10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17509
The paper examines different practices, imaginaries and programs of ecological transitions whose articulation points towards a more-than-local and less-than-global green eco-social transformation. Translocal ecological transitions bring together climate action politics, environmental justice, and the everyday ecologism of experimental community-led technoscience. Within transition projects we see the emergence of new more-than-human political constituencies, the making of broad eco-social coalitions, and the implementation of innovative forms of reparative governance. Ecological transitions foster a new political space, green democracy, as an alternative to both regressive nationalism and green globalism that dominate contemporary politics.
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2038-3460
17509
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Dimitris Papadopoulos
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/
Tecnoscienza – Italian Journal of Science & Technology Studies
reparative justice
Ecological Transition: What It Is and How to Do It, Community Technoscience and Green Democracy
Text.Serial.Journal
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12
Lectures
2022-03-26
2023-06-28
2022-03-26
2023-10-23
13-38
TS
Dimitris Papadopoulos
2021
10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17509
13
University of Nottingham
2038-3460
2
reparative justice
en
38
Ecological Transition: What It Is and How to Do It, Community Technoscience and Green Democracy
https://tecnoscienza.unibo.it/article/download/17509/16353
12
                                                                                         Lecture
                                                                                               13




Ecological Transition: What It Is and
How to Do It
Community Technoscience and Green Democracy

              Andrea Ghelfi                                Dimitris Papadopoulos
              University of Nottingham                        University of Nottingham



    Abstract: The paper examines different practices, imaginaries and programs
    of ecological transitions whose articulation points towards a more-than-local
    and less-than-global green eco-social transformation. Translocal ecological
    transitions bring together climate action politics, environmental justice, and
    the everyday ecologism of experimental community-led technoscience. Within
    transition projects we see the emergence of new more-than-human political
    constituencies, the making of broad eco-social coalitions, and the implementa-
    tion of innovative forms of reparative governance. Ecological transitions foster
    a new political space, green democracy, as an alternative to both regressive
    nationalism and green globalism that dominate contemporary politics.

    Keywords: Ecological transition; translocal infrastructure; more-than-human
    politics; green democracy; reparative justice.

    Submitted: December 01, 2021 – Accepted: January 30, 2022

    Corresponding author: Professor Dimitris Papadopoulos, Institute for Sci-
    ence and Society, School of Sociology and Social Policy, University of Notting-
    ham, Nottingham NG7 2RD, UK. Email: dimitris.papadopoulos@nottingham.ac.uk




1. Transition and the Ecological Condition

    The symptom Anthropocene testifies to the indelible traces of human
presence on planet Earth and the dangerously unstable condition of the
Earth-human relational systems (Bonneuil et al. 2016; Zalasiewicz et al.
2011). The sixth mass extinction, climate crisis, soil depletion, ocean acid-
ification, human displacement, forest destruction–the traces of ecological
conflict are everywhere. The unpredictable consequences of human im-
pact on the chemical, biological and geophysical structure of the Earth
are ungovernable. This is a new condition. What once was from the
pespective of the colonisers a “terra nullius,” land free for grabbing, “the

TECNOSCIENZA
Italian Journal of Science and Technology Studies
12 (2) pp. 13-38 - ISSN 2038-3460
www.tecnoscienza.net                                2021
14                                                          Tecnoscienza – 12 (2)

land of no one” (de la Cadena et al. 2018; Millner 2017; Svirsky 2010;
Wynter 2003; Wolfe 2006) has now become an unknown and unrecog-
nisable land, “terra incognita” (Crutzen 2002). But it was not only about
land, it was not only about the proclaimed “land of no one,” it was also
about the “matter of no one”: presumably inert, passive, unowned and
unclaimed matter free to be appropriated; materials free to be excavated
in the accelerated extraction of natural resources to satisfy a global de-
mand for minerals and energy and to provide for economic growth. Now
this supposedly inanimate and governable matter has become something
unrecognisable whose destructive power puts us in the middle of a multi-
tude of ecological troubles.
    In this paper, we reflect upon different practices, imaginaries and
programs of ecological transitions whose articulation can, perhaps, enable
a proposal for a green democracy. The centre of gravity of transition poli-
tics is an understanding of the ecological that highlights the entanglement
of ecosystems, technologies, institutions, and cultures through practice-
based forms of activism and more-than-local and less-than-global ac-
counts of material transformation. The emersion of climate protest
movements, such as Fridays for Future, diverse climate strikes, indige-
nous mobilisations, and environmental protest movements such as Ex-
tinction Rebellion and a multiplicity of more localised environmental jus-
tice campaigns, espouse a new sense of being and relating to Earth, a new
geo-internationalism that takes climate protest into a new direction to-
wards a transition from below: everyday practices of ecological reparation
with the support of different alternative forms of technoscience and mul-
tiple experimental processes of institutional reinvention.
    Transition politics demands alliances and convergences amongst the
everyday ecologism of community technoscience, protest politics and in-
novative forms of ecological governance. In this paper we develop the
idea of green democracy, a third political space alternative to both regres-
sive nationalism and green globalism as the political expression of ecolog-
ical transitions. We glimpse the possibility for a green democracy inside
the many entanglements and convergences amongst eco-social coalitions
for a zero-carbon and ecologically sustainable society, the emersion of
forms of reparative governance, and the accumulation of grassroots
knowledge innovations. The constituent power11 of green democracy, as
we argue in this paper, is a composition of alternative forms of sociability
and materiality, protest politics, and new institutional architectures.
    Transition is a key word for contemporary eco-social movements. This
term refers to the everyday collective capacity to take actions of ecological
reparation by mobilising different actors and sets of practices starting
from localised (not just local though, as we will discuss later) and specific
issues. From community urbanism (Pickerill 2021; Bulkeley 2015;
Calvário et al. 2016) to energy and food sovereignty (Shattuck et al. 2017;
Angel 2017; Engel-Di Mauro 2022), from transformative environmental
justice activism (Agyeman et al. 2016; Bullard et al. 2009) to indigenous
Ghelfi and Papadopoulos                                                     15
resurgence (Whyte 2018a; Mander and Tauli-Corpuz 2006), from alterna-
tive technological development and community led ecological change
(Ottinger et al. 2011) to social economies, the environmental commons,
and transition towns (Hopkins 2011; P2P Foundation 2015; Utting 2015),
there is a plethora of movements and programmes that situate themselves
within the larger field of discourses for civilizational and ecological transi-
tions.


2. Experimental, Reparative, and Translocal Transitions

    If we look at food sovereignty campaigns, for example, we see how al-
ternative food production systems and agroecology are key elements of
community transition within a multiplicity of movements and material re-
generation practices. Food sovereignty campaigns entail the simultaneous
responsibility of participants to be food growers and consumers, which
means being involved in the processes of food production and distribu-
tion by inventing alternatives to the large supply chains that currently
dominate the existing agrifood system. But food sovereignty is something
more than the consumers and growers’ right to choose what to consume
and what to grow and how. Food communities are first of all about creat-
ing alternative ways for dealing with the ecological interactions and inter-
dependencies involved in the processes of farming: the collective enter-
prise of creating an alternative lifeworld within the interactive dynamics
that inhabit the soil and its inhabitants (Bertoni 2013; Krzywoszynska
2020; Puig de la Bellacasa 2014; 2019; 2015). Starting from the end of the
1960s the so-called green revolution significantly transformed the ways
through which agriculture has been developed on a global scale (Rosset
and Altieri 2017; Shiva 2008; Altieri 2018; Altieri and Toledo 2011). The
central role of mechanisation, the adoption of new technoscientific inno-
vations, the selection of high-yielding varieties of cereals, and the exten-
sive use of chemical fertilisers and agrochemicals are the main features of
current “industrial” agriculture. These technologies of food production
have wide-ranging eco-social implications on biodiversity and climate
change, and they entail a relationship of strong dependency between
farmers and the world’s largest chemical producers.
    Agroecology (Rosset and Altieri 2017; Altieri 2018) appears as one of
the main alternatives for overcoming the shortcomings and damage that
the “green revolution” has caused. Agroecology is a response to the ques-
tion of how to transform and repair our food system and the rural life
starting from a transformation of the ecological practices of peasants and
farmers, artisanal fishers, pastoralists, indigenous cultivation methods,
urban food producers etc (for different approaches and cases see García
López et al. 2019; Lanka et al. 2017; Rosset et al. 2019; Altieri et al. 2011).
In this sense, food sovereignty movements and agroecological farming are
creating an alternative politics of matter: by seeking different material cir-
16                                                          Tecnoscienza – 12 (2)

culations and channels of involvement, they enact different ontologies by
materialising alternative forms of human-soil-food relations. Permacul-
ture, organic, biodynamic, regenerative agriculture, alternative food dis-
tribution2: these are some of the names given to practices by which
movements of ecological agri-food transition are converging today in em-
phasizing a need to attend to the health of the soil and the broader ecolo-
gies in which we grow food (Altieri 2018).
    The ecological dimension of transition highlights the interconnected-
ness of people, animals, plants and geophysical world, as well as the en-
tanglement of ecosystems, histories, technologies, institutions, and cul-
tures (Chakrabarty 2009; Kingsland 2005). While the environmental per-
spective focuses primarily on nonhuman nature, ecological thinking en-
compasses the complex web that binds together humans, nonhumans and
planetary systems (Nash 2006; Puig de la Bellacasa 2017). Ecological
thinking introduces the biggest paradigm shift in social science of the last
50 years, according to Latour (2017; 2018) – framing societies as embed-
ded in interconnected multi-cultural and multi-natural worlds (Rozzi et
al. 2015; Hamilton et al. 2015; Krebs 2016).
    This ecological dimension differentiates ecological transitions from
other forms of transition, in particular technological transitions such as
for example the substitution of one type of fuel for another in energy
transitions. The history of such technological transitions reveals that ra-
ther than reducing environmental impact they increase energy consump-
tion and neglect their broader environmental and social implications (for
different positions in energy history see Bonneuil and Fressoz 2016; Fou-
quet 2016; Fressoz 2014; Malm 2013; Podobnik 1999; Sovacool 2016)3.
Ecological transitions reverse this reductionist social-environmental func-
tion of technological transitions and put transitions squarely back into the
terrain of decentralised, bottom-up, and justice-driven practices that rad-
ically transform the socio-ecological organisation of the specific domains
(such as energy, housing, food provision, farming, sustainable produc-
tion, urban regeneration etc) in which they take place.
    Transition is a multiscale process of ecological reparation that involves
technological experimentation, institutional invention, and local spatial
diffusion. Reparation here is about reclaiming places that have been ap-
propriated or damaged, and then inventing alternative collectives, exper-
imental practices and mundane interventions: transitions are reparative
and practice based (Brown et al. 2012; Pickerill 2021; Papadopoulos et al.
2022). Transition is not a single process; different practices make differ-
ent realities. With Escobar (2015) we can say that the aim of transition
consists in changing existing socio-ecological configurations making al-
ternative worlds as part of ontological struggles for reappropriating, re-
imagining, and re-inventing forms of living beyond existing socio-
economic organisation in the specific domains they take place.
    Research from within Science and Technology Studies and related
fields reminds us that technological “reality is not destiny” (Law 2004)
Ghelfi and Papadopoulos                                                   17
and that there is always a multiplicity of alternative and diverging onto-
logical configurations in the making (Braun et al. 2010; Papadopoulos
2018; Holbraad et al. 2014). Different realities are enacted through dif-
ferent practices: the practices of transition are making fragments of alter-
native worlds in the present. Through practices of material reparation,
ecological transitions can be seen as ontological transitions, in which what
is at stake is reappropriating and reinventing what living otherwise in a
damaged planet (Tsing 2015) could mean. Ecological transitions drive so-
cial transformation through multilevel, practice-based experimentation
with alternative ways of relating between humans, animals and plants, ob-
jects, and technologies (Papadopoulos 2012, 2014). There are good rea-
sons for framing transition movements as local movements. Each transi-
tion enterprise defines its boundaries of immediate efficacy, local allianc-
es, and the specific pragmatics of day-to-day transformation. Transition
needs a concrete space to exist. Nevertheless, the local offers a very lim-
ited perspective for addressing the more-than-local circulation of materi-
als, chemicals, living matter, symbols, imaginaries, and narratives; the pro-
liferation of translocal infrastructures for knowledge and technological
transfer; the transnational composition of experiences, tools and tacit
knowledges that crisscross each and every local experiment.
    At the same time, ecological transitions are less-than-global: practices
are always situated, actions are always grounded, and trajectories never
extend in the same way endlessly. If the global has been the universalist
matrix through which the liberal governance evacuates ecology in the
name of economic growth (Leonardi 2017; de la Cadena et al. 2018), na-
tionalism – which (re)introduces an understanding of the local marked by
reactionary belongings and identities – has been the illusory refuge in
times of economic and geopolitical crises (Latour 2018). As we will see in
the next section, both represent key obstacles for more-than-local and
less-then-global processes of ecological transition. Rather than universal-
ism and localism, the model of ecological transition relies on the abun-
dance of many different contingent practices: ecological transitions imply
that practices do different things in different local ecologies and yet they
are intensive flows between them: translocalism (Ghelfi and Papadopou-
los 2022).


3. Technofix and the Ecological Impasse: Regressive Na-
tionalism and Green Globalism

   Such more-than-local and less-than-global ecological transitions are
contested on two fronts. On the one hand, current forms of nationalism
that attempt to appropriate and redefine the local in exclusionary, pri-
marily racial terms, and to assert ownership of a dominant “us” that is
permitted free access to local resources and materials negating its ecologi-
18                                                          Tecnoscienza – 12 (2)

cal embeddedness. On the other hand, we see attempts to unleash the
green economy into a global scale and create a universalist approach to
green economic growth that, again as with nationalism, negate the ecolog-
ical embeddedness of its economic model and its limits.
    Current expressions of nationalism condense common nationalist
tropes – such as protectionist localism, corporate libertarianism, ultra-
conservatism, reactionary militarism, and the hate for the cultural left –
with the violent disregard for antiracist, trans-feminist and ecological
movements (Stanley 2018; Giroux 2018; Teo 2021). Regressive national-
ism relies on widely common features of nationalism (Paxton 1998;
Sternhell 2010) but does that in a moment of a widespread liberal hege-
monic crisis and the ascent of postliberalism: the annulment of accepted
liberal-democratic rights and liberal-democratic patterns of governance
without the justification of entering into a distinct state of exception that
would, even if only nominally, justify such illiberal policies (Tsianos et al.
2012; Papadopoulos et al. 2008; Hayden 2021; Plattner 2019). In the core
of these postliberal moves and the renvigoration of nationalism resides
the implicit, and sometimes explicit, possibility of regression to fascism.
This threat of a “second coming of fascism” (Harootunian 2007) that
propagates authoritarianism and the rise of racism came as a response to a
wide range of antiracist, anti-austerity and radical democratic and envi-
ronmental movements that crisscrossed the globe in the past decade.
“Our way of life is not negotiable”: this is the slogan that dominates much
of the political expressions of regressive nationalism that refuses to rec-
ognise that we all share, live, and rely on the same planet (Collomb 2014;
Malm et al. 2021).
    Climate negationism is one of these dimensions of regressive national-
ism cultivating pride in a form of secession from the Earth in which eco-
logical claims are dismissed in the name of national economic interests,
blunt anthropocentrism, and naïve humanism (Malm et al. 2021). This
fictional secession from the Earth implies not only the refusal to take ac-
tion in order to mitigate the climate and ecological crisis but also an ac-
celeration of the practices of extractivism and environmental irresponsi-
bility: from deforestation to deregulated fracking, unchecked agribusi-
ness, mining, and fossil fuel reliance are seen as key vectors of economic
development and geopolitical dominance. Regressive national-ism’s au-
thoritarian realignment of state institutions and the incitement of social
polarisation along lines of race, gender, and migration (Negri 2010;
Traverso 2017) erases the space for any ecological claims.
    If regressive nationalism has declared a war on Earth through assum-
ing the proud belonging and uncontrolled exploitation of a locality, the
hesitant policies of green liberal governance constitute the other strategic
obstacle for ecological transition. Green globalism is promoted by leading
multilateral organisations and is assumed in national and interna-tional
policy (Aykut and Dahan 2015). It rests on the assumption that a decou-
pling of GDP growth from resource use and carbon emissions at a rate
Ghelfi and Papadopoulos                                                    19
sufficient to prevent dangerous climate change and other dimensions of
ecological breakdown is possible (Gupta 2014). Green globalism pro-
motes an aggressive agenda for globalising the green economy which re-
lies on a conception of technology and innovation completely disconnect-
ed from its socio-ecological premises and consequences (Pellizzoni 2015).
The World Bank defines it as “economic growth that is efficient in its use
of natural resources, clean in that it minimizes pollution and environmen-
tal impacts, and resilient in that it accounts for natural hazards and the
role of environmental management and natural capital in preventing
physical disasters” (The World Bank 2012). Despite the wider circulation
of the term green economy within significant global governance organisa-
tions, green economy initiatives made their presence in the world more as
object of political discourses than in a substantial green conversion of
production. Fossil fuel economies are still leading features of our socie-
ties, and a significant green transition is yet to be materialised. The under-
lying assumption of green economic globalism is that environmental lim-
its and “planetary boundaries” (Rockström et al. 2009) should not be
perceived as constraints to development but as unprecedent business op-
portunities towards green financialization and as engines of growth that
lay the foundations for a new cycle of accumulation (Nelson 2015; Braun
2015)4.
    Despite their open antagonism, regressive nationalism and green glob-
alism co-exist and both severely limit the possibility of ecological transi-
tion today. Market driven green economic globalism is failing to tackle
emission reductions and has weakened many attempts to deploy wide-
spread ecological transformation. This failure is reinforced by the real
threat for relapsing into far-right authoritarian politics that regressive na-
tionalism poses. The threat of a second coming of fascism has effectively
blocked ecological change not only when regressive nationalism is in
power5 but also when regressive nationalism acts as an oppositional pres-
sure group to the liberal or-der of power and the project of green global-
ism. Regressive nationalism blocks change when it is in power and it also
blocks change when in op-position through the threat of a fascist turn.
    Paradoxically, what unites these two political strategies is their hu-
manist conviction that strong political will and the implementation of
technological innovation can prevent climate and ecological danger
(Boehnert 2018; Huesemann and Huesemann 2011; Hopwood et al.
2005; Castree 2008). The lure of the technofix is not only dominant in the
eco-modernist discourse of green globalism but appears as a core political
strategy for appeasing the political unrest that regressive nationalism
spawns. Claims that the solutions to current environmental problems and
to the lifestyle changes that many in the Global North need to undertake
will be delivered through technological innovation and technoscientific
progress serve as the liberal answer to the postliberal challenge that the
second coming of fascism poses.
20                                                           Tecnoscienza – 12 (2)

  This threat of regressive nationalism and the fallacy of the technofix to-
gether with the failures of international governance (the fundamentally
flawed Kyoto protocol, replaced by the non-binding commitments of Par-
is, and the very weak compromises of Glasgow6) have dwindled the hopes
that the climate crisis could be tackled alone through top-down govern-
ment-led initiatives. The eruption of new ecological mobilisations and
climate disobedience actions seem to be an expression of a civil society no
longer accepting the inactivity of governments. Greta Thunberg: “[…]
people are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the begin-
ning of a mass extinction. And all you can talk about is money and fairy
tales of eternal economic growth. How dare you!”7.
  On the 17th of November 2018 thousands of activists of Extinction Re-
bellion organised a civil disobedience action by blocking five bridges over
the Thames in London. Similar actions have expanded with different in-
tensity over the last two years across hundreds of cities globally. On the
20th of August 2018 Greta Thunberg decides to skip school in protest
Swedish government’s insufficient actions to reduce greenhouse gas emis-
sions. Virally propagated in Europe, the United States and Australia, the
Friday school strikes initiative, promoted by the Fridays for Future
movement, continued into the following year and then diversified into a
multiplicity of mobilisations and direct action campaigns. As the voices of
the climate protest movements are intersecting with other campaigns for
environmental and social justice, they reinforce a new sense of being and
relating to Earth, a new geo-internationalism that promotes an ecological
transition for below. In what follows we examine two evolving and inter-
connected dimensions of this geo-internationalism that might take the
climate protest into the direction of ecological transitions: first, collective
practices of ecological reinvention of everyday life through the mobilisa-
tion of communally accessible technoscientific knowledge and, second,
the institutional reinvention of ecological governance.


4. Community Technoscience and the Making of Ecological
   Transitions

    Collective practices of ecological reinvention turn everyday ecological
existence to a terrain of material and political experimentation. Starting
from situated practices, transition movements are constructing other ways
of inhabiting our planet by practicing ecological transitions from below.
The movements we refer to sit uneasily within the broader political cate-
gory of social movements (see for example Tilly et al. 2009; Della Porta et
al. 2006). Transition movements are more-than-social movements in the
sense that their practices and aims are not primarily directed to challenge
power relations or established institutions. To put it in a different way,
they are doing more than that: by experimenting with other ways of en-
Ghelfi and Papadopoulos                                                    21
gaging with the materiality of life and making alternative socio-material
interventions, more-than-social movements are constructing fragments of
alternative common worlds beyond the dichotomy nature/society. Insist-
ing on the more-than-social dimension of transition movements highlights
their transformative power: their capacity to set up alternative material
configurations and everyday practices that aim to materialise ecological
transition in the human-nonhuman everyday continuum. From the per-
spective of more-than-social movements ecological transition is not only
the field in which a multitude of revolts against institutional injustice are
enacted, ecological transition is also the field for experimentation with
everyday practices of socio-ecological regeneration and reparation. Tran-
sition movements always involve the entanglement between human and
nonhuman others, between materiality and sociality, and, as we will see,
between knowledge and practice.
    Many of the ecological transitions and ecological initiatives described
in this paper not only engage in the circulation of alternative knowledges
but also in the production of knowledge itself through a multiplicity of
activities and practices: citizen science, maker and hacker spaces, agroe-
cology, co-production between instituted and amateur innovation, open
science and technology. This is the distributed power of community
technoscience to collaborate and invent technoscientific solutions neces-
sary for materialising ecological transitions. The lure of the universal
technofix that dominates green globalism and regressive nationalism as
we de-scribed earlier is here reversed though situated practices of minor
technoscientific inventions embedded within ecological transitions: kitch-
en science, DIY biology, the alternative experimentation with medical
sub-stances, lay engineering projects, production of alternative forms of
energy, community projects of environmental modernization, self-
managed systems against environmental hazards, radical patient-based
campaigns, permaculture regeneration, traditional systems of knowledge,
craft, embodied technoscience, punk science, health movements, open
source science, technology and agriculture, clandestine chemistry, the
hackers culture, ecological justice initiatives, cross-species collaborations,
bio-art, self-organised projects of scientific literacy, bio-dynamic princi-
ples of farming, inner city food gardens, cooperative production, organis-
ing against extractivism, creation of alternative seed banks, ecofeminist
advocacy, production of alternative research, making of alternative
knowledge collectives, setting up local systems of exchange – all examples
of crafting alternative material-ecological transition projects through the
creation of community technoscience.
    Community technoscience is about the transition from a highly regu-
lated relation to material and technological innovation that takes place
within instituted technoscience, such as formal research labs and indus-
trial R&D facilities, to a multiplicity of self-organised experimental spaces
(Papadopoulos 2018). Community technoscience is not only about the
generation of alternative scientific and technological innovation within di-
22                                                          Tecnoscienza – 12 (2)

verse communities of practice and the wide distribution of this innovation
across multiple places; it is also about the increase of traffic and ex-
change between instituted technoscience and community technoscience.
This increase in the traffic of knowledge and the distributed invention
power of community technoscience support the experimentalism of eco-
logical transitions: reclaiming everyday materiality by actively recompos-
ing and rearticulating it. Here, technoscience is done not only within its
so-called core institutions but in multiple ways and in many different
mundane environments: hackspaces, makerspaces, traditional and alter-
native knowledge systems, clandestine science, community labs, amateur
science and technology, fab labs, indigenous knowledge, bio-art, activist
knowledge, self-education projects, punk science, agroecology all gradu-
ally become a part of technoscience.
     Following the example of agroecology mentioned earlier in this paper,
we see how the multi-local experimentation with participatory pro-
grammes for genetic seed improvement has become a key dimension of
how the agroecological mission for seed biodiversity8 is redefining the re-
lation between science and everyday farming practice. In order to develop
on-farm seed conservation, genetic agrarian scientists, farming communi-
ties, ecological movements and consumer associations are co-creating in-
clusive spaces of technoscientific engagement: community biodiversity
management practices involve a multitude of practitioners and a situated
capacity of negotiating different needs and material engagements with
seeds. The implementation of on-farm conservation projects, participa-
tory research projects, seed banks, heritage seed libraries, open source
seed catalogues, knowledge and material transfers are key ingredients for
making participatory biodiversity management a significant technoscien-
tific innovation in food transition practices and in agrobiodiversity farm-
ing. In this example we see how community technoscience can be contin-
uous with parts of instituted technoscience and vice versa, a continuity
that unfolds across disparate and fragmented research settings. This ex-
tended view on technoscience allows us to capture how every specific
knowledge practice assembles around it a different social and material
world, be it scientists, technologists, animals, materials, businesses, social
policy makers, marketeers, tools, practitioners, consumers, enthusiasts,
activists, community stakeholders. What we have here are large ecologies
of multiple actors, landscapes, and information. An intense traffic of
knowledges and relations crisscross instituted and community based
technoscience, public policies and grassroots organising, everyday life
ecologism and public protests. This mangle of interdependencies situates
the constituent power of transition politics as discussed earlier in this pa-
per within a wider field of alliances and ecological connections contrib-
uting to new forms of institutional imagination: green democracy.
Ghelfi and Papadopoulos                                                   23
5. The Demise of Progressive Democracy
    Modern polity and especially political and social rights in our societies
are closely linked to fossil fuels. Timothy Mitchell (2011) argues that since
the nineteenth century workers in the Western world achieved political
and social inclusion thanks to their crucial role as workers in the ex-
traction, distribution and use of coal. ‘‘Carbon democracy’’ has been the
terrain for the inclusion of working class struggles into modern polity
(Mitchell 2009). But the miners’ ability to stop production, to make alli-
ances with railwaymen near their unloading grounds, to send their fami-
lies demonstrating under their employers windows, to sabotage industrial
production, all this disappeared with the global infrastructures of the oil
economy starting from the late 1960s (Bonneuil et al. 2016; Latour 2018).
The international energy transition from coal to oil constituted the mate-
rial base of the demise of working-class organisation and the end of a cy-
cle of social emancipatory struggles for more democratic rights (Mitchell
2011). As much carbon democracy was the terrain of a more inclusive
polity in the Global North, with the oil turn of the economy it became
eventually the terrain that constituted the defeat of progressive democra-
cy and its vision that within capitalist development it is possible to
strengthen social and political rights able to improve the economic condi-
tions of an inclusive workforce. The turn to oil not only brought with it
the marginalisation of the workers’ movements within polity and the ero-
sion of democratic rights but also amplified a collective form of life based
on unlimited economic growth.
    The new dependency on oil made progressive democracy vulnerable
and the oil crises of 1973 and 1979 dismantled the fragile political knot
that connected economic growth, working class struggles, and the widen-
ing of democratic institutions. Simultaneously, the political alternative of-
fered by socialism was de facto limited to the redistribution of the econ-
omy’s benefits eventually also relying on the same dominance of oil in the
model of production (Charbonnier 2020). The collapse of socialism and
the end of progressive democracy not only led to the dominance of finan-
cialised neoliberalism but also to the intensification of ecological break-
down. The term “Great Acceleration’’9 captures the other side of the
‘‘Thirty Glorious Years’’ – it is the dark side of the “Golden Age” of capi-
talism (Brenner 2006; Duménil and Lévy 2005a; Duménil and Lévy
2005b; Glyn 2006).
    The term resonates with Karl Polanyi’s ‘‘Great Transformation’’
(1944) that attempts to understand broader interconnected domains of
social change and aims to grasp the comprehensive and interlinked nature
of the post-1950s transformations sweeping across the socio-economic
and biophysical spheres of the Earth: ecological breakdown is inseparable
from economic growth. Despite the economic turbulences of the past two
decades recent studies highlight that we are witnessing a second accelera-
tion with even greater ecological and climate consequences (Steffen et al.
24                                                          Tecnoscienza – 12 (2)

2015). This second acceleration, which started in the beginning of the
2000s, was not a short-term phenomenon and has continued for more
than a decade. In the period 2002-2015 global material extraction in-
creased by 53% in spite of the 2008 economic crisis (Krausmann et al.
2018). During this period alone over 1000 Gigatons of materials were ex-
tracted, that is, almost one third of the total extraction since 1900. More-
over, during the Covid-19 pandemic that started in 2020 the demand for
raw materials continued despite the temporary decrease of the global
GDP, the breakdown of supply chains and extensive labour shortages.
We are witnessing a significant crisis of raw materials availability and this
as a worldwide-spread phenomenon (Zanoletti et al. 2021).
    The current social and ecological conjuncture characterised by the
end of progressive democracy, the demise of political alternatives, the
threat of regressive nationalism and implicitly fascism, and the unstoppa-
ble presence of ecological breakdown means that a new democratic trans-
formation will be inevitably confronted with the very conditions of pro-
duction itself. An ecological turn in the economy means disarticulating
the relation between production and fossil fuels and at the same time
abandoning the idea that progressive democracy is possible within this
material mode of production. Social justice cannot be achieved in the cur-
rent historical conjuncture without ecological transition. And ecological
transition cannot be achieved within the top-down political strategy of
green globalism.


6. The New Institutionalism of Green Democracy

     We already highlighted how community technoscience is a key actor
in ecological transitions. Here we want to focus on the wider fields of po-
litical, economic, social reinvention that can sustain and implement the
ac-cumulation of knowledge innovations coming from grassroots move-
ments and at the same time experiment with the governance of complex
and articulated networks of socio-ecological transitions. It is of course too
early to describe the key tenets of such an institutional reinvention. But as
the alternative to both regressive nationalism and green globalism a third
space of green democracy10 gravitates around three political tendencies
that already exist within collective enunciations and practices of ecologi-
cal transitions: (1) assembling a more-than-human political constituency;
(2) the making of broad eco-social coalitions for a zero-carbon society; (3)
the emergence of reparative governance.
     1) From food sovereignty movements to practices of solidarity for the
right to health, from permaculture to occupied factories, from feminist
and queer movements to indigenous resistance, from environmental jus-
tice campaigns to alternative autonomous subsistence movements, from
grassroots climate urbanism to alternative making, mending, hacking and
design practices, a central point of contemporary ecological movements
Ghelfi and Papadopoulos                                                     25
lies in the experimentation other ways of relating between humans, ani-
mals and plants, objects and technologies. Following the case of the Ital-
ian network of peasants, called Genuino Clandestino (Genuine Clandes-
tine), we can see agroecology as a set of practices that is transforming the
everyday doing of farming and as a process of reinvention of rural forms
of life (Ghelfi 2022). Reclaiming rural forms of life, though, is not about
the restoration of some nostalgic premodern social conditions. In the pol-
itics of Genuino Clandestino the farmers and activists who define them-
selves as “contadini” (peasants) reactivate the capacity to invent other
modes of material existence. Becoming a peasant, as they call themselves,
is an existential transition to a “practicability of life” (Bertell 2016), to a
form of living in which self-subsistence and ecological care are inextrica-
bly intertwined starting from the reinvention of daily practices of socio-
ecological repair. The desire of an embodied, everyday, material relation-
ship with the land: this is the peasant return. Permaculture, organic, bio-
dynamic, regenerative agriculture, the peasant return brings with itself a
multitude of practices of care (Puig de la Bellacasa 2017) in which mate-
rial engagement meets an obligation to make an ecology a liveable place
for all its participants.
    Projects of ecological transition such as Genuino Clandestino place
politics in a very different terrain than the traditional politics of progres-
sive democracy: politics unfolds in the material experimentation with
land, in the forest, in the scientific laboratory, in the clinic, in the com-
mune, in the field and the farm, in the hackerspace and in the many other
places where humans are learning how to decolonise their relationship
with the governance of earth and nonhuman others. A green democratic
political constituency addresses, involves, and implicates increasingly a
very different set of actors, human as well as nonhuman, in its material
workings. Such a reconfiguration of the political constitution is of course
from the perspective of regressive nationalism or liberal green globalism
impossible to be conceived let alone practised through existing political
institutions. In the sense of Rancière (1998), we could say that green de-
mocracy emerges as those nonhumans and more-than-social actors enter
the political scene only to reorder it so that it can allow for them to act
politically.
    2) La Via Campesina is a global network of peasant organisations that
are aiming to transform agriculture and food systems (Giunta 2021; Ajl
2021). Embracing 148 organisations from 79 countries, and representing
millions of rural peoples in Asia, Europe, the Americas, and Africa, La
Via Campesina is the most politically significant transnational agrarian
movement existing today. Since its foundation, in April 1993, La Via
Campesina began forming cross-sectoral and cross-cultural alliances with
key urban and rural social movements, unions, parties, civ-il society or-
ganisations, NGOs, indigenous resistances, environmental movements.
The global resonance of claims such as food sovereignty and agroecology
is not understandable without this culture of alliance that made possible
26                                                        Tecnoscienza – 12 (2)

the significant presence of La Via Campesina within the alter-
globalisation movement, the World Women’s March or the COP26 Coa-
lition for Climate Justice.
     La Via Campesina is a good example for thinking the role of eco-
social coalitions in transition politics. Green democracy as a political
condition and a transformational movement cannot develop without
reassembling diverse eco-social demands coming from heterogenous
intellectual, social and political positions (e.g. movements, trade unions,
parties, progressive business associations, NGOs, artists, scientists,
ecological movements) around the idea that in the current historical
conjuncture social transformation is driven by ecological
transformation11. This is happening through a programmatic convergence
around the necessity of decelerating carbon intensive activities in sectors
that do not contribute to socio-ecological well-being and at the same time
accelerating the forms of public investments, private enterprise action
and collective agencies that can build the social, cultural, material and
ecological infrastructures of a zero carbon society. This involves a re-
composition of the most ecologically progressive sectors of a
transformative economy: policy driven green new deal with strong
incentives for sustainability and circularity; municipal and regional
institutions capable of inventing localised innovative ecological policies;
and grassroots movements’ ability to form political alliances around
diverse issues such as zero emissions by 2030, high energy efficiency,
renewable materials, the downscaling of production, food sovereignty,
carbon emissions and wealth tax, and climate and ecological reparations.
Green democracy is mobilised as a vision and as a political framework
through the creation of novel alliances and material coalitions between
diverse actors and segments that participate in or at least enable
ecological transitions.
     3) The reliance on top-down solutions has been shown to have limited
effects on mobilising ecological transformations and to be exclusionary
towards diverse communities as well as transition projects that do not fit
within the green globalist agenda of the Global North. Ecological
transitions interrupt existing centralised liberal governance and valorise
projects and experiments of ecological reparation with novel models of
interactive governance across different scales and geographies: alternative
forms of agriculture and soil renewal, revegetation of urban spaces,
indigenous ontologies, reclaiming of dispossessed land, experimentation
with bio-fuels and green chemistry, recuperation of traditional and
indigenous systems of land use and land care, water and biodiversity
conservation, production of alternative forms of energy, participatory
practices of urban and regional ecological planning, to name just a few
examples.
     Reparative governance reinstates a postcolonial and decolonial
perspective into the governance of ecological transitions. Unlike
“romanticised reparations” (Cadieux et al. 2019, 649), contemporary
Ghelfi and Papadopoulos                                                      27
transition projects start from the assumption that there is no pure and
original state to begin with: environmental destruction, colonial and racial
injustices, and geopolitical inequalities are deeply intertwined with
ecological degradation (Ferdinand 2019; Simpson 2021; Cairns 2003)12.
Reparative governance relies on the framework of reparative justice that
seeks to address the wrongs done to those who are suffering ecological
damage rather than focusing solely on the punishment of the offenders
(Walker 2010; Perez Murcia 2014; Macleod et al. 2017; White 2016;
Almassi 2017). Du Bois (1964) provides the conceptual framework for
reparative justice in the Black Reconstruction in America and Fanon
(2004, 58-59) raises the question reparations as part of anticolonial action.
Reparations have a long history in postcolonial thought and practice and
are also a defining moment of indigenous politics for decolonising settler
colonial lands (Clapperton et al. 2019; Bacon 2018; Whyte 2018b).
Reparative governance involves reconsidering the geopolitical
ambivalences of the green democratic project and its uneasy attachment
to Global North politics. Green democracy cannot be a global project but
only a transversal and translocal one that reinvents itself through the
multiplicity of practices and demands of the diverse transitions and
movements involved13.
    Include non-humans in your politics! Make broad social coalitions!
Claim reparations and repair reclaimed lands! This is how current eco-
social movements do ecological transitions. The constituent power of a
myriad of ecological transitions that take place across so many different
places and geographies right now is a process of political composition
that entails alternative forms of sociability and materiality, transitional
knowledge and community technoscience, more-than-social civil
disobedience actions, new coalitions amongst a multiplicity of actors, and
the call for the new institutionalism of green democracy.


Acknowledgments

    Andrea Ghelfi would like to gratefully acknowledge the support of The Le-
verhulme Trust, UK (grant number ECF-2019-076) and Dimitris Papadopoulos
would like to gratefully acknowledge the support of The Leverhulme Trust, UK
(grant number RF-2018-338\4) as well as the Arts and Humanities Research
Council (AHRC), UK (grant number AH/R013640/1).


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1
  The notion of constituent power introduces a processual idea of democracy as the
“becoming of democracy” in the present, rather than normative promise of democracy
that is eternally deferred to the future, see Negri (1999); Negri (1996); Hardt et al.
(2000). Extending this view, a green democratic political constituency – see for exam-
ple Doherty et al. (1996); Braun et al. (2010) – involves a very different set of actors,
human as well as nonhuman, in its material workings in comparison to 20th century
constituent politics discussed in Negri’s work. This more-than-human approach resit-
uates constituent power from humanist modernity to our new ecological more-than-
human present.
2
  See, among others, Holmgren (2002); Mollisonand Holmgren (1978); Paull (2006);
Pfeiffer (2004); Masters (2019); Chase (2014).
3
  For a broader discussion of the concept of transition see Feola and Jaworska (2019);
Escobar (2015); Heffron and McCauley (2018).
4
  See for example different approaches to the valuation and financialization of ecosys-
tems and natural environments in Beckert et al. (2011); Birch (2017); Huguenin et al.
(2006); Lilley et al. (2014); MacKenzie (2011); Svampa (2015).
5
  For example, the Trump administration in the USA (2017-2021) not only opposed
regulation for carbon emissions reductions but also rolled back over 100 environmen-
tal policies; recent developments in Russia, Brazil, and India show how the rise of re-
gressive nationalism has supported aggressive climatic negationism, see Kohl et al.
(2021); Fearnside (2018); Popovich et al. (2020).
6
  See Rosen (2015); Kutney (2014); Spash (2016); Arora and Mishra (2021).
7
  Greta Thunberg’s speech at the U.N.'s Climate Action Summit in New York City,
23rd of September 2019.
38                                                                    Tecnoscienza – 12 (2)


8
   See Bioversity International (2017); Ceccarelli and Grando (2019); Ceccarelli et al.
(2009).
9
  Invented by a working group at the 2005 Dahlem Conference (Berlin) on the history
of the human–environment relationships (Hibbard et al. 2006).
10
   In recent years the democracy-environment nexus has been developed in the field of
environmental politics under the label of ecological democracy. This notion criss-
crossed various intellectual trajectories that are trying to stress the role of collective
ecological actions in a politics of radical transformation: prefigurative, collective, and
ecologically integrated practices give birth to new sustainable systems of production
and circulation (Meyer 2015; Schlosberg and Coles 2016; D. White 2019; Pickering et
al. 2020; Eckersley 2020; Doherty and De Gleus 1996). The ecological reorientation of
the material practices of everyday life is at the centre of new materialist work that high-
lights the democratic role of local communities’ action in shaping sustainable systems
of food, water, and energy circulation. The notion of green democracy developed in
this paper resonates strongly with ecological democracy that aims to create new alli-
ances, convergencies and processes of political composition amongst everyday ecologi-
cal transitions, the politics of environmental justice and environmental protest, and
new forms of reparative governance.
11
    For example see D’Alessandro et al. (2020), O’Neill (2020), White (2019), Brand
(2015), Adler (2019), Ocasio-Cortez et al. (2019).
12
   See also Rose (2004); Rivera Cusicanqui (2010); Simpson 2021; Kimmerer 2020.
13
   We are thinking, for example, of the world’s indigenous movements which have put
forth a multitude of proposals for reparative justice and ecological restoration, such as
the Anchorage Declaration, the Karuk Climate Adaptation Plan, the Red Deal, Green
New Deal for Appalachia (Nation 2021) or the agro-foresters of the Savanna Institute
and of the African-inspired agro-ecologists of Soul Fire Farm proposals for experi-
menting with alternative food production in a decolonial perspective, (Ajl 2021).
