Contested democratic innovations: Dilemmas of dealing with the far right in participatory sustainability governance

Increasing far-right participation in participatory sustainability governance, resonating with a general rise of the far right, generates challenges for involved actors. Building on and contributing to ongoing research on responses to the far right and the gains and losses of participation for sustainability, I introduce a novel framework that highlights the response options of ignore, cooperate, capitalise and exclude/isolate. In my qualitative analysis of semi-structured interviews of a case of far-right environmentalist participation in the participatory process of Dresden – City of the Future, I show that actors in practice problematise particular characteristics of far-right participation when choosing different responses and judge these options against the promises of participation, that is, emancipation, legitimacy and efficacy. Interpreting these findings, I conclude that every response option runs into a specific dilemma: ignore into a knowledge dilemma, cooperate into an emancipation dilemma, capitalise into a legitimacy dilemma and exclude/isolate into an efficacy dilemma. They share a general dilemma that militant responses to far-right participation might lead to further radicalisation of the far right and democracy undermining itself in authoritarian self-defence, while tolerant responses might lead to its further normalisation, enabling the abolition of democracy by democratic means. Instead of delegating responses and displacing dilemmas, actors might better be prepared by actively reflecting and dispute about actors’ specific roles in dealing with specific benefits and trade-offs.