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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.

In this collection of original essays, empirical analysts and theorists across disciplines turn a critical eye to a variety of recent institutional forms and styles of innovation. They examine lived reality and theoretical underpinning, promise and accomplishment, but also the pitfalls and capacity-building challenges that face virtually all attempts to bring citizen voice, knowledge, and skill to the center of public problem solving. Their analyses are both hopeful and hard-headed and are guided by commitments to help understand appropriate fit and realistic sustainability. Cases include face-to-face deliberation, online networking and citizen journalism, policy forums, and community and stakeholder planning sessions across local, state and federal contexts. Policy issues run a broad gamut from community and regional economic development and environmental sustainability to minority rights and gay marriage.