Democratic Anthropocene

2018 ◽  
pp. 128-150
Author(s):  
John S. Dryzek ◽  
Jonathan Pickering
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Collective Action ◽  
Social Values ◽  
Collective Decision ◽  
Collective Decision Making ◽  
Earth System ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Ecological Democracy ◽  
The Creation

The formative sphere is the sum of activity encompassing the creation, questioning, and development of principles for collective action. This sphere gives shape to the meaning of the Anthropocene and how its implications are taken up in collective decision-making. An effective formative sphere should operate as a deliberative and ecological democracy capable of questioning its own foundations. This chapter shows how the formative sphere can operate in interactions between experts and citizens, between the most vulnerable and their advocates, between advocates and discourse entrepreneurs, across local experiments, and across the human and non-human components of the Earth system. Contemplation of Anthropocene conditions shows that in addition to established arguments for ecological democracy, there is a new argument: the agents necessary to rethink core social values and principles to guide practice for the Anthropocene can only flourish under democratic conditions. Democracy itself is transformed in this new encounter.

Membership Matters: Organizing Archetypes, Participatory Styles, and Connective Action

2021 ◽  
pp. 089331892110326
Author(s):  
Shiv Ganesh ◽  
Cynthia Stohl ◽  
Young Ji Kim
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Collective Action ◽  
Strong Relationship ◽  
Collective Decision ◽  
Collective Decision Making ◽  
Digital Environment ◽  
Digital Space ◽  
Connective Action ◽  
Societal Dynamics ◽  
Action Groups

The contemporary communication landscape enables individuals to connect and engage with collective action efforts in multifaceted and ambiguous ways. This complexity makes membership in collective action groups particularly intriguing and important because of its pivotal role as a mechanism that connects individual behavior to group, organizational, and societal dynamics. This study seeks to examine the spread of membership types in the digital environment and explores how different kinds of prompts for collective action are associated with particular types of membership groups. Through a survey of participants on a popular global digital platform for collective decision-making, we found evidence of a broad range of membership types in the digital space, associated with particular prompts calling for action. The results suggest that there is a strong relationship between membership type and participatory styles of individuals. Implications of the results are discussed.

Islands of Stability: Engaging Emergence from Cellular Automata to the Occupy Movement

2014 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Pickering
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Cellular Automata ◽  
Black Box ◽  
Collective Decision ◽  
Collective Decision Making ◽  
Occupy Movement ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 1960S

"Instead of considering »being with« in terms of non-problematic, machine-like places, where reliable entities assemble in stable relationships, STS conjures up a world where the achievement of chancy stabilisations and synchronisations is local.We have to analyse how and where a certain regularity and predictability in the intersection of scientists and their instruments, say, or of human individuals and groups, is produced.The paper reviews models of emergence drawn from the history of cybernetics—the canonical »black box,« homeostats, and cellular automata—to enrich our imagination of the stabilisation process, and discusses the concept of »variety« as a way of clarifying its difficulty, with the antiuniversities of the 1960s and the Occupy movement as examples. Failures of »being with« are expectable. In conclusion, the paper reviews approaches to collective decision-making that reduce variety without imposing a neoliberal hierarchy. "

Corruption and Anticorruption in Democratic Athens

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Claire Taylor
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Participatory Democracy ◽  
Collective Decision ◽  
Civic Culture ◽  
Collective Decision Making ◽  
Alexander The Great ◽  
Political Equality ◽  
Individual Judgment ◽  
Collective Judgment ◽  
Hidden Knowledge

The chapter examines a major corruption scandal that involved the Athenian orator Demosthenes and an official of Alexander the Great. This episode reveals how tensions between individual and collective decision-making practices shaped Athenian understandings of corruption and anticorruption. The various and multiple anticorruption measures of Athens sought to bring ‘hidden’ knowledge into the open and thereby remove information from the realm of individual judgment, placing it instead into the realm of collective judgment. The Athenian experience therefore suggests that participatory democracy, and a civic culture that fosters political equality rather than reliance on individual expertise, provides a key bulwark against corruption.

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