The overall goal of the RETOOL project is to advance our understanding of how to address the twin challenges of responding to the climate imperative while strengthening and reinvigorating democratic governance. The project has four overarching objectives: (i) To deepen our understanding of the relationship between democratic governance and the climate imperative by developing a novel analytical framework and creating new empirical underpinnings, including important new open-access datasets; (ii) To understand how a variety of democratic institutions across Europe are responding to the climate challenge, including learning lessons from history and studying new and innovative democratic practices; (iii) To contribute to reinvigorating democratic governance in Europe by developing and synthesising new knowledge and insights on climate democracy, and presenting them in a range of high-impact formats; and (iv) To serve as a bridge between academic research on climate democracy innovations and policymakers and practitioners, as well as civil society and the wider public.
The RETOOL consortium brings together a variety of social science and humanities perspectives, and is interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary by design. Our disciplinary expertise includes political science, political economy, public administration, environmental law, European studies, deliberative democracy, political sociology, contemporary history, and geography. Researchers in the consortium have expertise in both quantitative and qualitative research and across a wide range of methods, including public opinion research, elite interviews, participant observation, and archival research, among others.
