Sustainable Development and Democracy. The Need to Reform Public Institutions

Aurélien Boutaud is concerned that politicians are unable properly to take account of environmental issues and tries to explain why this is. Although nowadays everyone talks blithely about sustainable development, elected representatives (or the candidates for the French presidential election) probably have little real idea that such development challenges the very concept of the common interest which, in the course of time, has come to be defined as “the package of individual interests shared by the largest number of voters”. Yet in fact, sustainable development implies not only a return to the mediaeval concept of “the common good”, but also that this should be understood with regard to both the long term, so as to take account of future generations, as well as to the whole of the planet and not just the narrow confines of the nation-state. Nobody today in the so-called representative democracies considers the interests of all humankind, let alone those of future generations. Politicians (including presidential candidates) look no further than the views of current voters, who basically remain indifferent to the important issues affecting the sustainability of the ecosystem. Having made this gloomy but quite realistic assessment, the author goes on to explore in what ways, by means of which bodies and new methods of public consultation, the long-term collective interest of the whole planet could be taken into account more satisfactorily. While we await the coming of a hypothetical global democracy, Aurélien Boutaud examines what contribution might be made by conferences of citizens and what form the principle of interactive subsidiarity might take. In short, this article puts an important question: what capacity to democratic systems – where they exist – have to take account of the views of all those who are not fortunate enough to be able to take part in elections.