The European climate governance regime is notoriously technocratic. However, in the last few years  growing pressure for climate action has crossed paths with the “deliberative wave,” participatory programmes, movement demands, and increasing recognition climate policies developed behind closed doors will not land amongst ordinary people. Now, European funders, governing bodies, and practitioners are searching for climate interventions that integrate democratic governance and citizen participation. Democratic Society (Demsoc) has been leading the democratic design in several flagship programmes including the upcoming Net-Zero Cities and its precursor Healthy, Clean Cities. From participatory budgeting in Vienna to building a community of practice for sustainable construction in Madrid the research team at Demsoc, myself included, has immediate access to a variety of climate projects with explicit democratic aims.

In this Work in Progress talk, which one could also call Work in Practice, I will share how Bernstein and Hoffmann’s (2018) analytic framework is being applied to climate interventions that have the explicit aim of democratization in addition to decarbonization. Instead of using the framework to analyze the trajectories of complete or established interventions, at Demsoc the theoretical framing – seeing decarbonization as a process of disrupting carbon lock-in at multiple scales in interdependent systems – has been translated and expanded into a tool, which is used throughout interventions’ design and implementation.

The motivation for this practice and the accompanying research is two-fold. Firstly, working through the framework iteratively throughout the project encourages practitioners to think about how an intervention can be designed to facilitate transformation, where systemic barriers exist, and how political mechanisms can drive change. Secondly, and importantly, the information entered into the tool doubles as a growing library of data points, which will enable the Demsoc research team to ask better questions about and begin to investigate the relationship between decarbonization (disrupting carbon lock-in) and democratization (disrupting systems that tend towards concentrating power).

Although, there are increasing references to deliberative and participatory democracy in the climate governance literature, and increased focus on climate content amongst those who study democracy, there is little cross pollination between the two fields. This Work in Progress / Practice is beginning to bridge that divide. This bridge will create space for us to wonder about and analyze the dynamics of decarbonization and democratization and how they relate to one another.