Democratic Participation and Ecological Transition: Towards a New Political Citizenry.

1. Introduction

This document is the report of a workshop held in Fondazione Giangiacomo Feltrinelli on the 30^th of November. This workshop was intended to inspect the relationship between democratic participation, deliberative practices, and green transition. This initiative is the first of a series of three, aimed at investigating the potential effects of the green transition in three socio-political spheres, respectively, democratic participation (30^th of November); labour market, work, competences and formation (1^st of February); welfare state and social protection (15^th of March).

Governance is a priority in the green transition. The “European Green Deal” and the “Fit for 55” package have defined ambitious targets in terms of climate policy, but their achievement requires a broad mobilization and strain by all the interested parties: from citizens to political institutions, from administrations to civil society. European societies have developed important instruments of multilevel governance over the years, which facilitate the involvement in the decision-making of several actors. Now the green transition requires a step change: this epochal challenge interests in fact the whole society. From industrial decarbonization to energy communities, from mobility to green housing, the scope of the green transition would interact with a plurality of contexts.

So, beyond the politico-administrative and technical issues, the objective should be to promote a new model of democratic participation, more open, more inclusive, and more aware of social marginality. The green transition should engage the “centre”, meant as the cities, considered as the poles of innovation and development, but also the “periphery”, to guarantee the inclusiveness and the effectiveness of the process, in terms of opportunities and living conditions: in other words, to guarantee that the ecological transition really constitutes a just transition. Especially in those peripherical areas concrete policy initiatives should take place, to involve the population and exploit the transformative potential of the green transition.

The ecological transition should not be a vertical process: it requires instead unprecedented social collaboration and political participation. Also in that sphere, European societies have significant experiences: from energy communities to social housing, from participatory budgeting to co-design of urban policies: there are numerous and virtuous examples. A key element should be the support and the diffusion of best practices at the institutional level, both through investment and by creating informational infrastructure to properly convey them.

Finally, it should be recognized that the cultural framing of the green transition has been successful: European citizenry is aware of the urgency of the theme, and there is an increasing political demand for green policies. The next step that would be necessary is the involvement of the population in the co-design and in the implementation of those policies, following the principles of Democratic Innovation.

So, to make the ecological transition a just transition, it is necessary to design the decision-making mechanisms in an inclusive and participative manner. The objective is twofold: on one hand, democratic citizenship should be enforced, on the other, policymaking should be opened towards more horizontal practices. The existent best practices should find resonance: from here we may start activating new fruitful experiences.

2. Questions

Starting from this vision and from a practical example, we ask:

• Are direct democracy and participatory practices a successful way to address the legitimacy crisis of contemporary liberal democracies?
• How do lack of trust in politics affect political participation?
• Can citizens’ involvement represent a response to political conflicts?
• Which mechanism should be put in place to strengthen the legislative implementation of the outputs of participative practices?
• How to guarantee a broad involvement of the whole citizenship?
• How do contextual factors and socio-structural positions affect political participation in direct democracy?
• How to address them?
• Should a new eco-social citizenship be promoted?

In short, the objective of the workshop was to respond to those questions. The following individuals took part to the workshop:

• Fatima Alves, UC Coimbra
• Cecilia Biancalana, Università degli studi di Torino
• Marino Bonaiuto, Università Sapienza
• Patrizia Catellani, Università Cattolica di Milano (as discussant)
• Marteen de Groot, The good Lobby
• Edoardo Dellarole, head of electrification cluster ENI
• Lise Deshautel, Independent consultant on climate policies (as keynote speaker)
• Riccardo Ladini, Università degli studi di Milano
• Thomas Pasini, head R&D biofuels and next generation downstream ENI
• Maurizio Pioletti, Centre for Social Studies of the University of Coimbra (as discussant)
• Carrmela Sarli, Head carbon storage and valorization ENI
• Ivano Scotti, Università degli studi di Napoli
• Cosimo Tansini, Europena Environmental Bureau
• Diogo Guedes Vidal, UC Coimbra
• Iacopo Zetti, University of Florence

4. Discussion

Lise Deshautel’s intervention, delving into the experience of the CCC and KNOCA, shed a light on the four key themes in the debate around democratic participation: i) the socio-political environment in which those initiatives came from, i.e. the legitimacy crisis of liberal democracies; ii) the issue of implementation and impact of direct democracy initiatives, which are not always channelled into concrete policies; iii) the difficulties in involving the citizens and the fact that communication-related to participatory practices is not always efficient; iv) the problematization of the socio-structural position of participants, i.e. the fact that richer and more educated people are more prone to political participation in deliberative practices.

Discussants

Against this backdrop, the two discussants made their points.

The first intervention was by Patrizia Catellani, Full Professor of social psychology at the Catholic University of Milan. Her attention focused mainly on the issue of communication. Accordingly, she defined three issues as necessary to build the political space for direct democracy and participatory practices: i) communication, which substantiates in the need for a more inclusive and less alarmistic involvement of people in an increasingly salient issue such as the ecological transition; ii) the economic individual sphere, remarking Lise’s point according to which individual poor economic conditions (such as poverty, or material deprivation) can represent a significant constraint in enabling participation; and iii) the necessity to build trustful interactions which empower people and value their identities.

The second intervention was instead made by Maurizio Pioletti, from the Centre for Social Studies of the University of Coimbra, who is involved in PHOENIX, a Horizon 2020 project about democratic participation around the European Green Deal. Considering 4 domains, which are energy transition, sustainable food, circular economy and forest fire prevention, the underlying idea of PHOENIX is to build and test different direct democracy instruments, such as: participatory budget, public debate, citizens’ assemblies, councils, and forum/conferences.

An outline of the discussion

Then the discussion took place. The interventions are not reported in their chronological sequence, but, instead, their order is re-elaborated, trying to make sense of the complexity and the heterogeneity of the discussion.

Accordingly, the interventions of Diogo Guedes Vidal (CES UC) and Maarten de Groot (The Good Lobby), given their macro and theoretical scope are reported for first. Those two interventions are useful to frame the issues and the socio-economic contexts in which we are moving (Maarten de Groot) and therefore to illuminate the necessity to overcome the anthropocentric relationship between humans and non-humans (Diogo Guedes Vidal).

Then, it is reported the intervention by Jacopo Zetti, from the University of Florence. According to his sensibility as an urbanist, he proposes some commonalities between democratic participation in environmental issues and in urban planification. Those two fields are both considered as complex and in their non-commodifiable: the proposal here is the strain toward the building of “insurgent relationships” between parties involved in transformative processes; insurgent in the sense intended by Leonie Sandercock: so, that conflicts and trade-offs are reconciled into participation and synergies.

So, thematically, the following intervention is the one of Cecilia Biancalana (University of Torino), which, on a political science approach, seeks to consider the determinants of political participation. Accordingly, she focused on the interrelation between the socio-structural positions of individuals, their cultural and political resources, and their willingness to participate in politics. Also, Cecilia Biancalana brought to the attention the issues of “pseudo-participation” and a reflection on the social costs of economic transition, expected to impact more on already marginalized and vulnerable social groups and territories. On a similar line, the Riccardo Ladini (University of Milano) intervention focuses instead on the role of institutions in guaranteeing the inclusiveness of democratic processes; accordingly, he considers also the possible relevance of institutions for non-already born people.

The last thematic block is instead the one related to communication. As already reported for the intervention of professor Patrizia Catellani (Catholic University of Milan), the objective should be the enacting of an inclusive and emphatic communication for what concerns environmental issues. Professor Marino Bonaiuto (University of Roma – La Sapienza) focuses instead on the relationship between social acceptance of technological change and an effective communication.

The discussion

Maarten de Groot, from the Good Lobby, highlighted that the contemporary socio-economic system has shown to be detrimental for the environment and, broadly, even to the well-being of people who are living on the planet. In particular, the idea that emerged is the need to reframe the approach of capitalist accumulation, intended as productive of domain and exploitation. Accordingly, an antiracist, anti-classist, anti-sexist, and anti-ableist approach toward deliberation should be developed, in order to come up with processes that can really make a difference.

Diogo Guedes Vidal, from CES UC, followed this line, highlighting, in line with the first evidence that came out from the PHOENIX project, the issue of the relationship between the human sphere and the non-human. The relationship between humans and the environment should be considered as a sociocultural construction: the only way to address the socio-ecological crisis is to deconstruct the way in which the interdependence between nature and human activities are framed. Accordingly, the critic is on the dominant cognitive approach, based on an instrumental understanding of the relationship between humans and non-humans. So, here the idea is to advocate for new non-anthropocentric political participation, that is plural, reflexive, transnational, ecological and dynamic, hence capable to enable emphatic and comprehensive participatory processes.

In dialogue with those ideas, another perspective that came out from the debate had to do with the practical example of urban planification, brought forward by Iacopo Zetti, from the University of Florence. These processes, which typically entail compulsory citizens’ participation, are defined by their complexity (which is also common to the transformation related to ecological transition) and by the non-marketability of the space, as it is for the environment: as said during the workshop, the territory is not just a piece of land, but it is a source of identity and sense. Considering the second point, the idea of compensation is unfitting for the transformation of space, due to its non-reproducibility. So, taking in account these issues, Zetti suggests participatory practices to occur as follows: those process should be open, e properly co-designed and insurgent, i.e. transformative: antagonistic transformed in design behaviour, to produce, involving the whole parties, desirable solutions for the socio-ecological crisis.

Then, after those general consideration on political participation in the actual socio-economic environment, some words have been spent in considering the micro- and meso- levels of analysis. About that, some participants invited to consider the socio-cultural determinant of political participation in participatory processes, and to analyse their limits accordingly; moreover, some words were spent on communication, both related to participation and, more in general, to the relationship between technological developments and their social acceptance.

Cecilia Biancalana, from the University of Torino, focused on the determinants of participation in direct democracy practices. Accordingly, the reason for which people do not participate are mainly three: i) because they can’t; ii) because they do not want to; iii) because no one asked them. Moreover, her intervention delve into several issue related to the ecological transitions. In particular she highlighted how the participants of direct democracy initiatives are basically those endowed with higher socio-cultural conditions. This phenomenon reinforces the polarization of the social costs of the transition, which typically affect more the peripheries where social marginalities are already present. In fact, environmental protection is perceived as a post-materialistic concern, which interests people who do not suffer from severe material deprivations. The paradox here is that other than the costs of the ecological transition, the negative externalities of climate change typically affect poorer, both in cross-national and in intranational perspective. Another important issue is the so-called “pseudo-participation”, that happens when the outputs of certain process are already decided in a top-down manner, and participation is just meant to create a sense of bounding between involved people. Strictly connected to that, is the issue of deception. Basically, here the point is that the conceptual framing of environmental and political issues should not be used to deceive the citizens. In fact, as for greenwashing, framing can show the environmentally friendly content of a certain policy, or product, or practice, hiding instead some negative externalities, possibly environmentally degrading.

Riccardo Ladini, from the University of Milan, instead consider the importance of institutions in building trust and creating a social bonding for the polity of reference. Starting from considering the renovated role of European institutions in promoting solidarity across EU countries during and after the pandemic, he parallelly considered how that could work for democratic participation practices. Moreover, he pushed his reflection in considering how, in talking about environmental and ecological issues, the “future generations” should have a voice in the matter: accordingly, he proposed to consider the possibility to implement those kinds of initiatives.

The last theme is communication. As in Patriza Catellani intervention, communication is a key for participation, as one of the main reasons for which people do not participate in direct democratic processes is the fact that, simply, no one asks them to. So, she considers how communication should be more encompassing and empathic, capable to build trustful interactions, in which individual identities are enhanced. Professor Matino Bonaiuto, from the University of Roma – la Sapienza, instead, focuses more on communication in relation to social acceptance, considered particularly relevant for green technological innovations. In fact, social acceptance is fundamental with reference to the diffusion of new technologies: accordingly, both education and public communication are key for positively orienting people toward new technologies and focusing them on new technologies aimed at reducing the environmental costs of capitalistic accumulation.

5. Conclusions, policy suggestions, good practices:

Summing up, several issues came out during the workshop.

First, the issue of conflict becomes a priority if we talk about democratic participation. In fact, democratic participation and deliberative practices should be thought as instruments to resolve societal conflicts, prevent, or to defuse them. The example of the CCC is interesting in these terms. The connection with the “Yellow Vest” experience and with specific eco-social conflicts in the French society was clear in that case. Accordingly, the CCC somehow participated to recomposing of that social fracture that was originating in 2018-2019.

Then, the implementation of participatory experiences should be addressed with particular attention, and, in these terms, the CCC experience was once again very paradigmatic. On one hand, there is the need of formal and binding institutions in charge of the implementation of the policies that originate from citizenship assemblies and, more in general, to channel the needs that emerged from the “ground level”. On the other hand, instead, the impact of these experiences is broader than the one they could have on the mere legislative level. As Lise said, the wider impact is reframing the discourse of the public opinion about climate change and climate policies. These experiments could bring us from not caring at all about these issue to common and spread sensitivity.

Then, the third issue is communication: the way in which we frame problems is key in making democratic participation practices effective both for their political relevance, given the transformative possibilities to them associated, but also for people to build bounding and emotional attachment to climate issues.

Moreover, contexts matter: it is important to have a systemic approach, but also to recognize the specificities of the territories and differences in the economic-productive sphere. Who is more affected and more vulnerable in terms of socio-economic conditions, but also, in terms of marginalization and intersectionality? And so, how we factor context in the design of participative experiences.

Strictly connected to the latter issue is the socio-structural position of people involved in democratic participation. We should be aware that those experiences are somehow designed for privileged people. We should probably then prevent for participation to be a privileged. The possible strategies are different: a first idea could be related to fostering greater investment in participatory practices, in order to guarantee a retribution for those involved. However, this problem is difficult to deal with. The CCC experience can give us some useful insights, but it might not be enough.

Another key topic is citizenship, a concept to be reframed and rethought in this new era. An element which was not specifically touched during the meeting on the 30^th of November is the debate about the creation of an eco-social contract, i.e. a new social contract in which to redefine what citizenship is in relation to ecology and which institution should be built accordingly.

Lastly, the issue of lack of trust in politics emerged as a core theme if we are talking about political participation. The democratic systems have been in a legitimacy crisis since several years, as the increasingly declining rate of electoral turnout continuously shows. This crisis, and the related lack of political trust is a huge barrier for political participation, both direct and representative. But this critical point is also the locus in which direct and representative practices can meet: on the one hand, direct democracy can fix some of the contradictions of the current political system; on the other hand, instead, representative systems should subsume some of the instruments and tools emerging from participative practices to strengthen representatives’ link with the “ground level”.

Regarding good practices, several experiences are in motion in the European territory. The CCC case is the first example that has been brought to the workshop, and it is particularly relevant due to the political context in which took place, characterized by the conflictual season of the Gillet Jaune. The CCC case was then capable to promote an important citizens’ mobilization and to transfer its claims to national politics. Another relevant experience is surely the PHOENIX project, an Horizon2020 project aimed at increasing the strength and the efficiency of democratic innovation practices, intended as those deliberative and participative practices aimed at addressing issues related to the European Green Deal pathways. Also, is worth mentioning the constant spreading of energetic communities, in which the production and consumption of electricity is decentralized at the community level; energetic communities promote a new understanding of energetic citizenship. Right now, a very relevant example is represented, other than the ones presented in the journalistic investigation, by the GECO project, in the Pilastro neighbourhood in Bologna. Moreover, climate assemblies were born in recent years in all the Europe, from France to Spain, from the UK to Denmark. To this aim, is particularly relevant the work of the KNOCA in coordinating and disseminating the best practices and most fruitful organisational behaviour, considering the increasing importance of those initiatives.