Democrazia e diritto di fronte alla crisi climatica

Faced with widespread skepticism about democracy’s ability to tackle global warming, there are increasing calls to rethink representative democracy and its relationship with the law. This article focuses on three of these proposals, critically examining their potential and limitations. The first proposal is to strengthen the deliberative content of democracy by supplementing traditional elected institutions with assemblies composed of citizens selected by lottery, who are invited to deliberate with the assistance of facilitators and experts. These are the now well-known «mini-polls», of which «climate assemblies» are a variant. The second proposal comes from legal theorists who, in the wake of the innovations introduced by some Latin American constitutions, call for the recognition of rights for non-human entities, such as rivers, glaciers, and ecosystems. In this way, formal political representation is superseded by other meanings of representation, such as the private representation exemplified by the figure of the «lawyer of nature», or the substantial representation referred to an assembly whose members act in the interests of someone or something that has not formally authorized them. The third proposal, formulated by Luigi Ferrajoli, consists of rethinking the balance between democracy and constitutionalism, within the coordinates of a multilevel system in which government institutions remain as close as possible to citizens and guarantee institutions are reorganized on a global scale. The backbone of this proposal, which translates into the drafting of a Constitution of the Earth, is the removal of natural resources from the availability of majorities, but also from the «savage powers» of the capitalist market, and their recognition as fundamental, inviolable, and inalienable goods.