Themes
Democracy and sustainability are inseparable
Daily life has plenty of examples of things that work in pairs to fulfil their potential.
A closed lock cannot shift without a key – and a key without a lock is just a piece of metal. Bees need flowers and flowers need bees to pollinate them. A nut isn’t much use without a bolt, and a bolt without a nut to hold it in place is unstable.

The Democracy and Sustainability Platform has been created around a similar understanding.
Democracy and sustainability are inseparable. Each needs the other. Each is weakened when the other is compromised.
Democracy needs sustainability. But current systems of liberal democracy already struggle to cope with climate change. Scarcity in natural resources can drive prices for essential products beyond the reach of ordinary people. And financial crisis only strengthens the temptation to act to meet short-term needs without thinking about the long term.
Democracy is likely to be more able to ensure that people make the most of their potential, as equals, if it’s not constantly damaged by gross social injustice, or scarcity, or conflict. Yet these are exactly the kinds of pressures that are likely to get worse if unsustainable patterns of human and economic development continue.
Sustainability needs democracy too. Thriving democratic systems, based on the creativity and the capacity for innovation of people around the world, offer the best chances of coming up with adequate responses to unsustainability. They are essential for sustainability.
We can sit back and allow democracy to drift – or even to fail – in the face of powerful currents of environmental and social change.
Or we can make sure we demand, and create, systems of democratic decision-making that are able to chart a powerful course towards a healthy environment and a world that is fair for people who are already alive, and for those who have not yet been born.
This isn’t a single-issue campaign. It’s a way of seeing the world, and our place within it. It’s a call to create the change that is needed, together.
It’s for all of us.
It’s for anyone who cares about democracy, or for sustainability. For even when we fail to link them, they need one another.