Sustainability as Democracy: Social Transformation Beyond Power

The urgent need to become sustainable in the face of climate change presents current societies with an unprecedented and seemingly impossible challenge. To achieve sustainability, entire societies – foremost the Western societies – will have to undergo a deliberate transformation of nothing less than their core norms and patterns of evolution, in a structural context pulling out all the stops – political, cognitive, semiotic, psychological – to prevent transformation. I argue sustainability governance, to stand any chance of being effective, must foreground the way in which all of the layers of political power condition societal transformations to sustainability. From this perspective, the existential crisis we face today is not about carbon emissions, nor about the lifestyles, the economic processes, or even the economic system imperatives that produce them. It cannot be addressed through decarbonisation, electrification, green consumption and production, or economic system change alone.

If the crisis is a symptom of how power conditions – and arrests – the evolution of society, the only intervention that can address it is one that confronts this power: The only intervention that can engender sustainability, I argue, is meaningful democracy. I show, then, that sustainability not only demands (new forms of) (deliberative) democracy as a useful governance instrument, but intrinsically consists in democracy as a fundamental critical norm of empowerment against domination.

Speaker

Marit Hammond is an Associate Professor in the Politics of Climate Change at the Department of Politics and International Studies, University of Warwick, UK. She gained her PhD in Political Theory at the University of Essex in 2015, following an MA in Environmental Governance also from Essex and a BA in International Relations from Dresden University of Technology. She was then a Lecturer in Environmental Politics at the University of Keele for 9 years before joining Warwick in 2024. Her research interest spans environmental political theory, sustainability governance, critical theory, and normative democratic theory. Previous publications include the book Power in Deliberative Democracy: Norms, Forums, Systems (with Nicole Curato and John B. Min), the edited volume The Political Prospects of a Sustainability Transformation (with Daniel Hausknost), and numerous articles in journals such as Environmental Politics, Sustainability: Science, Practice and Policy, Contemporary Political Theory, and Politics. She is currently working on a book of the same title as today's presentation.