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Klima, Corona, Ukraine: Die immer schnellere Abfolge von Krisen hat etwas Endzeitliches. Längst ist klar, dass unser nicht-nachhaltiges Modell nicht mehr haltbar ist. Allerdings beteuern viele Klimaaktivisten und Nachhaltigkeitsforscherinnen, dass eine sozial-ökologische Transformation das Schlimmste noch verhindern kann. Dieses Versprechen, argumentiert Ingolfur Blühdorn, verkennt die Realität der Spätmoderne. Das öko-emanzipatorische Transformationsprojekt zerbricht selbst an seiner eigenen Logik und inneren Widersprüchlichkeit. Diese doppelte Unhaltbarkeit, so Blühdorns Diagnose, führt in eine neue Moderne jenseits liberaler Zentralwerte wie Mündigkeit und Partizipation. Diese Entwicklung ist längst im Gange, wird aber bislang nicht als große Katastrophe erfahren

In European societies social differentiation, value pluralism and international integration have brought about a condition of previously unknown complexity. Citizens' expectations regarding political participation and the legitimization of government policy are rising, yet the capacities for social integration and political consensus formation may be in decline. This volume investigates how political actors and institutions in established European democracies are seeing to manage the condition of complexity and how this condition reconfigures the foundations of democratic politics. From the Contents: Legitimacy Crises, Efficiency Gaps, Democratic Deficits Efficiency versus Democracy: Conceptual Reconciliation of a Troubled Relationship? Citizens' Expectations: Is what matters only what works? Re-engaging Citizens: Institutional Responses to Political Disengagement Informal Government Delegated Authority: Legitimizing Independent Regulatory Agencies Delegation to the EU The Open Method of Co-ordination (OMC) and The European Employment Strategy Committee Governance in EU Agricultural Policy Efficiency versus Legitimacy: The Governance of Technology Does citizen involvement improve the quality, legitimacy and implementability of environmental policy? The Allocation of Health Care The Post-democratic Turn: Complexity and the Reconfiguration of Democratic Politics

Why has radical ecological criticism had so little impact, despite the urgency of the issues it highlights? This and other questions are answered in this challenging theoretical critique of ecological thought.

Despite decades of emancipatory mobilization, there is no realistic prospect for any profound socio-ecological transformation of contemporary consumer societies. Instead, social inequality and ecological destruction are on the rise and an autocratic-authoritarian turn is reshaping even the most established liberal democracies. In explaining these phenomena, the struggle for autonomy and emancipation is an important parameter that has not received sufficient attention so far. This article investigates these phenomena through the lens of the dialectic of emancipation – a concept that I have suggested elsewhere and that I here further elaborate, placing particular emphasis on the relationship between the rule-transgressing and the rule-setting capacities of the emancipatory project. The article specifies constitutive dimensions of the emancipatory project, explores their ongoing reinterpretation and reconfiguration and thus explains how the emancipatory logic itself has come to obstruct the socio-ecological transformation and to nurture new forms of authoritarian governance.

The democratic legitimation imperativeof the modern state has been conceptualised as the barrier that stops the environmental state from developing into a green or eco-state–and thus as the glass ceiling to a socio-ecological transformation of capitalist consumer democracies. Here, I suggest that this state-theoretical explanation of the glass ceiling needs to be supplemented by an analysis of why democratic norms and procedures, which had once been regarded as essential for any socio-ecological transformation, suddenly appearas one of its main obstacles. I conceptualise the new eco-political dysfunctionality of democracy as one dimension of a more encompassing legitimation crisis of democracy which, in turn, has triggered a profound transformation of democracy. Ultimately, exactly this transformation constitutes the glass ceiling to the socioecological restructuring of capitalist consumer societies. It changes democracy into a tool for the politics of unsustainability, in which the legitimation-dependent state is a key actor.

In some of the most established and supposedly immutable liberal democracies, diverse social groups are losing confidence not only in established democratic institutions, but in the idea of liberal representative democracy itself. Meanwhile, an illiberal and anti-egalitarian transformation of democracy evolves at an apparently unstoppable pace. This democratic fatigue syndrome, the present article suggests, is qualitatively different from the crises of Democracy which have been debated for some considerable time. Focusing on mature democracies underpinned by the ideational tradition of European Enlightenment, the article theorizes this Syndrome and the striking transformation of democracy in terms of a dialectic process in which the very norm that once gave birth to the democratic project - the modernist idea of the autonomous subject - metamorphoses into its gravedigger, or at least into the driver of its radical reformulation. The article further develops aspects of my existing work on second-order emancipation and simulative democracy. Taking a theoretical rather than empirical approach, it aims to provide a conceptual framework for more empirically oriented analyses of changing forms of political articulation and participation.

Der vorliegende Beitrag untersucht das Dreiecksverhältnis zwischen ökologischer Nachhaltigkeit, wirtschaftlichem Wachstum und liberaler Demokratie und stellt fest, dass dieses sich in den westlichen Konsumgesellschaften im Angesicht der zunehmenden lebensweltlichen Manifestation der "Grenzen des Wachstums" grundlegend neu konfiguriert. Dabei zeichnen sich tatsächlich die Konturen einer "demokratischen Postwachstumsgesellschaft" ab - allerdings unter gänzlich anderen Vorzeichen, als es der überwiegende Teil der Transformationsforschung ersehnt. In der Absicht, einen Beitrag zur Rückkopplung der normativen und sich als transformativ verstehenden Teile der Nachhaltigkeitsforschung an die sozialwissenschaftliche Analyse moderner Gesellschaften zu leisten, zeigt der Beitrag zunächst, wie im Bereich umweltpolitischer und demokratiebezogener Diskurse zentrale Narrative, die über Jahrzehnte die Debatte bestimmt haben, heute ihre Glaubwürdigkeit verlieren und sich damit das Feld für eine Neujustierung der Dreiecksbeziehung eröffnet. Anschließend wird aus gesellschaftstheoretischer Perspektive ausgeleuchtet, wie die Demokratie im Zeichen moderner Subjektivitätsverständnisse und bestenfalls noch moderater Wachstumsraten zunehmend zu einem Mittel der "nachhaltigen" Verteidigung nicht-nachhaltiger Lebensstile wird. Entschiedener denn je, so zeigt sich, erheben moderne Konsumgesellschaften die "Politik der Nicht-Nachhaltigkeit" zu ihrem Prinzip.