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Abstract

The climate crisis is testing the limits of representative democracy. The global nature of the crisis, its urgency and technical complexity, the polycentric governance context it creates, the democratic issues raised by climate injustice, and the barriers to including future generations and nature pose daunting challenges for representative institutions. Together, these challenges contribute to a twofold deficit of democratic legitimacy. The climate crisis makes robust democratic engagement and the inclusion of all affected interests in collective decision-making more difficult, which undermines democratic legitimacy procedurally, and contemporary democracies’ inability to respond effectively to the threat of climate change undermines their legitimacy substantively. In this context, political representation, which promises responsive, efficient, rational governance without the need for the direct participation of all, is more essential than ever. However, representation following the standard model—with its narrow focus on electoral representation at the nation-state level, its unidirectional conception of responsiveness and static conception of constituency, and its abstract individualism, anthropocentrism, and bias towards the present—is poorly suited to meeting the current challenges. I argue that reimagining democratic representation can help remedy democracy’s double legitimacy deficit. I analyze contemporary theories of representation that seek to move beyond the limitations of the standard model by accounting for the changing sites and scope of representation in the real world and addressing the under- and misrepresentation of certain kinds of interests. I suggest that the most promising ideas from a climate perspective include integrating informal political representatives, embracing certain types of elite mobilization, leveraging representation to promote deliberation, and designing supplementary forms of representation for social groups, discourses, nature, and future generations. Each of these ideas compensates for particular shortcomings of standard electoral representation, but each also suffers from its own deficits. In response, I propose a systemic approach to democratic representation that attends to the interactions between multiple forms and sites of representation. In addition to designing new criteria for evaluating representation’s democratic legitimacy at the individual level, theorists need to develop an understanding of the conditions that promote democratic legitimacy at the level of the representative system.