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 get rid of fossil fuels, and how to 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. Indeed, most modern inhabitants of this world have forgotten that life is about relationality and interdependence.
Taking Climate and Ecology seriously means recognising that One Worldism is part of the problem.
Would a Citizens’ Assembly listening to varied voices perhaps be a viable way to tackle one-Worldism? There are some doubts for this view. María Jacinta Xón Riquiac for example writes in a report how the inclusion of ‘the other’ to deliberate on ‘the political’ often ignores the territorial and knowledge-based dispossession of Indigenous peoples. She offers instead a proposal for a governance model based on an initial dialogue that brings Indigenous peoples closer to each other.
Yet relationality and interdepence also exist within modernity. Our task is to bring them out by constantly challenging the categories brought on by One-Worldism.
While a Citizens’ Assembly itself is built upon modern logic and frameworks, perhaps the trust it generates allows for transformations in our thoughts and practice towards plural perspectives. In an ideal case, the assembly would deliberate a question related to pluriversal innovations.
To find out more about current debates on the pluriverse and its relationship with sustainable development goals, you can familiarise with the vast work of scholars like Saurabh Arora available at Saurabh Arora Publications | University of Sussex and the book on Pluriverse – Radical Ecological Democracy