Welcome to our EE and Civic Engagement mini-blog series! This series highlights key insights from a panel discussion hosted by Cornell University and the NAAEE ee360+ program in February 2025. Each post will feature one panelist, sharing their segment of the webinar along with a thoughtful essay that expands on their ideas.

This essay was written by Dr. John Dryzek from University of Canberra, Australia. John Dryzek is Distinguished Professor and former Australian Research Council Laureate Fellow in the Centre for Deliberative Democracy and Global Governance at the University of Canberra. He is former Head of the Political Science Departments at the University of Oregon and University of Melbourne, and of the Social and Political Theory Program at Australian National University. He is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia and Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy. One of the instigators of the ‘deliberative turn’ in thinking about democracy, he has published eight books in this area with Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press, and Polity Press. His work in environmental politics and climate governance has yielded seven books with Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press, and Basil Blackwell. His current research emphasizes global justice, governance in the Anthropocene, and confronting contemporary challenges to democracy.

My focus will be on deliberative democracy and sustainability. Deliberation can be thought of as meaningful communication encompassing citizens and leaders. This is sometimes described as a talk-centric (as opposed to vote-centric) view of democracy, but listening and reflection are just as important as talk. Ideally this communication should be inclusive of all relevant interests (including the nonhuman world and future generations), and consequential in making a difference to collective outcomes, such as public policies. Democratic legitimacy then depends on right, opportunity, and capacity of those subject to a collective decision to participate in consequential deliberation about its content.

Where do we find deliberative democracy? It can be sought in conventional institutions of government, such as legislatures and courts. It can be sought in designed forums—such as dispute resolution exercise, involving partisans, or bodies composed of lay citizens selected more or less at random. It can be sought in civil society, in social networks of citizens, and social movements. It can be sought in whole systems of governance which combine many or all of these components. In his book The Audacity of Hope, this is how Barack Obama described the system of government set up by the US constitution, as a deliberative democracy.

In recent years, there has been a massive proliferation in the number of designed lay citizen forums, especially citizens’ juries (relatively small) and citizens’ assemblies (much bigger). Many have deliberated environmental issues, especially climate change. Climate assemblies have been conducted in countries including Ireland, the UK, Scotland, Sweden, and France, when in 2019 an assembly was established by President Macron. In 2021 the World’s first global citizens’ assembly (first proposed in a 2011 article on which I was the lead author) was conducted online, the Global Assembly on the Climate, comprised of 100 individuals from all over the world.

In theory, deliberative democracy should promote sustainability for at least five reasons. First, deliberation allows the articulation and integration of diverse perspectives (including both expertise and lay knowledge) on complex issues. This integration can include feedback on the condition of social-ecological systems. Second, arguments appealing to public goods or common interests such as the integrity of ecological systems are more persuasive than those based on more partial or limited interests. Third, deliberation can be effective in bringing to mind the interests of distant others – including future generations and nonhuman nature. Fourth, participation in deliberation can promote and reinforce active citizenship on the part of its participants—including ecological citizenship, where people become aware of themselves as participants in social-ecological systems, not just political systems. Fifth, deliberative processes should be good at reflecting upon the shortcomings of institutions in which they are embodied, and so contribute to the institutional reconstruction that the Anthropocene, the emerging epoch of human-induced instability in the earth system, surely requires.

What does the evidence say? We have substantial evidence from designed citizen forums that mostly corroborates these claims. For example, the French climate assembly proposed making ecocide a crime, and suggested incorporating ecological principles in the constitution, among a long series of proposed policy and institutional reforms. The evidence at the macro level of whole political systems is less clear, in part because existing systems are so far from deliberative ideals, and available indicators of the deliberativeness of national systems of government in practice do little more than measure the extent of public consultation.

Finally let me make a connection to environmental education (which is not my field). Here we can draw on John Dewey, who is both a philosopher of education and one of the leading precursors of what we now call deliberative democracy. For Dewey, education should be participatory and deliberative; ideally it involved a democratic community of inquiry, in which all participants offer ideas, share them with others, reflect upon responses from others, and judge knowledge claims. Ecological democracy would add to the Deweyian model a recognition that human communication should be embodied in ecological communication, meaning awareness of all the signals and meanings that pervade the non-human world, including pain of a damaged Earth system. Also, deliberative process does not stop with expanded individual and collective capabilities and better knowledge, but extends to influence upon collective choices (such as public policy decisions).