Why Democratic Renewal is Climate Critical
At the Daniel Sachs Foundation, we describe democratic and institutional renewal as the meta-challenge of our time: it determines whether societies can credibly act on the long-term challenges they face. Climate is one of the clearest tests of this. The question today is not whether democracies can produce climate policy, but whether they can sustain trusted mandates, durable coalitions, and fair delivery over time. Climate policy is only as durable as the institutions that uphold it. Democratic renewal is climate critical.
Across Europe, public concern about climate change remains high and support for climate neutrality by 2050 is stable (Eurobarometer, June 2025). The challenge is declining public trust that governments can deliver a fair and effective transition. This gap between concern and delivery trust is where policy implementation becomes fragile. But the same data also reveals an opportunity: because voters are not leaving the mainstream ideologically, they can be won back through renewed political leadership and governance.
Europe’s “traditional mainstream” still governs many institutions, but it is struggling to lead, particularly on high-friction, long-horizon transitions like climate. The challenge is less a lack of policy ideas and more about public confidence in institutions’ ability to deliver fair transitions. The key question is therefore not whether democratic systems can produce climate policy, but whether they can sustain credible mandates, durable coalitions, and trusted delivery over time.
Climate policy demands something unusual of democratic institutions: sustained public acceptance of short-term costs for long-term collective benefit, maintained across multiple electoral cycles and distributional conflicts. That acceptance needs institutional trust. Citizens accept costs when they believe the system imposing them is fair, competent, and responsive to their concerns. Where that confidence is weak, even widely supported policies can struggle to endure. Strengthening democratic institutions and leadership is therefore increasingly a prerequisite for effective climate action.
A growing field of democratic and political innovation is emerging to address this challenge, focusing on leadership renewal, stronger connections between civic life and institutions, and new participatory approaches that give citizens a meaningful voice in major societal transitions. This field remains significantly under-resourced. For funders, supporting democratic renewal can be understood as a form of long-term climate infrastructure, helping ensure that climate policies can be adopted, sustained, and implemented effectively over time.
The challenge is about trust, not ideology
It is tempting to frame the rise of populism as an ideological wave. The evidence says otherwise. Polling by Datapraxis across France, Italy, Germany, Sweden, and Poland consistently shows that 75-80% of voters remain in the broad mainstream, supporting a regulated market economy, a rules-based welfare state, climate action, and managed borders. Two-thirds of people voting for the populists do so because they are desperate for change, not because they prefer the policies. Between 60-80% of Europeans agree that politicians are out of touch with people like them. In most EU member states, around half or more consider their political system broken; in Italy and France, the figure exceeds seven in ten. National election turnout has fallen from nearly 80% to 68%, and EU election turnout is low in many EU member states.
These trends point less to ideological polarization and more to declining confidence in institutions. Many citizens want change at any price. Eurobarometer 103 (Spring 2025) found only 36% of EU citizens trust their national government. The OECD’s 2024 Trust Survey reports that 53% believe the political system does not allow people like them to have a say. The V-Dem Institute’s 2025 Democracy Report records just 29 liberal democracies worldwide, the lowest since the end of the Cold War.
Low trust increases the political risk of climate policy
For climate funders, the declining institutional trust is becoming a core delivery risk for climate policy. A Bruegel policy brief (February 2025), surveying 7,819 Europeans across five countries, found that while Europeans still want climate action, many do not trust governments to deliver a fair transition. Bruegel warns explicitly that delay or “going soft” increases the opportunity for populist actors to sow doubt about climate policy effectiveness and fairness. Research in the Journal of Public Policy demonstrates a concrete mechanism: low trust reduces acceptance of climate policies with visible costs and leads citizens to overestimate the costs of action. Trust erosion does not just weaken political will; it actively inflates perceived costs, creating fertile ground for backlash.
These dynamics are already visible in debates around climate legislation, at both national and EU levels.
The causal chain is circular: trust decline produces political fragmentation, which produces coalition instability, which produces policy fragility, which produces climate rollback, which further erodes trust. Without intervention, this cycle appears to accelerate.
The opportunity: democratic renewal as climate infrastructure
Funders investing in climate have historically invested downstream: in technology, mitigation, and adaptation. That work remains essential. But it rests on an assumption that the political conditions for implementation will hold. That assumption is becoming less certain. Investing upstream, in the democratic infrastructure that sustains policy over time, is becoming a precondition for climate impact.
Because the crisis is about trust, not ideology, there is a clear path forward. What is needed is credible renewal: new voices, new leadership, and policies that substantively improve people’s daily lives, combined with democratic methods that give citizens genuine voice in how transitions are designed. The OECD finds that the largest trust gaps are associated with whether people feel they have a say in government action, which means that political representation as well as participatory methods like citizens’ assemblies and participatory budgeting respond to root causes of policy fragility. Studies of young people’s political disengagement show that a dominant barrier is weak representation: “There is no one like me in politics. There is no one who understands my situation.” Across Europe, there is predominant agreement that politicians should focus on the real concerns of ordinary people.
A growing field of democratic and non-partisan political innovation is now emerging to address these challenges, building the conditions for leadership renewal, for substantive solutions, and for strategies that connect new leaders and ideas to voters. This field remains dramatically underfunded.
How the Daniel Sachs Foundation works in this space
The Daniel Sachs Foundation works with the reimagination and renewal of democracy. We focus on the void between civic life and institutions where renewal becomes possible, and operate through a model we call funded activism: identifying structural problems, finding the people best positioned to lead, testing solutions, and scaling them with others.
Some examples relevant to this context: The Better Politics Foundation that builds and supports the growing field of political leadership innovation, accelerating och convening over 120 organisations working to renew politics across almost 50 countries, and through the Better Politics Fund ; a global pooled fund that directs investment to political changemakers across this emerging field.
Open societies are not self-sustaining. They must be cultivated. The resignation many feel about the current political moment can and must be turned into energy for change. The future of climate policy will not be shaped by technology or targets alone, but by whether we invest in the democratic soil from which durable policy grows.
What philantrophy can do:
Strengthening democratic capacity can be understood as a form of risk mitigation and long-term impact protection. Fund democratic and non-partisan political renewal, organisations cultivating new leadership pipelines, initiatives connecting civic life and social movements to formal politics, and platforms training leaders who can sustain commitments through electoral cycles. Fund leadership resilience infrastructure: mentoring, peer networks and support systems that enable transformational leaders to remain in public life.
Fund deliberative methods that rebuild democratic legitimacy for the green transition. Citizens’ assemblies, participatory budgeting, and new engagement methods create the social license for climate policy that top-down regulation alone cannot sustain.
