Starting off from long-standing debates about whether democratic practices are capable of fostering timely, large-scale transformations towards sustainability, the article synthesises existing research on prospects and pitfalls for democratising ongoing sustainability transformations.
The authors present a new typology for understanding various combinations of democratic/authoritarian practices and of transformations towards/away from sustainability and they explore the role of democratic practices in promoting or obstructing different dimensions of sustainability transformations.
The author group finds substantial evidence that democratic practices can foster transformations towards sustainability and provide a set of associated policy recommendations how to reform existing democratic practices to accelerate shifts towards more sustainable societies.
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Name of the article: Democratising sustainability transformations: Assessing the transformative potential of democratic practices in environmental governance
Authors: Jonathan Pickering, Thomas Hickmann, Karin Bäckstrand, Agni Kalfagianni, Michael Bloomfield, Ayşem Mert, Hedda Ransan-Cooper and Alex Y. Loh