Democracia ambiental: una alternativa a la crisis civilizatoria del capitalismo tardío

Identifier:  TDX:2605

Handle: https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11797/TDX2605

Authors:  Vilaseca Boixareu, Isabel

Abstract:
This doctoral thesis is written in a context of crisis of civilization conditioned by planetary limits confronting capitalist system and threatening humans’ survival. Since the seventies, the explanation and the management of this crisis has been undertaken through the tension between two antagonistic social forces: the new left-wing which tries to address the crisis from its roots, challenging the foundations of modernity; and the new right-wing aimed at improving the attainment of modern fundamental economic principles through the search for more efficient production models and technologies capable of permanently expanding the frontiers of growth. International and state institutions have experienced in this period substantial transformations by receiving contradictory demands from both trends, which are asymmetric in strength. Therefore, in a world that remains ultramodern in its economic core, notions such as sustainable development or liberal participatory democracy become domesticated and harmless matrices. Digging into the roots of the crisis of civilization, the present thesis carries out a critical analysis of these reformist discourses, which appear inadequate to ensure a democratic transition towards a model of social reproduction which adjusts to the nature’s capacity. Based on this, the thesis suggests an alternative approach to the crisis of civilization grounded in the environmental democracy notion, which is raised within an emancipatory process currently led by civil society and aimed at deconstructing the economic roots of modernity and simultaneously building new forms of social being and living, around the idea of environmental justice and degrowth. Expanding mainly outside of the institutional system, this process does not completely avoid the public institutions. Therefore, the dissertation proposes a critical and innovative constitutional paradigm providing citizens with useful tools to restrain the most virulent progresses of late capitalism and to pave the way for its emancipatory strategy.