Achieving change through high-energy democracy and coalition-building

Abstract

Addressing the central theme of structure and agency, this chapter explores the dilemma that decision-making entails structural power often controlled by elites, while transformative change often happens through the agency of people power and collective action. Key to enabling transformation is the relationship between mobilisation and democratic institutions; we need more democracy (more equalising structures) and more mobilised citizens (more agentic power). The dominant form of power in political parties needs to relate to and facilitate the transformative power of mobilisation. The first section of the chapter briefly contextualises the structural power of capital, corporations and elites and addresses the importance of engagement of people in ideational debate in rich forms of participatory and deliberative democracy: a form of institutional democracy described as ‘high-energy democracy’. The second section discusses strategies for collective mobilisation, arguing for coalition-building and mobilisation around environmental, gender and social reproduction and traditional distributional concerns about income equality and public services. Arguing that necessity is the mother of coalition, the combined evils of environmental destruction and inequality merit a new political mobilisation in the form of a triple movement. The chapter concludes by discussing Ireland from the perspective of movement-building, examining various constellations of actors, and clusters of mobilisations.