasing mobilisations against war and rearmament, and for social justice and international solidarity. These voices also come from, and join forces with, the climate justice movement (CJM). These mobilisations often explicitly oppose the policies of existing institutions and call for new approaches to democracy. In both civil society and academia there has been a wide debate over the relationship between climate-environmental governance and democracy, asking what forms of democracy might be necessary, useful, or even detrimental for programmes like the EGD (Buzogány et al. 2025). Current forms of liberal representative democracy do not seem to prioritise effective environmental governance, but neo-authoritarian politics are not scoring well either (Pickering et al. 2020). This suggests that the calls by CJMs to renew democracy through new forms of participation may furnish a fundamental instrument to reorient EU politics towards climate governance, environmental care and social justice (Bua and Bussu 2023). Emotions are important for many kinds of political innovations by CJMs (Cassegård et al. 2025). As climate and environmental crises put the materialities of bodies and territories to the forefront, emotions can be seen as emerging political languages that draw new contours for democratic participation and re-invest participatory governance with new meanings and practices: from the disembodied, abstract and universalistic forms of representative democracy, to the local, interdependent and embodied praxis of a renewed deliberative democracy (Knops 2021). Emotions-infused democratic innovations may strengthen both climate action and democratic governance: affective mobilisation could drive an ethics of more-than-human care. By drawing on empirical data from the Horizon EU project RETOOL, with our paper we contribute to this debate in two ways. First, we address the discourses and practices of democracy within climate justice movements in a time of re-militarisation and discursive disinvestment in climate goals: How do democratic innovations by movements seek to strengthen climate governance and objectives at EU level? How do movements’ own democratic innovations spread to existing institutions to enhance civic engagement and participation towards effective climate governance? Second, we consider the specific role that emotions play in redefining democracy in times of crisis. Emotional (dis)engagement is fundamental to draw the contours of a democratic politics: What are the prevailing emotions when subjects face moments of polycrisis? What emotional responses are movements capable of articulating? On the side of movements’ own democratic innovations, we look at the emotions that infuse and sustain democratic engagement within specific organisations, and how this might contribute to a wider societal shift towards re-democratising EU climate governance.