Rethinking Foreign Policy

While world leaders dither on climate change, ordinary citizens are taking matters into their own hands.

As the Copenhagen negotiations on climate change approach, many Canadian citizens are seeking ways to bridge the gap between their desires for a strong, binding global climate agreement and the current government's lack of political will in forging a climate deal to replace the Kyoto Protocol when it expires in 2012. Such an agreement, if reached, would play a critical role in setting the global framework for how countries will respond to the current and growing threat of climate change.

Canada's reputation as an environmental leader has been greatly tarnished, both at home and abroad, and has undergone a great deal of domestic and international criticism due in part to a lack of a domestic regulatory framework for greenhouse-gas emitters, a failure to create policies and campaigns to address the consumption side of Canada's emissions, and an increasing disregard for meeting the commitments of the Kyoto Protocol. As the federal government continues to thwart efforts to reaching a global climate deal, Canada is increasingly being represented by civil society organizations as a fossil rather than a leader in relation to environmental policies and multilateral relations.

In response, concerned citizens and organizations are engaging in historically unprecedented experiments to democratize the climate policy process, at both the national and global levels. These coalitions are encouraging people to find ways to creatively raise awareness of the importance of an international climate agreement and to pressure political representatives to sign on to a global climate deal. Groups such as 350.org, to name just one, have mobilized thousands of people from across the nation and around the world, encouraging them to take to the streets and to the internet to voice their concern. The Danish Board of Technology organized the first-ever citizen deliberation on a global scale. Called World Wide Views on Global Warming, it brought over 4,000 people from 38 countries together on September 26, 2009 to express their opinions on climate policy. The vast majority agreed that urgent and strong collective action on climate change is imperative.

According to journalist and activist Naomi Klein, a global climate justice movement is also emerging, building on the social justice movement that began with the Seattle WTO protests in November 1999. The concept of global justice shifts the debate from a focus on technological and market-based solutions to an attention to the global inequalities among nations that underlie our present climate crisis. The Copenhagen negotiations will draw activists from around the world who aim to open climate negotiations to discussions of justice, accountability, and fairness.

Many scholars and activists maintain that solving the climate change crisis requires forging a participatory form of democracy, the early manifestations which are only beginning to appear. When people are encouraged to take action to address climate change, these actions are usually limited to changes in lifestyle practices, such as switching to more energy-efficient forms of technology. These transformations, however useful, limit citizen engagement to acts of consumption. They do not address broader issues of democracy and citizenship. In order to solve the climate crisis, as Al Gore has emphatically argued, we need to address the democratic crisis, as political apathy has engendered a system in which politicians do not necessarily serve the interests of the citizens they were elected to represent.

Democratic nations need to find the means of assuring participation by affected citizens. When the scale of an issue is as large as it is with climate change, there is little precedent on which to draw to determine which actions will be the most effective. This is particularly relevant in a global context, as United Nations climate negotiations have not traditionally provided avenues for citizen participation, outside of contacting political representatives or civil society organizations.

Remarkably, the upcoming climate negotiations are forging grassroots, bottom-up experiments in engaging citizens. Although it is too early to discern how effective these initiatives will be, the breadth and quantity of attempts to engage citizens in climate policy is noteworthy. An impressive range of individuals and organizations are tackling the intertwined crises of climate change and democracy. It remains to be seen whether our decision-makers will play their part in upholding their own democratic responsibilities.