Introduction: Sustainability, Democracy and the Dark Sides of Civil Society

Abstract

Despite widespread acknowledgement of the value of sustainability, the transition towards more sustainable economies and societies remains a challenge around the world. Civil societies play an important role not only in supporting government efforts on sustainability by ‘filling gaps’ and raising social awareness, but also in pioneering new practices and disrupting particular governmental or corporate strategies, as well as engaging and empowering previously marginalised individuals and groups. Yet civil society is not always a champion of sustainability nor of democracy; these actors may of course also destabilise innovations, depoliticise sustainability issues by reifying certain concepts or approaches and reinforce social hierarchies and patterns of exclusion that can undermine any transformative potential and bolster the unsustainable status quo. This Special Issue is therefore dedicated to interrogating what we see as the ambiguous, yet critical, role played by civil societies in sustainability politics. This introductory paper intends not only to draw attention to some of the arguments, theories and challenges found in each of the individual papers collected here, but also to pull on the common threads that run through them, as well as to unpick some of the different uses of the key terminology that they employ. We aim, moreover, to highlight the inevitable tension between the ‘democratic side’ and the ‘dark side’ of civil society and its politics of sustainability.

An Agonistic Perspective on the Challenge of Biodiversity Value Integration

“…In fact, there is reason to believe that it is the other way round" [39]. Machin and Ruser (2023) make a similar point in highlighting that civil society can act as both a catalyst and a barrier to the IoPV [40]. A crucial but understudied question for research is, therefore, how to mitigate transcendental and social value conflicts to achieve value integration [2].…”