The Democratic Politics of Planetary Boundaries

• In Event: The Demos and the Boundary Problem

Abstract

How can we make environmental decisions that will allow us to flourish together now and in the future? The surprising answer to this question involves both a constraint on and an expansion of what are generally taken to be core democratic principles. On the one hand, biophysical limits demarcate boundaries around the set of democratic decisions that can be made without interfering with the conditions of continued democracy. Defensible environmental decisions must therefore fluctuate within the bands of a safe operating system for the planet, described in ever more urgent detail by Johann Rockström, the late Will Steffen, and their collaborators (Richardson et al., 2023). On the other hand, the relevant demos to whom environmental decisions must be justified is far broader than liberals and democrats have presumed, encompassing everyone alive now and recognising the interests in continued democratic agency of future generations. Looking at the status quo of decision-making in most of the nine planetary boundaries (climate change, biosphere integrity, land-system change, freshwater change, biogeochemical flows, ocean acidification, atmospheric aerosol loading, stratospheric ozone depletion, novel entities), we find that far from fluctuating within a safe space while acknowledging a global demos, decisions are deferred, denied, or, when they are made, they violate the safe operating space of planetary sustainability while ignoring majorities of human beings’ interests. The exceptional case of the Montreal Protocol, which represents an elite-level global decision to respect planetary boundaries for ozone depletion, provides an interesting but more or less ungeneralisable counter-example. Citizens’ climate assemblies have a better track record and more promise as mechanisms for making the democratic decisions that will allow us to flourish together now and in the future.

Author

• Elisabeth H. Ellis, University of Otago