Andreas Johansson

Biography

My research examines how democratic governance can be sustained and strengthened amid growing environmental and climate challenges and major societal transitions. I am particularly interested in how such changes can be governed while upholding core democratic values such as inclusive participation, equal voice, open and reasoned discussion, transparency, accountability, and responsiveness.

I study different forms of democratic participation – from citizen forums, dialogue processes, and other democratic innovations to grassroots mobilization and community-led initiatives. My research focuses primarily on environmental and sustainability-related conflicts and transition processes. A recurring interest is how participation can be designed and organized to give people meaningful influence, how rules, institutions, and power relations shape what is possible, and what consequences participation has for decision-making and governance.

I welcome enquiries from current and prospective PhD students with research interests in these areas and am open to supervising relevant doctoral projects.

Research

Ongoing projects

Democratic Governance, Environmental and Climate Challenges, and Societal Transformation: Deliberation, Inclusion and Citizen Influence for Sustainable Food Systems (DEMETRA)

The changes in everyday life needed to meet the goals of the green transition can place significant demands on citizens. For climate policy to succeed, it therefore needs both broad public support and meaningful opportunities for citizen participation. This requires democratic processes in which all groups in society have a genuine opportunity to take part and influence how transition policies are designed.

DEMETRA builds on the EU’s Farm to Fork Strategy, a key component of the European Green Deal, and examines how deliberative forms of citizen participation – including in-person and digital citizen forums – can contribute to more sustainable systems of food production, distribution and consumption. The project seeks to identify approaches that enhance inclusion and citizen influence in food-related decision-making while supporting democratic governance and more sustainable food systems.

The project addresses the overarching question: How can ambitious climate goals, including major reductions in carbon emissions, be achieved while safeguarding democratic processes, strengthening public trust, and supporting both legitimate and effective policymaking?

DEMETRA critically examines the design, implementation and outcomes of participatory processes related to food-system transformation across different contexts. The analysis focuses on the quality of deliberation, the inclusiveness of participation, participants’ political engagement, and the tangible effects these processes have on food systems and decision-making. A common comparative research design enables systematic comparison across seven European cities: Bologna (Italy), Cologne (Germany), Geneva (Switzerland), Brighton (United Kingdom), Lille (France), Tartu (Estonia) and Uppsala (Sweden).

More information about the project and its latest developments is available here: https://www.qmul.ac.uk/demetra/

Grassroots Participation and Democratic Deepening in the Green Transition

The green transition is intensifying conflicts over land, natural resources, rights, and how land and resources should be used. But conflicts are not only problems to be resolved. They can also bring overlooked perspectives into political decision-making, put pressure on decision-makers to justify their choices, and open possibilities for democratic change. This project examines why some conflicts develop in democratically productive ways, while others contribute to polarization, distrust, and exclusion.

The project focuses on grassroots participation – forms of participation created or claimed by local communities, civil-society actors, Indigenous peoples, and other affected groups when established channels for influence are seen as inadequate. These may include protests, community-produced knowledge, alternative impact assessments, locally developed ways of giving or withholding consent, and other forms of collective organizing.

By tracing and comparing mining conflicts in northern Sweden and South Africa, the project examines how such initiatives develop over time, how their claims and knowledge reach institutions where decisions are made, and what democratic consequences follow. The aim is to understand when such conflicts can contribute to democratic deepening by strengthening affected actors’ political voice and influence – and when they are instead managed in ways that leave underlying power relations unchanged.