Contribution short abstract

Based on ethnographic engagement with democratic innovations in Danish land-use transformations, we argue democracy is a complex system where each new component introduces uncertainty and ambivalence, shifting focus from design principles to practices of designing democratic innovations.

Contribution long abstract

Democratic innovations, designed to deepen citizen participation, increasingly operate within political ecologies where decisions about land, resources, and futures are entangled with multispecies and intergenerational justice. The literature on democratic innovations seems to assume that democracy can be approached as a complicated system where a few essential components classify whether a democracy functions. We argue instead that democracy is more like a complex system, where each new component introduces a level of uncertainty, while always displacing the system for better or worse pushing our attention towards the practices of designing democratic innovations, rather than design principles of democratic innovations. This perspective foregrounds ambivalence as a condition of democratic practice, shifting attention from principles to practices. Drawing on ethnographic engagement with democratic innovations for land-use transformations in Denmark, we trace how these processes negotiate tensions between democratic engagement and climate governance. We treat ambivalence as a condition for forming attachments and attunements, cultivating ecological sensibilities vital to intergenerational and more-than-human futures. Finally, we explore lingering as a methodological practice for working with ambivalence without forcing resolution, thickening democracy in and for political ecology.