By Ioannis Rigkos-Zitthen, Roskilde University
What do climate change, widening inequality, geopolitical instability, and the erosion of welfare institutions have in common? These challenges intersect across places and political scales. Their overlapping effects are often described as a polycrisis. But what does this mean for democracy?
In my recent commentary, ‘Rethinking Democracy in Times of Polycrisis,’ published in The Geographical Journal, I argue that the crisis exposes limitations in dominant liberal, technocratic and human-centred political arrangements—not the exhaustion of democracy itself. Democratic renewal requires reconsidering who holds power, how collective life is sustained, and which futures societies can imagine. Geography matters for all three. Here are five reasons why.
Crises do not affect all places equally
Climate change is global, but its consequences are geographically uneven. Some communities face flooding, drought, and declining agricultural productivity, while others are relatively protected. The benefits of production and consumption may be concentrated in one region, while their social and ecological costs are displaced elsewhere. Consider the green transition. Renewable energy and electric vehicles can reduce emissions, yet extracting the minerals they require can intensify environmental pressures and conflicts over land in distant territories.
Research on ecologically unequal exchange helps explain how unequal economic relationships distribute resource benefits and environmental burdens across the world. The concept of socio-ecological reproduction connects these processes. It directs attention to the conditions that sustain collective life: care, housing, healthcare, water, biodiversity and functioning ecosystems. These are often treated as secondary to economic production, although production depends on them. A geographical approach to democracy asks how political arrangements reproduce dependencies both within and between territories.
This matters for democratic legitimacy. Decisions made within one jurisdiction can reshape the living conditions of people who have little opportunity to influence them. Asking whose voices count therefore requires following supply chains, environmental effects and relationships of care beyond the formal boundaries of the electorate.
Democracy is also about how power is organised
Democracy is often discussed in terms of elections and representative institutions. Yet these tell us only part of the story about who can shape everyday life. In Power in the Anthropocene, Lars Tønder distinguishes ‘power over’—domination and control—from ‘power to’: the capacity to act and shape shared conditions. Farmers may be expected to implement environmental policies without meaningful influence over their design. Communities affected by energy infrastructure may be consulted without gaining substantial decision-making authority. Participation, in other words, does not necessarily mean political agency.
Geography helps reveal how such inequalities emerge across territories and institutional scales. Democratic renewal requires redistributing power among human actors while also questioning how ecological resources and forms of labour are appropriated, valued or exhausted. The issue is not simply who governs, but who can shape the conditions of collective life. The distinction also matters for evaluating democratic innovations. A meeting or consultation can broaden the number of people heard without changing who sets the agenda or controls the final decision. Examining ‘power to’ directs attention to whether participants can initiate proposals, contest priorities and hold institutions accountable after consultation ends.
Nature is not outside politics
Soil sustains agriculture. Microorganisms influence health. Rivers connect communities across borders. Forests shape livelihoods and regional ecologies. The more-than-human world is not a passive backdrop to politics: its processes enable and constrain political decisions. Imagine a river crossing several countries. Water extraction or pollution upstream affects communities and ecosystems downstream, although democratic authority remains divided by national borders. How can institutions recognise ecological relationships that exceed their jurisdictions?
A more-than-human perspective does not mean that rivers should vote. It asks how ecological interests can enter democratic deliberation and representation. Ecological councils, bioregional governance and legal recognition of nature offer avenues for experimentation, although each raises questions about accountability and whose interpretation of nature prevails.
A discussion of new materialism and climate action, involving Tønder and other political theorists, explores how attention to non-human agency can reshape understandings of power and collective action. Ecological questions are therefore political questions, not merely technical management problems.
For geographers, this opens questions about scale and representation. Who speaks for an ecosystem when its effects are distributed across several communities? How can scientific knowledge, local experience and competing ecological needs inform decisions without allowing any one group to claim unquestioned authority? Such questions make institutional design an empirical and democratic challenge.
Democracy needs more than one institutional scale
Parliaments coexist with social movements, citizens’ assemblies, local initiatives and other forms of collective organisation. These arrangements need not replace one another. Local groups articulate situated concerns; assemblies create space for deliberation; movements bring neglected issues into public debate. National and international institutions remain necessary for coordinating responses to climate change and environmental protection.
The OECD report Innovative Citizen Participation and New Democratic Institutions examines nearly 300 representative deliberative processes, including citizens’ assemblies and juries. Such experiments show possibilities for involving citizens, but meaningful participation also depends on whether their work influences decisions. Ecological processes rarely follow administrative borders. Biodiversity, water and atmospheric systems connect different territories. Democratic renewal therefore requires links between institutions and scales, without reducing local participation to consultation or expecting any single body to resolve interconnected crises.
Connecting scales is difficult in practice. Local experiments can be responsive to place-specific concerns but lack the resources to change national policy. Larger institutions can mobilise resources but overlook situated knowledge. The task is to create durable channels through which local experience informs wider decisions and those decisions remain open to public scrutiny.
Imagining different futures is a geographical question
Institutions are shaped by stories about progress, prosperity and development. In Captured Futures, Maarten Hajer and Jeroen Oomen examine how dominant visions of the future can constrain environmental politics. Even ecological transitions are frequently framed around technological innovation and continued growth, with less attention to the relationships underpinning production and consumption. Other possibilities are visible in community energy, cooperative production, democratic experiments and ecological restoration. These initiatives are neither free from inequality nor sufficient on their own to address global challenges. They do, however, make alternative ways of organising collective life imaginable.
Geography asks how these practices emerge in particular places, encounter existing power structures and connect to broader institutions. Socio-ecological reproduction offers one way of linking them: rather than treating growth as an end in itself, it places the maintenance and regeneration of the conditions of life at the centre of political debate.
Political narratives matter because they connect otherwise fragmented struggles. Questions about affordable housing, secure livelihoods, biodiversity and climate adaptation may appear separate, but each concerns the reproduction of shared conditions of life. A democratic imagination attentive to these connections can bring diverse concerns into conversation without assuming that every place needs the same solution.
Towards a geography of democratic renewal
Polycrisis cannot be addressed only by defending existing institutions or proposing technical fixes. It requires examining how power, production and ecological interdependence are organised across places and scales. Democracy remains plural and open to transformation; its renewal depends on institutions and collective imaginaries able to confront interconnected social and ecological challenges. The geographical question is not simply where democracy takes place, but how the relationships that sustain life can become part of democratic politics itself.
About the author: Ioannis Rigkos-Zitthen is a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Department of Social Science and Business at Roskilde University, Denmark. His research examines political ecology, democratic governance, commons and commoning, and socio-ecological transformations in the Anthropocene.
Suggested further reading
Paul, F. C. (2025). Demanding ownership: Energy democracy and environmental labour geographies. Area. Available from: https://doi.org/10.1111/area.12987
Rigkos-Zitthen, I. (2026). Rethinking Democracy in Times of Polycrisis. The Geographical Journal. Available from: https://doi.org/10.1111/geoj.70121
Simmonds, P., Maye, D., Ingram, J., Gardner, A. & Raseta, S. (2025). Deliberative approaches to the climate crisis: Adapting Climathons for rural communities. Area. Available from: https://doi.org/10.1111/area.12994
How to cite
Rigkos-Zitthen, I. (2026, September) Five reasons geography, power, and more-than-human relations matter. Geography Directions. https://doi.org/10.55203/ZXMJ7528
