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 May 2024. 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 Oliver Escobar, professor of Public Policy and Democratic Innovation at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. He works on participatory and deliberative democracy, with a focus on citizen participation, policy innovation, the commons, political inequalities, and the governance of the future. His research explores the intersections of political theory and practice, aiming to improve the legitimacy and capacity of democracy to address the challenges of our time. 

His latest book is Climate Assemblies: New Civic Institutions for a Climate-Changed World, co-edited with Stephen Elstub and forthcoming in 2025.

Environmental education entails myriad practices through which we help each other to make sense of life on Earth. This shared learning can support collective action based on ecological values and care for people and the planet. In turn, civic engagement entails myriad practices through which we help each other to work out how to live well together, and apart. This is a foundation for developing communities that strive for inclusion, wellbeing, solidarity and justice in the pursuit of common goods. Both of these fields of practice are crucial to democratic life, especially when it comes to reimagining our shared worlds and acting collectively towards desirable futures. 

At their heart, the climate and ecological crises are crises of political, economic and public imagination:

• A crisis of political imagination where institutions and leaders across the world are struggling to think and act with the wisdom and urgency necessary to avert the worse possible futures of a climate-changed world. 
• A crisis of economic imagination where we are locking ourselves into systems of economic organization that prioritize extraction, accumulation and exploitation over people and planet.  
• A crisis of public imagination where we are led to believe that our current political and economic arrangements are the only ones possible or desirable. 

Civic engagement and environmental education are key to countering these crises and rewiring these realms of imagination and action. But our legacy institutions often suffer from stagnation, complacency and incapacity, which prevents change at the pace and scale required. 

Part of the problem is the issue of ‘democratic myopia’ (see Graham Smiths’ work), that is, the short-termism endemic to political and economic institutions driven by short electoral cycles and even shorter market cycles. This short-termism is reinforced by powerful actors that are in the business of squandering everyone’s tomorrow to secure their own interests today. 

Another key challenge is what Dalton calls the ‘participation gap’: the growing gap between ‘the politically rich’ and the ‘politically poor’ (i.e. those who can influence the decisions that affect their lives, and those who can’t). Power inequalities feed economic inequalities, and vice versa, while dominant financial interests fuel what Nancy Fraser calls ‘cannibal capitalism’ – an economic system that destroys the very conditions for its own existence (including a liveable planet). 

We are undergoing a sustained period of democratic recession globally (see for example the V-Dem reports). Traditional forms of democratic governance through legacy institutions are challenged in terms of both legitimacy and capacity. Legitimacy for meaningful action requires substantial inclusion and public trust in institutions. Capacity for effective action requires mobilizing material resources and human capabilities. If public institutions lack legitimacy, they can’t mobilize capacity; and if they lack capacity to make a difference, they lose legitimacy.  This is a vicious circle that undermines the power of public institutions to effect change. But the legitimacy/capacity vicious circle can be turned into a virtuous circle. 

The versions of democracy that prevail in much of the current public and political imagination are rather narrow: they are designed to be elite-driven and involve citizens in marginal ways. Citizens are entrusted to choose leaders through the ballot box, but less so to take a direct role in collective leadership efforts. Given the complexities of a climate-changed world, elite-driven forms of democratic governance are not just insufficient but counterproductive. The environmental and ecological crises require active citizens and communities supported by new institutions that can meet the challenge of imagining and enacting desirable futures.  

There is a great deal of activity and hope across a range of fields at the intersection of research, policy, activism and practice. One of them is the field of democratic innovation, which seeks to rekindle democratic life by involving citizens directly in collective action, public policy and institutional decision-making. Democratic innovations are processes or institutions designed to reimagine the role of citizens in governance by increasing opportunities for participation, deliberation and influence (see Elstub and Escobar’s overview). Examples of democratic innovations include digital crowdsourcing, participatory budgeting, collaborative governance, citizens’ initiatives and deliberative mini-publics. There is an increasing number of cases covering all kinds of issues around the world, from local to regional, national, transnational and global levels of governance (see examples in Participedia). 

Let’s take an example from civic engagement in environmental politics, policy and governance. In the last few years, climate assemblies (a type of deliberative mini-public) have been gaining momentum, often emerging from the interplay between civil society and public authorities in a range of countries. Climate assemblies are civic institutions where citizens selected through civic lottery learn and deliberate together about environmental issues to develop proposals and advance climate action. They seek to reflect a cross-section of the relevant population (hence the use of civic lottery) and are designed to foster the kind of high-quality deliberation that is so rare in the shallow gladiatorial arenas of our mediatised public spheres. 

Climate assemblies thus foreground environmental education and civic engagement oriented towards collective climate action. In our forthcoming book Climate Assemblies: New Civic Institutions for a Climate-Changed World (Elstub & Escobar 2025) we assess their potential and limitations. They are not a panacea, but a growing number of cases across Europe (see Knowledge Network on Climate Assemblies), as well as pioneering cases such as the Global Assembly on the Climate and Ecological Crisis, are producing valuable learning for the development of the next generation of democratic innovations. 

These experiences often show that citizens tend to be more ambitious than their political leaders when it comes to addressing the climate emergency. Climate assemblies tend to generate proposals that are more environmentally progressive than existing national policies (see Smith’s KNOCA report). They also offer a unique way of involving children and young people, as illustrated by the pioneering work of the Children’s Parliament as part of Scotland’s Climate Assembly in 2020-2022 (see their inspiring report). What is clear so far is that climate assemblies are building new spaces for civic engagement and environmental education –and doing so in ways that are capturing the imagination of organizations as varied as the United Nations and OECD, activist networks such as Extinction Rebellion, and governments of various ideological stripes. 

Climate assemblies are just one amongst myriad democratic innovations emerging around the world. But they illustrate how new institutions can be designed to place environmental education and civic engagement at the heart of democratic governance. Navigating the troubled century ahead will require quantum leaps of imagination in action. Nothing less will do if we aspire to become, as Roman Krznaric puts it, good ancestors.  This will mean developing more democratic communities, institutions and economies. For that to happen, citizenship must be more than just the act of choosing others to act on our behalf. The crises we face demand the kind of legitimacy and capacity to act that can only emerge from mobilizing democracy’s true potential for collective intelligence and action.

This eePRO blog series, Ripple Effect, highlights stories of collaboration and impact among partners in the ee360+ Leadership and Training Collaborative. ee360+ is an ambitious multi-year initiative that connects, trains, and promotes innovative leaders dedicated to using the power of education to create a more just and sustainable future for everyone, everywhere. Led by NAAEE, ee360+ is made possible through funding and support from U.S. EPA and twenty-seven partner organizations representing universities and nonprofits across the country, as well as five federal agencies. Through this partnership, ee360+ brings together more than five decades of expertise to grow, strengthen, and diversify the environmental education field.

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