Democratic Innovations in Dealing with Intergenerational Burdens: Institutional Development of a Commons Approach in the Search for a Final Repository Site for Highly Radioactive Waste in Germany

The final disposal of highly radioactive waste is considered one of the most complex and lasting environmental conflicts in Germany that illustrates a top-down, partly violent, approach by the German state in the past. This historic legacy continues to influence the relationship of trust between civil society and state actors to this day. The new site selection process with the Repository Site Selection Act (StandAG) intended to break the societal lock-in situation by implementing a new regulatory approach that includes new stakeholder structures and new, previously unknown participation formats. These formats are not formulated in detail, but are experimental spaces that are open to co-creation by citizens. The StandAG conveys a new understanding of the state's role in pacifying large-scale projects and contains innovative elements for democratizing the resolution of complex societal challenges. In the course of the first participatory formats implemented in 2021, an institutional dynamic became apparent in the process. Based on theories of institutional change and commons governance those dynamics can be described as a development of new forms of collective action that incorporates institutional logics of commoning. Commoning can be described as an institutional and infrastructural arrangement for cooperation in which the use and production of a common good are jointly organized and managed. Using qualitative empirical social research based on participatory observation of participation formats in the site selection process, interviews with different stakeholders in the field, and document analysis, an analysis is performed which contextual and opportunity structures stimulated institutional developments toward commoning and what specific role the innovative democratic elements and structures of the law play here in the formation of new institutional logics, roles and rationalities among the participants, including for example the mobilization of democratic entrepreneurship. In addition, the structural obstacles facing democratic innovations in such long-term large-scale projects are analyzed. These obstacles are rooted both in the complexity and inaccessibility of the subject matter, but also in administrative structures that have thus far been incompatible with new forms of cooperation, or in resistance to the necessary redistribution of power structures. Finally, a reflection is added on the connection between new innovative forms of democratization of complex and conflictual infrastructure projects, new understandings of the relationship between the state and the public, and commoning.