Moving from ‘Extractivism’ to Accountability

20 December 2022

Geographic area:

Europe

Topic:

PHOENIX

While academic work is important in helping us understand the way the world functions and imagine different, better futures, its positive potential can only be realised outside academia, in interaction with the communities that knowledge is supposed to serve.

The climate crisis confronts us with a way of using planet Earth’s natural resources that is fundamentally unsustainable. Any serious attempt at tackling climate change must address the roots of the system we live in, and we are all shaped by, the system that we follow the American author and social activist bell hooks in naming it “imperialist, white supremacist, capitalist patriarchy”. Recognising our own implications in the system we are trying to modify is a crucial first step on the road to change.

Written by:

Maarten de Groot (he/him)

Consultant participatory democracy at The Good Lobby

Kelsey Beltz (she/her)

Managing Director at The Good Lobby

Connected to this, the PHOENIX project addresses the following question: how can we improve existing participatory democratic mechanisms to make top-down policies such as the European Green Deal (EGD) more locally embedded and genuinely effective?

As a research project, PHOENIX is primarily concerned with knowledge production: how to enrich so-called ‘democratic innovations’ so that they can better support the green and just transition? While ‘extractivism’ is a key feature of the dominant economic model that caused the climate crisis, it is just as central to the dominant mode of knowledge production.

If PHOENIX wants to break this cycle, we have to start with our own practices: we have to engage in knowledge production in a way that is amenable to the communities that our project wishes to serve. This means that we should work with these communities and find ways to support their agenda while being open and transparent about our own interests.

This is where The Good Lobby comes in: leveraging our work as an NGO dedicated to participatory democracy and equalising political systems, our goal is to ensure that the methodology and research produced by PHOENIX are tangible, practical, and actionable for the communities this project seeks to support.

PHOENIX conducts eleven pilots to co-develop and test improvements in existing instruments for political participation and democratic innovation in specific territorial contexts.

The PHOENIX consortium aims to support local partners by offering a portfolio of democratic innovations and by supporting the establishment and work of a Territorial Commission for Co-design (TCCD) – an organ representing relevant stakeholders and interests that works to co-design processes of political participation in partnership with the commissioning body.

While most of the work will need to take place within the ecosystems of each of the eleven pilots, an inter-pilot dialogue will be organised to transcend the local context with the aim of drawing overarching lessons about the potential and limits of political participation processes in the context of the green transition.

The success of this phase depends on the extent to which local participants will feel ownership of this trans-local and transnational process of learning and exchange, and feel inspired and empowered to integrate the lessons learned in their local work. Moreover, a final conference will be organised in Brussels in order to share and discuss PHOENIX’s findings with relevant actors operating at the EU level, ensuring that future policies adequately reflect the outcomes of the PHOENIX project.

The green transition can only be successful if all play their part, starting with those most powerful and those most responsible for the climate crisis. Operating both at local and European levels, combining academic and civil society expertise with local initiatives, PHOENIX aims to be part of the change we wish to see in the world.