Climate Justice in a Conflictual Public Sphere: The Challenge of Mobilizing Climate Counterpublics in Liberal Democracies

This paper argues that the democratic legitimacy of the Green Transition depends on acknowledging the plurality and conflictual nature of contemporary climate politics in the public sphere. While youth-led movements have revitalized climate justice discourse, emerging forms of dissent—such as No Farmers, No Food, No Future—show that many ordinary citizens are concerned about the heavy interference of political institutions into their daily lives in pursuit of climate targets. Drawing on McKinnon’s political conception of climate justice (Section I) and Habermas’s model of the public sphere (Section II), the paper contends that public reason must be complemented by communicative spaces in which citizens can contest and shape the meaning of a just transition. Incorporating post-Habermasian insights (Section III), it introduces the idea of climate counterpublics to capture the ambivalent yet democratically significant role of alternative voices, from a normative perspective. The paper concludes with institutional strategies for communicating the Green Transition, thereby fostering a more inclusive and legitimate path toward green transformation (Section IV).