10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17510
application/pdf
2038-3460
17510
2
en
Luigi Pellizzoni
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/
Tecnoscienza – Italian Journal of Science & Technology Studies
Gaia
Handle with Care. Transition, Translocalism and Experimentalism for a Green Democracy
Text.Serial.Journal
https://tecnoscienza.unibo.it/
12
Commentary
2022-03-26
2023-06-28
2022-03-26
2023-10-23
39-48
TS
Luigi Pellizzoni
2021
10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17510
39
University of Pisa
2038-3460
2
Gaia
en
48
Handle with Care. Transition, Translocalism and Experimentalism for a Green Democracy
https://tecnoscienza.unibo.it/article/download/17510/16354
12
                                                                               Commentary
                                                                                              39




Handle with Care
Transition, Translocalism and Experimentalism for a
Green Democracy

    Luigi Pellizzoni
          University of Pisa




     Abstract: Commentary to the Lecture “Ecological Transition: What It Is
     and How to Do It. Community Technoscience and Green Democracy”, by
     Andrea Ghelfi and Dimitris Papadopoulos (this issue).


     Keywords: technofix;                    prefiguration;   neoliberal   governmentality;
     Anthropocene; Gaia.

     Submitted: January 31, 2022 – Accepted: February 15, 2022

     Corresponding author: Luigi Pellizzoni, University of Pisa, Department
     of Political Sciences - University of Pisa. via Filippo Serafini 3, 56126 Pisa,
     Italy. Email: luigi.pellizzoni@unipi.it.




    The question of the ecological crisis is on the table for many years. It
surfaced around 1970 as the “limits to growth” issue. The MIT report,
together with other publications of major public resonance, such as Paul
Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb or Barry Commoner’s The Closing Circle,
stressed the material impossibility of proceeding forever, or for long, with
what retrospectively would be called the Great Acceleration in
industrialization and economic growth. Yet, the post-Fordist restruc-
turing of capitalism, supporting and at once supported by the impetuous
development of life and information sciences, dovetailed with the rise and
worldwide diffusion of neoliberal rule – according to which the market is
the only resource-efficient social institution – in opening a season of “eco-
logical modernization”, that is a technology-based and market-mediated
reform of industrial economies aimed at transforming the limits to growth
into the growth of limits.

TECNOSCIENZA
Italian Journal of Science and Technology Studies
12 (2) pp. 39-48 - ISSN 2038-3460
www.tecnoscienza.net                                   2021
40                                                          Tecnoscienza – 12 (2)
     This season, however, was showing signs of fatigue already at the be-
ginning of the 2000s, due to two concomitant factors: on one side
increasingly worrisome global threats (climate change, biodiversity loss,
resurgent or insurgent epidemics…); on the other a new Great Accelera-
tion, with a thrust – which continues to date – in extraction and dejection
processes far outperforming any increase in resource-efficiency. Faced
with that, calls to reform started to look incongruous. Not by chance rul-
ing political, economic and intellectual elites’ strategy for legitimizing the
status quo began to change. Though climate denialism persisted, it was
increasingly overtaken by a complex move. On one side an endorsement
of the Anthropocene narrative, as calling for a “stewardship” of the pla-
net allegedly based on the “decoupling” of society from its material un-
derpinnings (Breakthrough Institute, 2015). On the other a backing of
the Gaia argument, as originally developed by Lovelock (1979), whereby
planetary forces are provided with self-reparatory or self-adjusting capaci-
ties, while constituting a “form of sovereignty, [...] a power that domi-
nates the heads of state” (Latour 2018, 84), to which one cannot but bow.
As a result, we are faced today with an awkward governmental arrange-
ment, which combines a strongly technocratic approach – the one advo-
cating fourth-generation nuclear power and geoengineering solutions like
GHG capture and storage – with a gambling one, hedge fund managerial
styles being increasingly extended to material assets (Cooper 2010) with
the purpose of riding the unexpected and the unpredictable thanks to re-
silience, flexibility and “ongoing creative experimentation” (Clark and
Yusoff 2017, 18). Where these apparently opposite governmental ap-
proaches – one hyper-agential and hence “responsible”, the other hypo-
agential and hence ultimately “irresponsible”, in the sense of irrelevant to
what happens – converge is in an unshakable faith in technofixes (though
what is meant by “fix” diverges considerably) and in hollowing out de-
mocracy, both in its traditional representative forms and in the “en-
larged”, participatory modes that scholars in STS and environmental poli-
tics had been advocating as the only sensible reply to increasingly com-
plex issues, often entailing “real life experiments” (Funtowicz and Ravetz,
1993; Krohn and Weyer, 1994).
     Against this increasingly bleak backdrop, the proposal of Andrea
Ghelfi and Dimitris Papadopoulos for a green democracy stands as a sort
of anti-climax. Admittedly, the plea for a renewal of democracy is not
new. Since the 1990s there have been plenty of attempts to devise institu-
tional changes capable of addressing Ulrich Beck’s diagnosis of the eco-
logical problem as the result of the inability of modern political, eco-
nomic and scientific arrangements to tackle the consequences of their
own operation. The very term “green democracy” has contended the aca-
demic and public space with other expressions, like “environmental de-
mocracy”, “ecological democracy”, “green politics”, “global environmen-
tal governance”, “earth system governance”, “environmental state” and
others, each of which conveys partly different meanings, referring to dif-
Pellizzoni                                                                  41
ferent understanding of the type and scale of institutional change sup-
posedly needed to address the ecological challenge, from the reformist to
the radical, from the local to the state, to the planetary (Dryzek 2016;
Eckersley 2020; Pellizzoni 2020; Pickering et al. 2020).
    Ghelfi and Papadopoulos’s argument builds on three basic features:
1) the authors make a case for a green democracy from below, the level of
everyday practices and of a technoscience made by and for communities;
2) this is for them implied in the need for taking into account more than
human constituencies; 3) yet they also contend that, for having any effica-
cy, these broadened constituencies need translocal coalitions, namely
around the goals of decelerating carbon intensive activities and of en-
gaging in reparative actions, away from mythologies of pristine nature.
Let’s have a look at each claim.
    Democratization from below is the workhorse of supporters of
prefigurative politics (Yates 2015), frugal and DIY innovation (Khan
2016), new materialist mobilizations (Schlosberg and Coles 2016) and
new peasantry (van der Ploeg 2009). In different ways and from different
perspectives, this scholarship argues that change is possible (and indeed is
already taking place) only starting from the bottom, in a sort of revamp of
the old anarchist claim that to change the world you have first to change
yourself and your way of living, acting as if the new world was already
there and avoiding to engage in an open conflict with institutionalised
powers. This case seems no doubt fit for a situation where, as Ghelfi and
Papadopoulos argue, democracy is caught between the Scylla of regres-
sive, hyper-extractive nationalism and the Charybdis of green, hyper-
regulative globalism.
    Taking into account more than human entities as constitutive of an
enlarged political community is a case made by philosophers and ethicists
since at least Aldo Leopold’s “land ethic”. Recently, anthropologists have
been especially prominent in conveying a sense of more than human
communities, as their work on non-western cosmologies has shown how
naturalism, with its sharp division between humans and the rest of the
world, clashes with other ontologies for which there is continuity, kinship
and mutual exchange between animal and vegetal species, and even with
the inanimate world (Descola 2014; Viveiros de Castro 2014; Kohn 2013;
Haraway 2016). Bruno Latour (2004) has made an elaborate attempt to
translate such acknowledgment into the refashioning of democratic insti-
tutions.
    Finally, the issue of scale has increasingly taken the forefront in reflec-
tions over the way global capitalism works to extract value and how hu-
man and more than human arrangements survive and develop in response
to its devastations (Tsing 2015; Papadopoulos 2018). The issue of scale is
moreover for long time at the centre of debates over the scalability of
“real utopias” and new materialist arrangements up to challenging the
ruling order (Wright 2010; Schlosberg and Coles 2016). Ghelfi and Pa-
padopoulos’s case for an intermediate level of coalitions of local expe-
42                                                          Tecnoscienza – 12 (2)
riences, based on the recognition of affinities between differences, is rele-
vant to escape the lure of localism or of a “climate Leviathan”, that is an
overarching technocratic governance necessarily authoritarian even if
formally respecting democratic rules (Wainwright and Mann 2018).
    Taken on their own, the pillars of Ghelfi and Papadopoulos’s argu-
ment have thus been developed at length in recent years. What makes it
promising, however, is the stress on their reciprocal implication. I say
promising as it is obvious that the space of an article prevents from a
thorough development. The paper, in my understanding, is a first outing
in the troubled water of (re)thinking green democracy in the post-Liberal
era. In this sense, the sketchy character of the new institutionalism the au-
thors propose should not be regarded as a detractor. Indeed, even book-
length elaborations, like Latour’s (2004), remain at quite an abstract level
of development. Of course, a more precise account would and will be
welcome of how, say, prefigurative practices can translate into institu-
tional set ups, or translocal initiatives like Via Campesina can come to
really challenge the ruling order. But beside and before this, it is worth
considering a few issues, paying attention to which I believe can be bene-
ficial for the development of Ghelfi and Papadopoulos’s argument.
    One is the problem of voice. Who is going to speak for nonhumans?
On the basis of what kind of entitlement? These are recurrent questions
in environmental political theory (see e.g. Dobson 2010; Eckersley 2011;
O’Neill 2001). Whatever the reply (scientific knowledge, moral intuition,
empathy, indigenous culture and so on), “the authority of nature’s repre-
sentatives depends primarily on their claim to know something about na-
ture”, with ensuing temptations to “shut down democratic debate with
claims to speak for nature’s objective interests” (Brown 2017, 33). Even
worse, one may add, if an understanding of representation as corre-
spondence, whereby representatives directly talk for pre-existing
constituencies, is replaced with a constructivist approach, whereby “the
process of making representative claims shapes both the representatives
and those they represent” (Brown 2017, 35), as the scope for dominative
outcomes is likely to grow proportionately. In any case, connecting de-
mocracy – an eminently human notion and enterprise – with nonhumans
is anything but simple. Whatever the solution one envisages, one should
clarify beforehand the type of relationship between humans and nonhu-
mans one has in mind. There is ostensibly a major difference between a
commitment to caring and building kinship (Puig de la Bellacasa 2017;
Haraway 2016), to which Ghelfi and Papadopoulos subscribe, and, say,
Latour’s most recent take on environmental politics, according to which,
faced with terrestrial forces, “there is no other politics than that of hu-
mans and to their own benefit”, and no possibility of living “in harmony
with so called ‘natural agents’”(2018, 86-87). The kind of “non-identity”
relation between humans and nonhumans envisaged by Adorno possibly
points to yet another direction. In other words, green democracy can be
conceived, and institutionally developed, having in mind quite different
Pellizzoni                                                                  43
ontologies and related politics.
     Another issue demanding attention is whether a green politics from
below, even aimed at building translocal alliances, is capable of escaping
the risk of ineffectiveness – or worse. Indeed, one of the major criticisms
of prefigurative mobilizations is that, especially after an initial, more con-
frontational phase, they tend to boil down to lifestyle politics, that is per-
sonal choices concerning “dress, diet, housing, leisure activities, and
more” (Portwood-Stacer 2013, 4). This is something that has long proven
inoffensive and even welcome to capitalism, which reads it in terms of
market differentiation and of diversion of energies from open contesta-
tion (Pellizzoni, 2021). Even intimately oppositional experiences like
Genuino Clandestino, or comparable “alternative value practices” (Cen-
temeri 2018) one encounters especially in the primary sector, from
participatory plant breeding to flour compacts, are not immune to this
risk. On this view, the locality of initiatives raises not only the question of
their scaling up and coordination but also a question of how they can
translate into something more straightforwardly political and antagonis-
tic, and whether this translation is actually needed (Mouffe 2013).
     A third point worth considering is solicited by the anti-climax charac-
ter of Ghelfi and Papadopoulos’s case for an encompassing, more than
human democracy, when it is set against the Zeitgeist. Recent years have
been characterised by a growing sense of urgency, insecurity and pending
catastrophe. Many indicators tell this: post-9/11 “wars on terror”; the se-
curitization of everyday life, with an unprecedented extension of surveil-
lance; the worsening of climate change indicators, from GHG concentra-
tion to weather turbulences; the accelerated pace of new and resurgent
epidemics; the very rise of climate movements like Fridays for Future and
Extinction Rebellion, which build their case on the lack of time and im-
pending disaster; the diffusion of dystopian narratives and of collap-
sology, a literature and public discussion over how capacities for survival
after the fall of technologically organized society, deemed inevitable, can
be developed (Allard et al. 2019; Centemeri and Tomassi 2022). Faced
with all that, one is reminded that democracy is time and energy con-
suming. Growing voices claim in fact that it is a luxury increasingly hard
to afford – most recently in relation with the Covid-19 pandemic. If one
compares the Latour of Politics of Nature (2004, first published in 1999)
with the Latour of Down to Earth (2018), the change in tone is striking,
showing how, at least for a progressive intelligentsia, the situation has
changed in twenty years from serious to dramatic. In the first book we
find a case for diplomacy, a cautious, patient negotiation, an ongoing
reassessment of which entities have to be admitted to the world in com-
mon. In the second book we meet a case for the need to act now, in haste,
with very simple and clear objectives in mind: struggling for human sur-
vival in competition with all the organisms present in the “critical zone” a
few kilometers thick between the atmosphere and the source rocks. In
this framework the rise of a “climate Leviathan” or, at the opposite side
44                                                          Tecnoscienza – 12 (2)
of the spectrum of reactions, the flourishing of groups self-organized
around survival skills and emergency stockpiling may seem a more likely
future than a further enlargement of democracy. Said differently, the time
for a truly radical green politics might be already over.
    Finally, one has to consider the very notion of transition. As a term,
transition has been increasingly replacing others, like revolution or trans-
formation, to convey a sense of change. Concerning climate, for example,
claims from social movements and workers organizations (Schlosberg and
Collins 2014; Smith 2017) talk of “just transition” (towards sustaina-
bility). Concerning socio-technical change, successful approaches like the
“multilevel perspective” also talk of transition (Geels and Schot 2007).
Yet, are revolution, transformation and transition just synonymous? The
issue would obviously require an extensive treatment. At face value,
however, one can say they are not, to the extent that they entail different
ontologies. Revolution literally means “turnaround” – turning things up-
side-down. A certain stuff is reversed, usually abruptly. Yet, it is just that
stuff, only organized differently. Transformation, instead, suggests a more
substantial change: a variation in structure, texture, assemblage, look or
form by which something becomes something else. This may happen
quickly or slowly, even imperceptibly. However, the end result cannot be
completely different from the point of departure, at least if it is to be suc-
cessful. Transformations can be monstruous and monstruosity consists in
an unmatching combination of parts: some of them have changed while
others have not. This affects and, according to countless dystopias, ulti-
mately undermines the functioning of the thing. Said otherwise, trans-
formation has to keep an inner consistency; one cannot become anything.
The ontology of transformation is thus more dynamic than the ontology
of revolution, but it keeps a fundamental stability. Compared with both,
then, transition conveys the idea of a subtler, smoother, yet at once more
radical morphing. It implies an ontological fluidity unknown to the other
types of change. Step by step the original assemblage is led to become
something radically else.
    This ontological “freedom”, however, comes at the cost of opening
avenues to unprecedented forms of domination. As I have argued else-
where (Pellizzoni 2016), ontological fluidity is the cypher of both cutting-
edge social theory, which sees in it an emancipatory claim and opportuni-
ty, and of neoliberal governmentality, which builds on it to expand and
strengthen its appropriative, exploitative hold on humans and nonhu-
mans. Just think of how corporate storytelling depicts biotech as the con-
tinuation of what humans did for thousands of years, or nature always
did, “the ‘technology’ in these practices [being] nothing more than biolo-
gy itself, or ‘life itself’” (Thacker 2007, xix). In this account nature is
technology and technology is nature, through and through. The result is
that GMOs are claimed to be indistinguishable (no specific regulation
needed) yet simultaneously different (more usable, valuable, hence pa-
tentable) from natural entities. Or just consider how experimental poli-
Pellizzoni                                                                      45
tics, as advocated by Ghelfi and Papadopoulos and a host of scholars in
STS and political theory, is advocated as well since the 1980s by neoli-
beral managerial and policy literature, in terms of accepting and indeed
riding and enjoying unpredictability, surprise, insecurity, volatility, disor-
der, as “at the heart of what is positive and constructive” (O’Malley 2010,
502; for an example of this literature see Taleb, 2012). In this framework
the recipe for good politics is trial and error and non-predictive decision-
making. The result is a de-responsibilization of policy-makers and, conse-
quently, a depoliticization of issues, including those fraught with major
social implications like climate change (Swyngedouw 2010). The result is
also an “administrative” take on all sorts of crises, from financial to bio-
logical, no longer seen as amenable to solution but as a permanent condi-
tion with which to come to terms (Pellizzoni and Sena 2021).
    In short, one may ask, is experimental politics compatible with de-
mocracy? In a broad historical sense certainly yes, as democracy builds on
no pre-existing certainties but proceeds through collective reasoning and
dialogue. The affinity between science and democracy has not by chance
long been stressed, by the likes of Popper and Dewey, among the others.
However, in another sense, closer to the present situation, the reply is un-
certain. It much depends on how one conceives of experimentalism, who
are those that apply it, and for what purposes.
    To conclude. Notions like transition, experimentalism and translo-
calism are hardly innocent and self-evident in their meaning. A case for a
green democracy like Ghelfi and Papadopoulos’s needs a careful disen-
tanglement of the different, even opposed implications these notions car-
ry with them. Their article is an excellent starting point for such an en-
deavour.


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