Upcoming events

Program for the 6th Annual JCT conference: Climate change and the Future of Democracy

 

9.07.2026

 

09:30-09:45 Welcome

 

09:45-10:45 Andreas Føllesdal (University of Oslo): The challenges of climate change for democracy – and some responses

The likely scenarios of drastic climate change unless we collectively change our modes of life appear to challenge our commitment to democratic rule: that the existing population within a state should decide by majority vote on the institutions which shape their lives. There are at least three main challenges: climate change imposes geographical and temporal externalities outside each state and upon future generations, none of whom have voting rights; and the incentives of politicians make them too short sighted, aiming at most to garner popular support at the next election cycle rather than propose costly shifts for the long term benefit.

The paper identifies and explores several ways to address these challenges, in part by reframing the conception of democracy and in part by specifying the challenges more precisely in order to identify somewhat promising better practices and strategies. The aim is modest: not to claim that the glass is half full, but only that complete pessimism may be premature.

Among the central elements to be presented:

1 Reframing the case for democracy.

A) The sort of democratic rule worth defending is not majoritarian, but constitutional – including constraints on what majorities can do toward the rest of those affected, such as persistent minorities; and constraints to ensure that elections occur on the basis of deliberation with alternative policy proposals, free criticism and scrutiny etc.

B) The defence of such democratic institutions for governance is comparative: not that it is perfect or conceptually required for politically autonomous equals etc, but that this mode of governance is better by various standards than alternative sets of institutions. So to compare constitutional democratic rule with a benevolent, climate attentive dictator is a category mistake.

2 Some strategies worth pursuing:

A) exploit constitutional protections including -A.1 judicial review to require climate impact assessments of political proposals; - A.2 institutionalize the right of children to be heard as part of the policy proposals with climate impacts; .

B) Explore the collective action problem climate change impose on states. It is misleading to regard it as a ‘global public good’ problem, e.g. B.1 because the burdens and benefits of alternative solutions impact affects individuals within and across states differently. B.2 The paths toward solutions may not require full compliance [in which case ‘weakest link’ challenges are important], but sufficient compliance among a sufficient number of states. Modes of creating ‘club goods’ among able and willing compliers e.g. within the auspices of the (too weak) Compliance Committee of the Paris Agreement, may be possible, inspired by the Montreal Protocol to protect the ozone layer which allowed side payments and club goods. B.3 A focus on the 'global good' framing may draw attention from the very important challenges of selecting among strategies to resolve or at least reduce the climate challenge, each strategy will impose different distributions of benefits and burdens. Here the lack of sufficient international arrangements for dispute settlement even among parties who want a solution seem crucial, yet beyond the usual tasks of international courts etc. So, the upshot is not particularly optimistic.

 

10:55-11:55 Kerstin Reibold/ Clare Heyward (UiT – The Arctic University of Norway): Climate adaptation, democratic deliberation, and epistemic injustice

As we are increasingly approaching a world in which climate change becomes unavoidable, climate adaptation becomes more and more important. In the context of climate policies, adaptation as a response to climate change aims not to prevent environmental impacts but to reduce the effects of the physical changes on key interests. Therefore, it is necessary to consider what kinds of things—what interests— should adaptation seek to protect from the effects of climate change. Any account of justice in adaptation must take a position on what interests adaptation measures should protect (the what-question). There have been suggestions that basic material interests, economic interests, but also cultural interests are the proper object of adaptation measures. While there is wider agreement on basic material interests, there is more debate as to whether and why economic interests should be considered and how we should understand the protection of cultural interests, especially in the face of diverse cultures that might make very different claims, both in content and in scope, when it comes to climate adaptation. Even once we have settled which interests climate adaptation should protect, we must still settle what are acceptable means for implementing such climate adaptation (the how-question). Often, adaptation can be done in different ways, causing different costs and imposing burdens and benefits on different groups.

In this paper, we suggest that democratic deliberation has an important role to play with regard to each of these questions. Democratic deliberations heighten both the epistemic quality and the legitimacy of decisions about the what and how of climate adaptations. At the same time, such deliberations usually do not take place within the ideal deliberative situation that, for example, Habermas envisioned. Rather, power structures and prejudice lead to various forms of epistemic injustice which undermine fair deliberations and thereby just and epistemically good decisions about adaptation policies. This paper maps the different places in which epistemic injustices can occur and discusses how democratic deliberations about climate adaptation can be made more just.

 

11:55-13:00 Lunch break

 

13:00-14:00 Jonathan Kwan (NYU Abu Dhabi): Who Speaks for the Future, the Past, and Nature? Confucian Ecological Democracy on Proxy Representation

How would Confucian ecological democracy assess the proxy representation of natural entities and future generations? According to Confucian ecological democracy, the demos is conceptualized not as an aggregate of atomistic individuals existing at one time but an intergenerational political community constituted by (1) relationships among past, present, and future members and (2) relationships to a shared place, its environment, and the natural world, and bound by (3) rituals (禮)—social norms, practices, and traditions—that cultivate ecological stewardship. This relational and ecological ontology of the demos grounds duties of ecological stewardship as constitutive of rather than external to democracy. By recognizing the cross-generational nature of the demos, Confucian ecological democracy could justify proxy representatives not only for future generations but also for past generations as a way to fulfill a demos’s ecological duties. Although past generations already had an opportunity to voice their say, granting them proxy representatives nonetheless helps protect the worth of their rights to have a say in a demos’s intergenerational decision-making.

As for natural entities, Confucian ecological democracy would not grant them proxy representatives based on their possession of equal democratic rights. Confucian commitments to political equality are grounded in the equal capacity of humans to realize the virtue of ren (仁) or humaneness. But if natural entities do not have equal democratic rights, would enfranchising them via proxy representatives be democratically illegitimate? Here, Confucian ecological democracy offers a promising rejoinder. Proxy representatives for natural entities could still be democratically justified as a way for the demos to more fully consider how it should relate to such natural entities, which given the Confucian eco-relational conceptualization of the demos, would enhance rather than limit a demos’s collective self-determination. A demos’s right to self-determination just is its right to rule over its common intergenerational affairs that are embedded within a place and the wider natural world.

 

14:10-15:10 Darrel Moellendorf (University of Frankfurt) Plutocracy as a Problem for Climate Justice

Climate change has been recognized publicly as a problem for several decades. Yet public policy has permitted fossil fuel investment and demand to continue to grow to record levels. Accompanying that growth, however, there has been significant expansion in the much smaller renewable energy sector, and some, albeit woefully inadequate, progress in reducing emissions in some parts of the world. How is that complex reality best explained? This paper argues that several explanations on offer fail to explain this circumstance adequately, these include attempts offered by moral philosophers having to do with the inadequacy of traditional moral concepts, including the concept of responsibility, as well as other attempts that rely on global and intergenerational versions of collective action problems.  In contrast, the paper argues that the existence of a plutocratic tendency better explains the circumstances. This is characterized as distortion of the democratic process that occurs due to the susceptibility of the public decision-making capacity to the influence of private money and due to deliberate, although not necessarily coordinated, attempts by private interests to exploit that susceptibility. The paper examines evidence of such a tendency. Plutocracy is rarely discussed in political theory, but if the paper’s argument is compelling, it is a major obstacle both to effective climate change mitigation and to approximating the ideal of democratic equality. In order adequately to mitigate climate change, the forces of plutocracy will have to be countered. The struggle for climate change mitigation is, then, also a struggle for democracy.

 

15:30 – 16:30 Caleb Althorpe (Utrecht University): Economic Democracy and Growth in Times of Ecological Crisis

A criticism of growth that has recently received increased interest of late is that growth over the long term is incompatible with achieving ecological sustainability (Lenzi 2025; White 2025, 220; Jackson 2011). Commonly labelled degrowth, this position argues that because growth can never be entirely ‘decoupled’ from ecological pressure, sustainability can only be achieved by downscaling economic sectors, namely though restrictions in the consumption and production of certain goods (Parrique et al. 2019).

While proponents and activists are quick to insist democratizing the economy will bring about a degrowth transition (Kallis 2018), this seems far from certain due to the significant sacrifices to consumption and changes to ways of life this would require. Thus, in this paper I investigate more deeply the relationship between the degrowth model and economic democracy. I use the concept of democratic legitimacy and the democratic relevance of future people’s interests to argue that decision-making in the economy can only be properly democratic when growth is limited.

The argument turns on two central claims. First, extending recent work on the democratic inclusion of future people (Smith 2013; González-Ricoy and Gosseries 2016; Caney 2009), the paper argues the current trajectory of climate change is violating future persons’ interest in liveability. I argue economic decision-making procedures are democratically legitimate only when they represent this interest, given it is basic and relates to people’s freedom to choose between different ways of life. Second, it argues that forecasts about decoupling are best understood as an instance of uncertainty. Recasting the endorsement of degrowth regimes as resulting from suitably applying a ‘precautionary principle’ (Gardiner 2006; Hopster 2023). The paper concludes by considering some upshots of the argument for recent debates on economic democracy more generally (Cordelli 2025; Hussain et al. 2023).

 

16:40 – 17:40 Alessandro Cangiano (LUISS Guido Carli, Department of Political Science): The Anti-Democratic Structure of Carbon Offsetting

Carbon offsetting is one of the most prominent climate policies today. This policy is based on the idea that individuals, governments, and private companies can “compensate” for their emissions by financing projects that produce an equivalent reduction or avoidance of emissions elsewhere in the world, most often in low-income countries.

Carbon offsetting raises fundamental questions about the democratic governance of projects in relation to the communities affected in the areas of implementation: these communities frequently lack formal recognition of their land rights at the state level, and although free, prior, and informed consent is formally required, it is systematically violated in practice. As a result, existing decision-making procedures systematically fail to respect basic democratic principles of political participation.

There are two dominant debates on the ethics of carbon offsetting: one grounded in the consequentialist framework of John Broome (Stefansson 2022; Barry & Cullity 2022), the other engaging with several contemporary works within the territorial justice literature (Stilz 2019; Moore 2019; Nine 2022). I argue that both these frameworks fail to theorize the anti-democratic structure that governs carbon offsetting. Drawing on the plural tradition of indigenous political theorists (e.g., Whyte, K.; Corntassel, J.; Murdock E.G.; Watene, K.), I argue that the exclusion of affected communities in carbon offsetting is not an “accidental” implementation problem, rather it emerges from the extractivist model underlying this policy, which creates the conditions for the systemic exploitation of local communities and Indigenous peoples.

In particular, I highlight three interconnected drivers that may give rise to these injustices. First, carbon offsetting relies on the commodification and global trade of land and natural resources, generating a structural pressure to maximize credits: this paves the way for the systematic exploitation of affected communities. Second, the very idea of “free, prior, informed consent” reflects the fact that affected communities are treated merely as “consultants,” rather than as sovereign actors and co-designers of the projects themselves. Third, carbon offsetting reproduces colonial patterns in global climate governance, where historically marginalized communities bear the costs while wealthy states, corporations, and fossil fuel industries reap the benefits. Taken together, these drivers constitute an extractivist structure that systematically undermines democratic agency.

 

18:30 Dinner at Piazza Toscana