Climate Justice and Democratic Understanding

Abstract

An increasing number of environmental movements is striving for ‘climate justice’: the linkage of climate change action and socio-economic reforms. The political ideals and methods of these movements can differ vastly. I examine the diverging democratic strategies of two climate justice movements. The Green New Deal is shown to presuppose a left populist strategy, as theorised by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, while Extinction Rebellion proposes sortition-based democracy as the political strategy fitting to climate justice. I compare the different understandings of democracy implied in the two movements, and present an approach that could combine these. The analysis demonstrates that a debate of climate justice is inevitably also one of democratic understanding, democratic principles, and democratic legitimacy