Democracy Otherwise: Learning From the South

Abstract

More than 40 years of neoliberal globalization have led to a democratic deficit that necessitates urgent redress. Democracy otherwise - which is grounded in decoloniality and its accompanying epistemologies of the South - provides urban and regional planners with an opportunity to learn from the diverse democratic practices emerging in the Global South, practices that are deliberately delinked from the state and capitalism. One such example is found on communal landholdings in South Africa, where residents deploy multiple principles of legitimacy to foster an emplaced democracy. But given the entwined relationship between planning and the state, and the state's support of market rationalities, decoloniality urges us to question whether alternative democratic practices are possible beyond local settings. Findings presented in this article suggest that place dependency diminishes transferability and scalability. Nevertheless, herein lies the power of an otherwise democracy to counter coloniality, while keeping alive Derrida's "always to come" narrative, which challenges the liberal tradition of democracy as the only and most profitable outcome. This perspective enables planners to learn from the South - not to replicate its rich diversity, but to appreciate multiple democratic possibilities that acknowledge pluriversality, relationality, popular knowledges, local experiences, and situated worldviews, while nurturing "polities of difference" and "becoming in place," in tandem with "idioms of autonomy and community."