Is deliberation dead? In light of recent events, one could be forgiven for thinking so. White supremacists on trial for their role in the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville mocked the proceedings to entertain their social media followers. Elected officials gaslight the public and foment violence by encouraging their supporters to “stand back and stand by.” The recent COP26 meeting in Glasgow, meant to avoid the most catastrophic effects of climate change, had depressingly limited success. In short, it is easy to think that, when it comes to creating a more just, democratic—or merely livable—future, reason-giving and persuasion are not where the action is. Although some critics of deliberative democracy have always contended thus, the miasmal swamp of our current political moment seems to have led many scholars to turn away from deliberation and direct their attention to—and pin their hopes on—more uncivil, confrontational, and contentious forms of political action.

Two new books push back against this tendency, arguing that global democratic deliberation is not only helpful but also necessary to address the most severe global problems. In Democratizing Global Justice, John S. Dryzek and Ana Tanasoca argue that “the practical pursuit of global justice will require … global deliberative democratization” (p. 1; emphasis in original). In Future Publics, Michael K. MacKenzie claims that “deliberative democracy” is “the only means we have for making our shared worlds, and thus our futures, together” (p. 6). Dryzek and Tanasoca focus on the more than two-year-long process of “consultations, dialogues, and negotiations” leading to the creation of the 2015 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs; p. 9); they also discuss climate change, though less extensively (pp. 23–27). MacKenzie’s argument is not keyed to a specific case, but he mentions many examples, especially climate change (pp. 21–22). Both books are very worth reading for anyone seeking to better understand the potential role of deliberation in addressing pressing global issues. Both books also illustrate the value—and difficulty—of addressing real-world problems in practical and theoretical registers simultaneously.

One might think that the best way to demonstrate that global democratic deliberation is necessary to promote global justice would be to compare two global-justice–promoting initiatives, one deliberative and one not, and show that only the deliberative one succeeds. But Dryzek and Tanasoca do not—indeed, so long as they are focused on the SDGs, they cannot— take this route, because they view the process leading to the creation of the SDGs as both “the most comprehensive attempt the world has yet seen to advance global justice” (p. 207; see also p. 11) and as falling far short of what ideals of deliberation and global justice demand (pp. 207–10). They therefore both hold up the SDG process as an example of how deliberation can help achieve global justice and criticize it for failing to be more deliberative and just.

In making these arguments, Dryzek and Tanasoca build on Onora O’Neill’s well-known discussion of “agents of justice.” They conceptualize this agency as a continuum from, at one extreme, “specifying” what justice requires in a particular context, which they call pure formative agency, to, at the other extreme, “implementing” what has been specified, which they call effecting global justice (chap. 2, especially pp. 53–56). They argue that agency at the more formative end of the continuum is most conducive to global justice when it is developed and exercised in global deliberative democratic contexts. The core chapters of the book analyze different kinds of entities, including states, international organizations, corporations, foundations, experts, citizens, and poor people’s social movements, with an eye toward what kinds of agents of justice they are and should be—that is, where along the continuum they should fall—and what role, if any, they should play in deliberations aimed at achieving global justice. Not all entities are “redeemable” as agents of justice; the formative agency of corporations in this regard should be minimized (pp. 91–96), whereas poor people’s social movements should have a much greater role as formative agents of justice than they do currently (pp. 147–54, generally chap. 6). Chapter 8 synthesizes these arguments to offer a model for globalized democratic deliberation that also serves as a basis for criticizing existing practice. This model involves the “transmission” of ideas born of deliberation from the more informal “public spaces” of civil society and social movements to “empowered spaces” in which authoritative collective decisions are made; these decisions are “accountable” to participants in public space, and the whole system is “reflexive”; that is, it assesses its own performance and makes course corrections as necessary (p. 195).

One of the book’s many strengths is that it draws on 20 original interviews, conducted by the authors, to provide a richly detailed account of how the SDGs were developed (p. ix). For example, we learn that one of the most successful aspects of this process from a deliberative democratic perspective—the organization of the 70 countries participating in the Open Working Group (OWG) into “troikas” of three countries that each shared a seat—was an unintended side effect of the haphazard process by which the OWG was organized, rather than an intentional strategy (pp. 67–68, 206).

Although these empirical details inform Dryzek and Tanasoca’s conceptual frameworks and normative arguments to some extent, one wonders what would have happened had they allowed the empirical information they gleaned from their interviews and secondary sources to permeate their organizing categories and concepts more deeply. For example, they note that many of the people they refer to as “the global poor” think of their own situation not primarily in terms of poverty but rather “dignity” and “self-management” (p. 160). It’s therefore not clear why Dryzek and Tanasoca advocate for a “global community of interest” comprised of “the global poor” (p. 151), rather than communities of interest organized around one (or more) of these other concepts. Likewise, what other examples of global justice-promoting deliberation within international organizations might have come into view had Dryzek and Tanasoca taken, as their organizing frame, not global poverty but instead a concept with more resonance in affected communities, such as anti-colonialism or self-determination? It would have been interesting, for example, to hear Dryzek and Tanasoca’s take on other instances of deliberation at the UN that also had hugely consequential implications for global justice; for example, debates surrounding the passage of UN Resolution 1514, the Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and People (1960; see Adom Getachew, Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination, 2019, chap. 3).

As their emphasis on global poverty suggests, Dryzek and Tanasoca conceive of the domain of global justice as primarily distributive and social (pp. 16–17). Although they present this conception of global justice as logically prior to the SDGs (p. 5), it also tracks the scope of the SDGs, which, they argue, incorporate “the vast majority of dimensions that might factor into global justice” (p. 15). But given that the processes leading to the SDGs excluded the voices of the poor (p. 208) and were dominated by neoliberal logics (p. 210), perhaps we should be skeptical of this conception of global justice, in which questions of distribution appear largely hived off from the violences of colonialism, imperialism, and war. Might truly democratic deliberation about global justice, in the context of the SDGs or elsewhere, result in a differently contoured conception of the domain of global justice itself?

If democratizing global deliberation to include poor and marginalized people is challenging, including future people (i.e., people who do not yet exist) is more challenging still. Whereas Dryzek and Tanasoca devote one chapter (chap. 7) to this issue, it is MacKenzie’s main topic. As MacKenzie notes in his exceptionally clear and well-written book, this challenge is more than a logistical constraint imposed on all governments by time’s linearity. Rather, compared to autocracies, democracies appear to be especially bad at incorporating the interests of future people. MacKenzie calls this the democratic myopia thesis, which I refer to here as the DMT. According to the DMT, “democratic systems are functionally short-sighted. Democracies tend to focus on the present not when they are working badly but when they are working well” (p. 6).

MacKenzie does not completely reject the DMT, but he finds it to be significantly overstated. In the central chapters of Future Publics, he shows why deliberative democracy, in particular—not autocracy and not nondeliberative forms of democracy on their own—can avoid democratic myopia. Although the DMT suggests that individual voters are myopic—there is a “‘natural human tendency’ to favor the near term over the long term” (p. 8)–MacKenzie argues that this tendency is only a problem if we assume that the purpose of democracy is to enact people’s existing preferences, rather than helping shape those preferences, something that deliberation does especially well. Although the DMT highlights the fact that future people cannot be included in democratic decision-making because they do not yet exist, MacKenzie argues that when people disagree about policy but agree that the interests of future people should be taken into account, a “virtuous cycle” (p. 107) can develop in which everyone feels compelled, for strategic reasons, to defend their preferred policies on the grounds that they do not harm future generations (chap. 4). In response to the worry that older, wealthier people often have disproportionate power in democracies and that this is bad for future generations, Mackenzie argues that making present decision-making more inclusive of diverse voices helps incorporate the interests of future people, because like present people, future people are bound to be diverse (chap. 5). Democratic deliberation also incorporates the interests of future people because it is intentional (and so helps avoid “drift”) and moderately flexible, avoiding both rigidity, on the one hand, and rapid, dramatic change on the other (chap. 5).

After showing that the DMT is overstated, Mackenzie considers which democratic institutions, deliberative and otherwise, could best incorporate the interests of future publics. He discusses several possibilities, including future-regarding constitutional clauses, referenda and citizens’ initiatives, “posterity impact statements,” and “representatives of the future” (chap. 7). Without providing a strict hierarchy, MacKenzie implies that the most promising options are randomly selected representatives for the future—organized into a second chamber of a legislature, in ad-hoc committees, or both—and posterity impact statements (chap. 7).

MacKenzie acknowledges that some of these solutions might seem like weak sauce, given the enormity of the challenges he is addressing (p. 187). In particular, he notes that, for democratic processes to be future-regarding, the corrosive effects of global capitalism on them must be constrained (pp. 186–90). He discusses several strategies for doing this, such as worker-owned cooperatives. Although these strategies might not be sufficient, this widening of the book’s aperture to include economic systems is welcome. It is also exemplary of MacKenzie’s willingness to elucidate immensely challenging problems and propose concrete solutions, without pretending that the solutions will be enough to solve the problems. Although some readers might find this excessively optimistic, I view it as an admirable commitment to starting somewhere.

MacKenzie’s thorough, careful, and selective takedown of the DMT, together with his constructive proposals for reform, provides an excellent framework for thinking about the problem of incorporating future publics into present decision-making and the potential for deliberation to contribute to this task. But even though MacKenzie avoids the messiness that comes with deep engagement with specific examples, the end result is sometimes a bit stylized. For example, he emphasizes that deliberation can help people make better decisions by engaging their analytic (“system 2”) brains, rather than their intuitive (“system 1”) brains (p. 99). But as the example of QAnon aficionados who “do their research” suggests, it’s not clear that system 2 thinking avoids deliberative dead ends. Future scholarship building on MacKenzie’s framework might confront these and other complexities.

Although deliberative systems theory has a broader purview, the beating heart of deliberative democracy remains the use of reasoned argument to persuade others. Especially in the context of international development, I worry that putatively deliberative procedures can serve as a distraction, delay tactic, faux-legitimating cover, or techno-procedural escape hatch from the laborious work of forging broad political coalitions that fight for justice not only by offering reasons but also by exerting political (and economic and social) pressure. Nonetheless, these two books make a persuasive case that democratic deliberation is alive and—if not exactly kicking—then at least offering good reasons why we should grant it a prominent place in efforts to address pressing global problems.