Energy Democracy as Democratic Method

I’ve been reading David Ridley’s work on Dewey and democracy, and it’s got me thinking about what “energy democracy” actually means. Is it a destination—some ideal future where we’ve democratized the energy system? Or is it more like a method, a way of working through the messy problems of decarbonization together?

Ridley’s Deweyan framing suggests the latter, and I think that shift matters. It also opens up two other questions I want to explore: how does democratic governance relate to the commons (especially when we’re talking about the atmosphere), and when is it okay to use force to change an unjust system?

Democratization as process

Ridley’s book The Method of Democracy: John Dewey’s Theory of Collective Intelligence [@ridley:2020:method] is still on my to-read list (at $60, it’s waiting for the library). But his earlier articles have already reshaped how I think about this. His piece linking Dewey and Lippmann’s first debate gave me the idea that Dewey might present an alternative to neoliberalism that was available early in its development.

What strikes me most is Ridley’s emphasis on “democratization” rather than “democracy” as an end-in-view [@ridley:2017:institutionalizing]. The word choice matters. “Democratization of energy” puts the emphasis on transition and action; “energy democracy” can sound like a fixed destination we’re trying to reach. And there are obviously many points in the energy transition where democratization could take place—it’s not one big transformation but many smaller ones.

Ridley puts it well:

The concept of democratisation changes the question from ‘What is wrong with the world and what should it be like?’ to ‘Where are we going and how do we get there?’ [@ridley:2017:institutionalizing]

This fits nicely with the P2P Foundation’s framing, where energy democracy succeeds the “state” (regulated monopoly) and “market” approaches. Democracy and commons start to look like related concepts.

Democracy and the commons

That relationship between democracy and commons deserves more attention than I can give it here. But one thing keeps nagging at me: the “atmospheric trust” argument from the Our Children’s Trust lawsuit. The idea that common property—like the atmosphere—needs to be managed for future generations.

This is where liberal democracy, understood as voting, runs into trouble. There’s a built-in bias toward the present. The vast majority of people affected by today’s decisions about greenhouse gas pollution haven’t been born yet—or worse, won’t be able to be born if we get this wrong. How does radical democracy deal with that kind of intergenerational conflict? I don’t have a good answer, but it seems like the commons framing at least lets us ask the question.

Democratic coercion

Here’s where things get uncomfortable. Energy democracy isn’t just good planning or collective intelligence. It’s also about applying force to change a deeply unjust system. The fossil fuel industry isn’t going to democratize itself.

Alexander Livingston’s paper Between Means and Ends: Reconstructing Coercion in Dewey’s Democratic Theory [@livingston:2017:between] helped me see that Dewey’s democratic method doesn’t rule out coercion—it just changes when coercion is legitimate. The paper’s title is a nod to Reconstruction in Philosophy, which I think is the key framework for understanding Dewey’s later work.

Livingston argues that when institutions become obstacles rather than agents of progress, force becomes justified:

Where existing institutions are judged to be inefficient means for realizing their ends, there arises a legitimate claim to use coercive force to disrupt, correct, or abolish them. Inherited institutional orders that were once agents of progress can become obstacles to further development as they fail to adjust to changing historical conditions. [@livingston:2017:between, p. 525]

But it’s not just any coercion. It has to serve democratic ends—specifically, it has to provoke public inquiry:

Coercion can become a democratic means when it serves as a tool of provoking public inquiry. These are means that intensify the problematic character of a social situation that remains repressed or distorted by existing institutions, narratives, ideologies, and practices. [@livingston:2017:between, p. 525]

This is what movements like the climate strikes are doing—making visible a problem that existing institutions want to keep invisible. Dewey himself put it this way:

The method of democracy—insofar as it is that of organized intelligence—is to bring these conflicts out into the open where their special claims can be seen and appraised, where they can be discussed and judged in the light of more inclusive interests than are represented by either of them separately. [@dewey:1935:liberalism, p. 79]

Tying it together

So what does Dewey offer energy democracy? Three things, I think. First, a reframing: democratization as an ongoing method rather than a destination we arrive at. Second, a connection to the commons that takes intergenerational justice seriously—even if the details are still fuzzy. And third, permission to be confrontational. When institutions block democratic inquiry, disrupting them isn’t anti-democratic. It’s democracy doing its job.