The Future of Democracy in the Face of Climate Change

Democracy is the central concern of our work on ‘the future of democracy in the face of climate change’. But democracy is a contested term, so a review of existing definitions of democracy and associated concepts is a necessary baseline for our work. In carrying out such a review however, we must acknowledge that neither the past nor the present are sufficient guides for the future.

This is the second paper in our project on ‘the future of democracy in the face of climate change’. It highlights a range of definitional approaches to ‘democracy’ and describes some of their underlying assumptions or core concerns. We briefly review some of the relationships between these approaches and dilemmas at the heart of the relationship between democracy and climate change, which were highlighted in Paper One.