The Climate-Ecology Blueprint envisages that a strategy for life within planetary boundaries requires reforming democracies by involving in the decision making processes a Citizens’ Assembly, or multiple assemblies, where people gather to deliberate with each other and build trust.
Trust is a crucial component that needs to be enhanced through policy and action. In a recent interview, the world-renowned historian Yuval Noah Harari said that humans are great at solving problems, but we have to make sure that we are solving the right problems.
Harari sees that one of the right problems to focus on is how to establish trust between humans.
The Citizens’ Assembly would aim to deal with this problem. By gathering different people selected through sortition to deliberate together, a Citizens’ Assembly generates trust between people with very different views and opinions on things related to climate change, work and even spirituality.
After trust is established, we can move on to the bigger questions, like how to rapidly phase out fossil fuels and use green energy sources in a just way.
In this task, we should also aim to learn from worldviews and philosophies that stress that the planet Earth is not something that “we have” in common. Rather, we are part of it.
Pluriversal politics is a strand of philosophical and political thought stemming from countries of the global South that has challenged one-worldism behind narratives of growth and development in favour of a narrative of a World where “many worlds fit”. The point is that although we share the same planet, we have different realities. Pluriversal politics emphasies how life is about relationality and interdependence.
Unlike a Growth-centered universe, the pluriverse requires questioning and transforming entrenched ways of knowing, being, and acting through diverse approaches. For example, local economic practices can serve as foundations for infrastructures that promote an ethic recognising all species and life forms.
Taking Climate and Ecology seriously means recognising that One Worldism is part of the problem.
Yet relationality and interdependence also exist within modernity. Our task is to bring them out by constantly challenging the categories brought on by One-Worldism.
Although a Citizens’ Assembly is grounded in contemporary logic and structures, the confidence it inspires may allow changes in our thinking and practice toward embracing multiple perspectives. In an ideal case, the assembly would deliberate on questions related to pluriversal innovations, such as an Indigenous Economy of Full Life.
To find out more about current debates on the pluriverse and its relationship with sustainable development goals, you can familiarise yourself with the work of scholars like Saurabh Arora, available at Saurabh Arora Publications | University of Sussex and the book on Pluriverse – Radical Ecological Democracy