‘Think globally, act locally’: sustainable communities, modernity and development

Abstract

This article sets out to explore the political relationship between the global and the local through the prism of the sustainable development. The ideal of sustainable communities is explored in the context of evolving political fictions that define alternative conceptions of modernity. While the article uses Ireland (reputedly the most globalised society in the world) as a microcosm of development, the context is firmly located within the wider sphere of European and planetary politics. It is argued that the ideal of sustainable communities offers the opportunity of reviving the civic republican tradition of democracy (the Ancient Greek agora) as a metaphor for the public sphere in the conditions of late modern society. The agora in Ancient Greece provided a site of political assembly, based upon participation (citizens’ engagement in decision-making) and deliberation (a process of reached argument). Today, concepts such as ‘participatory civility’ and ‘discursive democracy’ seek to revive these classical ideals, as the basis for building sustainable communities in a transforming modernity that searches for a new logic of development.