Editors' Introduction: Why Sustainability and Democratization?

Democracy and democratic development is directly connected to the challenges emerging from the global sustainability crisis understood in a broad sense, including political, economic and social-ecological dimensions. Reconsidering and renewing the interdependent levels of democracy is a huge challenge in our present historical situation. Commons would be the pivotal institutional form of the new kind of sustainable democracy referred to by amongst many others Vandana Shiva. Democracy has both theoretically and practically been a key concept for Action Research since its establishment as a separate research tradition. Kurt Lewin found that research and science should be situated within such a horizonnot only as a political or moral obligation, but because the question of democracy should be considered a necessary issue within research and sciences themselves. The decisions made nationally and internationally at the institutional political and economic top levels have, rightly it seems to us, been characterised as an "organised irresponsibility", practically denying the real problems