As increasing recognition of the new ‘Anthropocene’ era puts centre stage both the inextricable interconnections between ecological and social systems and the central role of human actions in driving social-ecological change, so must questions around sustainability governance both employ a broader definition of sustainability (encompassing the long-term resilience of combined social-ecological systems rather than the more immediate and more directly ‘environmental’ issues) and revisit the role of democracy and the wider citizenry in deeply normative accounts of societal change (rather than predominantly technical-managerial accounts around formal environmental policy-makers and ‘experts’). Based on an ecologically as well as sociologically grounded account of sustainability as social-ecological resilience, this paper argues that sustainability governance in the Anthropocene must take place at the level of the fundamental patterns of societal evolution, which must support ongoing legitimation at the same time as a genuine open-endedness towards even radically different new future paths. The only form of governance able to achieve this balance are new forms of democracy that normatively demand and institutionally incorporate the critical-imaginative spaces needed for citizens to play their crucial role of contributing to both. Thus, the paper closes with an evaluation of recent deliberative democratic theory from this perspective, advocating a cultural account of deliberative systems as the necessary basis for genuinely inclusive and critical citizen engagement, and theorising the imaginative-reflective realm of the Arts as one of its key foundations.
