In Chapter 4, I offer a new theory of citizen power. Every adult male citizen would have been free, but this also made him kurios, or empowered, as opposed to ceding his power to a slave master. When substantivized, kurios indicated a male citizen’s institutionalized role as the head of a household. The lens of the household kurios generates an understanding of citizen power that encompasses both private and public domains. Not simply power as domination, kurios also indicated a shared power to act. As a conceptual metaphor, kurios was applied to the political sphere and structured thought across these different domains. Thus, qualities of the term kurios in its original domain, the household, corresponded systemically in the applied domain, the city. The laws and the corporate citizen body, too, were understood as kurioi. While there may be competing claims to power, the identification of the citizen as sharing in power with and through the laws and the dēmos is distinct from the modern conception of the individual versus the state. The negotiation of power in this way has repercussions for debates regarding sovereignty and the rule of law.

In the Anthropocene, earth system governance must be effective both within and across identities, and the inescapable equivocality of democratic governance means that discussions can never be closed but merely transformed as old problems and concerns give way to new.The experimental quality that effective environmental governance must possess cannot be a transient quality but, rather, must be a permanent feature of the landscape of democratic decision-making, in which success is realized in a context of identity politics.To take place without distortion and without posing systemic disadvantage, and for intergroup differences to be accommodated, substantial equality of access to decision-making and equitable allocation of fundamental capabilities are essential prerequisites.Institutional arrangements must provide for empowerment of those whose identities are otherwise ill-favored and the embeddedness of environmental decision-making in the communities of fate where people actually determine their shared life experiences.

More than just democracy in the form of aggregation of votes, deliberative democratic practice makes possible the learning, local knowledge, and engagement required by enlightened environmental governance under the conditions associated with the concept of the Anthropocene.

If there is no corner of the natural world that is beyond human influence, then no corner of the world lies beyond the human responsibility implied by our moral agency.The question of agency is critical to any strategy of global political transformation one might imagine.Agency is not merely a matter of knowledge (beginning with self-knowledge) or autonomy (as the absence of restraint or coercion) or both.Effective practice presumes capability.For an agent to be held responsible, the capability of effective action must exist.Agents of governance are not merely political actors.They are, rather, any authoritative actors who have both the legitimacy and capacity to act.The agency of those outside of the core governance institutions and processes should not be limited to a support role.Doing so both degrades the quality of decision-making and marginalizes those whose agency should be enhanced by self-governance.

One of the mechanisms by which power sharing contributes to the development of minimalist democracy, we argue, is by helping to distribute political power and resources more equitably across individuals and social groups. This chapter tests the existence of this relationship, which we refer to as involving the promotion of democracy from below. Our claim in this instance is that power-sharing institutions can help empower citizens and groups in ways that have the effect of enhancing their ability to participate in politics. This occurs as groups formerly excluded from politics are included in one or more domains of state power and as the distribution of resources enables individuals and groups, particularly those that were formerly marginalized, to take part in the political process.