An example of why actionable granularity matters: transformation and climate change

A timely example of where the lack of actionable granularity matters is the level at which democracy and transformation are discussed in the face of the climate emergency. There is a patent asymmetry in many of these discussions: The climate emergency is manifestly empirical and context-dependent; democracy and transformation are left as abstractions. An example helps.

A point made about longer-term transformations in light of the climate emergency is: “Based on climate science, there is not enough time to first overhaul a critical mass of economies simultaneously according to socialist democratic planning and then to realise emission reductions” (https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13563467.2024.2434469 ). And yet, so what?

For others it is increasingly obvious that the realization of democratic processes outweigh the consequences: “We emphasize the importance of taking political time and maintain that collective social responses to major climate impacts must center actually existing material and symbolic inequalities and place procedural and distributive justice at the heart of transformative action. This is so even where climate change will have devastating physical and social consequences” (https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-10242756; my italics).

What’s missing in all of this is the adverbial property of what it means to act democratically (or in varied transformative ways). To answer that requires sensitivity to diverse contexts. Here but not there, to behave democratically means people choose leaders by these elections, pay these taxes, have these social protections, and more. Elsewhere the really-existing practices of “behaving democratically” can and do differ.

All of which means that without first differentiating the impacts of the climate emergency by location and time, it is next to impossible to identify, let alone differentiate, the consequences with respect to the disparate and different practices of acting democratically or transformationally.