Schmid Patricia, Lamotte Léa, Curran Michael, Bieri Sabin
Centre for Development and Environment (CDE), University of Bern, Bern, Switzerland.
Institute of Geography (GIUB), University of Bern, Bern, Switzerland.
Innovation (Abingdon). 2024 Jan 31;37(3):832-850. doi: 10.1080/13511610.2024.2309173. eCollection 2024.
Food systems affect and are affected by the interrelated crises of climate change, biodiversity loss, resource depletion and health, amongst others. Transforming to sustainable approaches is vital, yet entangled with uncertainties, complexity and a great value diversion with stakeholders. Deliberative processes such as citizen assemblies offer a valuable contribution to such a transformation, since the crises and their responses affect everyday life, and therefore inviting individual and collective action. Still, who is included and whose knowledge counts affects outcomes. Theoretically anchored in concepts of environmental justice, our study analyses three nation-wide citizens' assemblies on climate change and food systems from Western Europe. It assesses (a) how citizens' assemblies can incorporate a broad set of viewpoints and design more substantive political answers to current crises, and (b) whether citizens' assemblies include environmental justice aspects to facilitate social change. The paper argues that systematic and methodologically reflected inclusion of various positionalities can inspire decision-making processes in that they incorporate procedural, recognition, and distributional justice to address problems of climate change or modern food systems. It concludes with offering further approaches to include more than scientific knowledge in deliberative processes for a just transformation towards sustainability.
食物系统影响着气候变化、生物多样性丧失、资源枯竭和健康等相互关联的危机，同时也受到这些危机的影响。向可持续发展方式转型至关重要，但却与不确定性、复杂性以及利益相关者之间巨大的价值分歧纠缠在一起。诸如公民大会这样的审议过程为这种转型做出了宝贵贡献，因为这些危机及其应对措施影响着日常生活，从而促使个人和集体采取行动。然而，哪些人被纳入其中以及哪些人的知识算数会影响结果。我们的研究理论上以环境正义概念为基础，分析了西欧关于气候变化和食物系统的三次全国性公民大会。它评估了：（a）公民大会如何能够纳入广泛的观点，并为当前危机设计更具实质性的政治应对方案；（b）公民大会是否纳入了环境正义方面的内容以促进社会变革。本文认为，系统且在方法论上经过思考的不同立场的纳入能够激发决策过程，因为它们纳入了程序正义、认可正义和分配正义，以解决气候变化或现代食物系统的问题。文章最后提出了进一步的方法，以便在审议过程中纳入比科学知识更多的内容，从而实现向可持续发展的公正转型。
