Although both our climate and democracy are in crisis, there is hope. Creative engagement has been taking place at the community level as environmental activists, grassroots movements, and place-based collaborative efforts have partnered with institutions to create effective sustainability initiatives.

Renewable Civic Energy provides an analytic framework and case studies that show how innovative practitioners from civic and professional associations, educational institutions, and youth organizations, as well as local, state, and federal agencies, have collaborated to “design for democracy.” These include watershed associations to restore rivers and address sea level rise, as well as collaborative community conservation and tribal partnerships on Western lands. Sirianni also analyzes collaborative environmental justice and university partnerships that promote engagement and democratic professionalism.  

Sirianni closes Renewable Civic Energy by proposing several transformative, yet thoroughly pragmatic, institutional reform strategies. Ordinary people can help solve complex public problems—and they can enable government to work with them to improve both the climate and democracy.

Carmen Sirianni is the Morris Hillquit Professor Emeritus in Sociology and Public Policy at Brandeis University. Among his previous books are Sustainable Cities in American Democracy: From Postwar Urbanism to a Civic Green New Deal; Investing in Democracy: Engaging Citizens in Collaborative Governance; and Civic Innovation in America: Community Empowerment, Public Policy, and the Movement for Civic Renewal. He is an elected fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration and a former fellow at the Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies at Harvard. He also coedited the 45-volume monograph series, Labor and Social Change, for Temple University Press.