David Schlosberg

The climate-challenged future requires a response to a convergence of three key crises: increasing climate-induced and environmental turbulence; ongoing social, economic, and environmental inequity; and mounting public disillusionment with and disconnection from contemporary democracy. My Erkko Visiting Professorship project, talk, and proposed symposium will focus on this crisis convergence and explore its impact on evolving conceptions of environmental justice and practices of democratic innovation and experimentation. Examples include the expanding use of citizen assemblies on climate action, which can either simply legitimize existing policies or be more genuinely engaging (Wells et al 2021); the growth of attention to justice and inclusion in adaptation or ‘green new deal’ planning, in contrast to plans that focus on risk or those that can exacerbate inequity or maladaptation (Schlosberg et al 2017, Cohen and MacGregor 2020); spontaneous and grassroots community responses to climate disasters, and experiments on combining Indigenous and western knowledges and concepts such as kinship in environmental management and climate policy development (Whyte 2020). These examples will be examined for their democratic inclusion and authenticity, the role concepts of environmental justice play in process design and resulting policy proposals, and, more generally, their place as a response to the ecological, social, and political polycrisis.