How can we make the transition to a net-zero-carbon economy a political divide pitting conservatives versus liberals and those living in urban cores versus rural communites?

The author argues that while State consent does contribute to international law’s legitimacy, it does not do so by providing a justification for it. States are not bound to obey international law because they have chosen to submit to its authority. Rather, international law provides them with a reason for action, and indeed they have a moral duty to obey it, if and only if they will do better at realizing justice if they act as the law directs them to act than if they act on their own judgment. As a means for crafting international law, State consent is, according to the author, valuable insofar as it yields international legal norms that satisfy this condition. He argues, that in a few cases, it may also constitute an intrinsically valuable expression of trust in the international political community or an international institution that exercises political authority.

Pablo Ouziel offers his reflections on the Workshop and volume. He describes the development of some of the main themes. Next, he presents six distinct types of working relationships among democratic citizens that he first developed in his research with citizens involved in Spain’s 15M movement. Then, he shows the presence of these six ‘joining hands’ relationships in the various chapters. This exercise enables us see how the diverse democratic citizens of each and every chapter can work together in context-specific, integrative relationships of democratic cooperation and contestation. As the chapter illustrates these relationships of democratic “joining hands” or integration are not only possible, but actual, here and now, in the local and global field of democratic diversity. The further growth of these action-coordination relationships has the potential to generate and integrate robust democracies with the capacity to respond to our ecosocial crises and co-create a sustainable, democratic future.

The concept of consensus must be understood in a more complex and contingent way than it often is.Consensus is that level of agreement among all parties to the decision process that allows them to “hang together” as they move from one stage of that process to the next.Consensus in governance is not, and never could be usefully thought of as, synonymous with simple unanimity.The major elements of consensus – the normative, the political, and the social – all relate to different kinds of agreement, each with its own regulative standard.

Analysis of the concept of transparency provides an illustration of the role of consensus in democratic earth system governance, which must confront five core analytical problems identified in the first Science Plan of the Earth System Governance Project: architecture, adaptiveness, accountability, access and allocation, and agency.The character of each distinct analytical problem of governance places its own demands and limitations on governance by transparency policy.

Appreciating how government budgeting systems and policies vary is best understood by comparing and analyzing the political cultural, historic, economic, and institutional contexts in which they are formulated, adopted, and executed. This book argues that even similar-appearing institutions and budgetary procedures may very well differ in practice due to the influence of a government’s political cultural and historical experiences.