The rise of digital eco-technocracy: Ecological crisis,digital innovation and legitimacy in the adaptive society

Abstract

This paper examines the convergence of digitalization and ecological sustainability within the framework of “digital eco-technocracy” analyzing its implications for legitimacy. We first elaborate the reasons why we believe that adaptation is increasingly becoming an essential leitmotiv of social integration and transformation. We then argue that the convergence of digital and green has the potential to fundamentally reshape the relationship between politics and society in terms of political legitimacy. In doing so we claim that the integration of digital and green agendas may transform liberal democracies into adaptive, technocratic systems focused on depoliticizing ecological conflicts via digital technologies. Drawing on critical theory, particularly Claus Offe's work on technocratic dilemmas, we then propose a “negative dialectic of technocracy,” where efforts to stabilize society through technocratic solutions risk further legitimacy crises, but in doing so further strengthen technocratic trajectories.

Introduction

Until recently, the epistemic communities focused on sustainability and digitalization rarely visibly intersected. The sustainability community primarily focused on preventing and mitigating damage to climate and environment by reducing human impact. Conversely, the economic pioneers of the digital transformation openly acknowledged that technology intended to drive the acceleration of economic commodification. Thus, as digital innovation shed its utopian roots, it facilitated fundamental aspects of globalization by linking factories and production sites across the globe. It enabled financialization through computerized financial systems, improved rationalization and labor control across industries (Schiller, 2011) and fueled unsustainable consumption patterns through aggressive data-driven advertising and on-demand delivery systems for both physical and digital products. While sustainability discourse centered on reducing human impact and aligning economic development with planetary limitations, digitalization predominantly revolved around capitalist expansion by serving other industries, exploring fresh economic domains in the so-called data economy, and expanding the array of novel goods and services available to consumers.

However, as the multidimensional crisis of world ecology has accelerated in recent years, increasing economic, political, and intellectual capital has been invested in applying the “solutionist ethic” of digital capitalism (Nachtwey & Seidl, 2020) to address this crisis. From public infrastructure investments aimed at creating more energy-efficient grids through digital technologies, to corporations offering personalized carbon tracking and management tools, and intellectuals envisioning a climate super AI (Bratton, 2021; Lovelock & McMillan, 2019), the worlds of digitalization and sustainability are increasingly converging within the framework of “ecological modernization” (Hajer, 1997) or “green capitalism” (Buller, 2022). Against this background, political initiatives for a twin transition toward a digital and green economy, which is supposed to enable high levels of economic growth and consumption while using technology to manage nature, can be seen as the most recent expression of an “ecological agenda” which is now supposed to be embedded in a nexus of digital-green.

With the increasing centrality of digital-green for states’ economic modernization agendas, it is crucial to explore their interconnections. As exemplified by the twin transition, the coupling of digital technologies and the eco-political agenda can be expected to play an important role in the ability of states to manage political legitimacy in the face if escalating ecological problems. While sociologists have begun to explore the twin transition, for instance in terms of the legitimizing effects of the digital-green paradigm for capitalist modernization (Lenz, 2022), a comprehensive understanding of how this process might impact democratic politics is still lacking. This is striking, as classic works in critical sociology and political economy have long emphasized the relationship between capitalist modernization and social crisis as an issue of successfully (or not) managing political legitimacy. Notably, in the 1970s, in what was at the time labeled as “younger critical theory,” Offe (1976; 1984) and Habermas (1976) described the “structural problems of the capitalist state” (Offe) as arising from the state's overextension in the process of capitalist modernization, leading to “legitimation problems” for the political system. Thus, in this article, we draw on this type of reasoning to explore the relationship between the new green-digital nexus and its potential consequences for the management of political legitimacy.

Presently, both the domains of digitalization and sustainability occupy a central position in the landscape of self-proclaimed progressive politics. Politicians seek to garner the support of constituents and thereby secure support for their political authority by promoting and shaping these concurrent trends. Consequently, it is worthwhile to delve into the interconnections between these two issues, particularly in terms of their impact on the management of “mass loyalty” (Habermas, 1976; Offe, 1972) within liberal democracies grappling with the dual challenges of climate-induced crises and digital modernization. The key question from such an analytical angle is: How are digital technologies promoted in the interest of political legitimacy in the face of the climate crisis, and what kind of an approach to politics emerges from this?

As we are addressing an emerging social issue within which at least two major social trends are converging, we view our analysis essentially as a conceptual endeavor. Given the inherent uncertainty of the future, adopting this perspective allows us to identify potential trajectories that diverge from current societal norms. It prompts the query of how these paths might shape overarching future trajectories. These dynamics can be considered vectors of social development, for they lack a fixed destination and instead project potential directions for the society of tomorrow. From a methodological standpoint, however, this analysis can naturally amount to little more than an empirically and theoretically informed sociological conjecture—in essence, an exploratory form of social theory.

We tackle the connection of political legitimacy and the digital-green nexus in five sections. We start by delineating what we consider the current state of digitalization and sustainability in section 2. We argue that in the general critique of digital innovation as harmful to society, the matter of the negative ecological consequences of digital innovation is gaining more and more attention. At the same time, in the realm of eco-politics liberal societies are transitioning away from a paradigm of sustainability characterized by prevention and mitigation, and toward one of perpetual adaptation for which digital technologies are supposed to be applied. In section 3, we further elaborate five reasons why we believe that adaptation is increasingly becoming an essential leitmotiv of social integration and transformation: the historical path dependency of corporate-led sustainability politics in the neoliberal era, the temporal structure of democratic politics, the material trajectory of societies under constant adaptive pressures, fiscal constraints on adaptation-as-mitigation, and the societal perception that even moderate mitigation measures are experienced as substantial pressures within the lifeworld.

In Section 4, we apply this understanding of digitalization and sustainability to the question of how it is connected to politics. We argue that the convergence of digital and green has the potential to fundamentally reshape the relationship between politics and society in terms of political legitimacy. To capture this shift, we introduce the concept of the “technocratic vector” to describe a process through which ecologically disillusioned and adaptation-focused polities may increasingly seek to depoliticize ecological conflicts through digital technologies.

Building on a particular piece of the younger critical theory school, Offe's work on dilemmas of technocratic governance, we conclude in section 5 with the thesis of a “negative dialectic of technocracy.” This thesis posits that, within the adaptive constellation, politics will shift away from calls for progressive democratization toward a push to depoliticize risk through technological adaptation. Despite the uncertain effectiveness of digital technologies in achieving this depoliticization, we suggest that a) technocratic governance will likely exacerbate legitimacy crises within democracy in the adaptive context and b) may nonetheless gain stability, possibly because of this very crisis. Consequently, we argue that liberal democracies are undergoing a structural transformation toward an eco-technocratic paradigm, replacing among other things the prevailing narrative of subpolitical democratization (Beck, 1996) and what remains of the eco-emancipatory project (EEP) toward socioecological transformation via emancipation, autonomy and self-realization (Blühdorn, 2020).

Digital disillusion and the adaptive constellation

The paradigms of digitalization and sustainability have both evolved tremendously over the last years. Digitalization experienced widespread euphoria in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, promising a new lead sector for the global economy, disruptive innovation and efficiency gains via unrestricted data flow, and large-scale solutions to numerous social problems (Morozov, 2013). Ecological concerns occasionally found their place within the tech elite's problem-solving framework, yet they never held a prominent position. For an extended period, both consumers and politicians fervently endorsed digital developmentalism and critique mostly remained confined to relatively marginal groups of activists and intellectuals. However, starting around 2017/18, larger segments of public discourse began to be skeptical of the promises of “digital capitalism” (Schiller, 2014; Staab, 2024), which was increasingly seen as distorting markets, tainting public discourse, and interfering in democratic elections via its control over user data (Zuboff, 2019), social media (Staab & Thiel, 2022), and entire markets (Staab, 2024).

Most importantly for this paper: Although the digital economy and its technologies had long been expected to be (and had presented themselves as) environmentally friendly due to the presumed immaterial and nonrival nature of digital goods, along with their potential to enhance efficiency across various sectors, empirical data have revealed a rather alarming ecological impact of the technology industry. Freitag et al. (2021) found that between 2002 and 2012 the carbon footprint in the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) sector showed an increase of at least 40 per cent, significantly contributing to the planetary crisis of world ecology instead of aiding its resolution. Without political intervention and industrial efforts, they predict, global emissions of ICT are going to increase even more. An IEA (2024) report estimates that by 2026 electricity consumption from data centers, AI and cryptocurrency will likely add “at least one Sweden or at most one Germany” to global energy demand.

Notably, the consumerist nature of the commercial internet has further bolstered the “dialectics of emancipation” observed by Blühdorn (2020), whereby emancipation becomes increasingly intertwined with acts of consumption. In doing so the EEP itself exacerbates the ecological crisis and reinforces a cultural emphasis on self-realization or “singularization” (Reckwitz, 2021) through consumption. Taken together, these developments, well documented in public discourse, have generated a widespread public disillusionment regarding the transformative effects of digitalization on society. Thus, the coupling of digitalization and sustainability appears like a promising option to relegitimize digital capitalism by aligning it with eco-politics.

On the other hand, the field of eco-politics is transforming at a rapid pace as well and any study of the rising digital-green nexus must start by outlining the overall trajectory of eco-politics. The argument we wish to present in this section is the following: Viewed from a sociological perspective, we have already embarked upon the trajectory of sustainability-as-adaptation, and this trend will intensify as both the crisis of world ecology and the endeavors to devise political solutions to it gain momentum.

To establish this argument, it becomes necessary to depart from the conventional understanding of both mitigation and adaptation as commonly portrayed in the political discourse surrounding climate change. In this context, mitigation has often entailed preemptive measures aimed at prevention or harm reduction, often through forward-looking planning (ex-ante measures, so to speak). Conversely, adaptation predominantly denotes reactive practices aimed at coping with damage that could not have been averted (ex-post). The difference between preventing glaciers from melting or building dams illustrates the difference. Advocates of the EEP have, after its “neoliberal” appropriation, historically perceived adaptation as a strategy not only counterproductive to climate change mitigation, given the notion that it might compete with preventative efforts, but as a practice fundamentally opposed to this EEP's project of individual liberation through ecological politics.

From a sociological standpoint, however, adaptation can be understood substantially differently. In sociology, adaptation is a pivotal concept that denotes a social practice that involves, to quote a lexical definition: “changes in characteristics, habits, orientations, and patterns of behavior […] to a certain extent, a prerequisite for engaging in reciprocal social interactions and assuming roles and responsibilities in systems rooted in the division of labor. This includes managing social collaboration and addressing environmental demands, thereby ensuring the fundamental continuity of human society as a whole” (Hillmann, 2007, p. 29, own translation).

Evidently, this definition encompasses both mitigation and adaptation strategies in the context of eco-politics, as both encompass processes of reactive change and the management of environmental demands. Consequently, in the realm of social transformation, the distinction between mitigation and adaptation might actually not be very pronounced as compared to political discourse. Instead, mitigation operates as a form of adaptation strategy. This becomes apparent when we observe instances in which substantial mitigation/adaptation measures are implemented: These measures are often perceived as exerting adaptive pressure, leading to frustration and social unrest, incentives to purchase electric vehicles, mandates to replace fossil fuel-based heating systems with heat pumps, or increases in gasoline prices can provoke resistance.

More importantly, this perspective aids in delineating the shared foundation of social adaptation practices and distinguishing them from the late EEPs’ emphasis on individual autonomy. Let's deconstruct adaptation as the act of “addressing environmental demands, thereby ensuring the fundamental continuity of human society as a whole”: Firstly, we confront demands—tasks that are indispensably necessary and must be fulfilled if a certain goal is to be achieved. Put differently, adaptation concerns tasks we would likely forego if circumstances didn't dictate otherwise. Adaptation is a reaction to circumstances, and as such a clear opposition to the unconstrained agency implicit in the late EEP. Secondly, as long as the “continuity […] of human society” really hinges upon it, adaptation refers to practices that present themselves as profound, essential, and thus, “imperative” for systemic stabilization (Habermas, 1976).

While there is little doubt that individuals and societies must safeguard themselves throughout history and may occasionally face risks to their stability, the promise of liberal modernity as well as of the late EEP has been to liberate them from the relentless burden of constant adaptation and aimed at broadening the opportunities for individual freedom. Classical liberal thinkers generally stress individual liberties to free individuals from constant adaptation to arbitrary power. The extension of social welfare rights (Marshall & Bottomore, 1992) in the twentieth century can also be seen as an effort to meet legitimization requirements by protecting citizens from the adaptive pressure of existential risks. The late EEP, which evolved at the end of the twentieth century, emphasized individual autonomy as the foundation for a progressive approach to ecological issues, rendering them not only solvable but also a source of further self-realization (Blühdorn, 2020, 2022).

In contrast, adaptation suggests that the stabilization of individuals or social systems can never be considered “solved,” as these problems evolve unpredictably, and that climate change in particular brings issues of self-preservation back to the core of the political agenda (Mittiga, 2024). By doing so, the liberal framework of legitimacy is fundamentally challenged. As Mittiga (2024) argues, the liberal perspective predominantly emphasizes “contingent” sources of legitimacy. Its focus remains largely on individual emancipation and autonomy as long as “foundational legitimacy” concerns—such as basic issues of security—are not at stake. However, in situations like the ecological crisis, where threats to self-preservation take precedence, legitimacy demands that all contingent elements be subordinated to existential matters of life and death (ibid). Therefore, adaptation must take precedence over self-realization.

A basic definition of adaptation would be: a reaction to problems, which we would ignore, if we thought that we could. Thus, what all these interconnected practices share is their approach to subjectivity, which once again significantly diverges from the core tenets of the late EEP. While the late EEP revolved around expanding the realm of individual freedom, self-efficacy, and self-fulfillment, adaptation directs its focus toward external factors: the tasks people and politics would prefer to avoid, but increasingly must undertake to ensure their own reproduction. In other words: Adaptation projects a society heavily occupied with possibly diverse issues of destabilization—ecology probably being the most significant one of them.

The rise of the adaptive society

To exemplify some reasons, why we believe, that adaptation will be (or in a way already is) the essential leitmotiv of social integration and transformation in late-modern societies, we suggest the following five arguments. In presenting them, we will especially focus on adaptation as a practice of responding to ecological crisis.

The historical path dependency of corporate-led sustainability politics

Adaptation has been widely described as the leitmotif of the neoliberal turn from the 1980s onward, as illustrated by Margaret Thatcher's proverbial TINA principle (there is no alternative) and structural adjustment measures that the WTO, IMF, and World Bank imposed on large parts of the Global South. In relation to climate change, an adaptation mantra developed early on that was intimately linked to the neoliberal dogmas of the time. Felli's (2021) political-economic analysis of the co-evolution of climate policy and the neoliberal turn demonstrates that adaptation has been the pivotal strategy of capitalist elites in response to the recognition of climate change since the 1970s.

Economists such as Thomas Schelling, William Nordhaus, and others shaped climate policy by reframing it as an economic resource allocation issue through cost–benefit analyses rather than a political–moral imperative. When climate policies eventually became inevitable, they pushed to align these policies with market principles, emphasizing adaptation as a central theme. Taken together, these two responses “implied the need to emphasise the theme of adaptation” (Felli, 2021, p. 56).

Given existing politics and institutions, the legacy of corporate-centric sustainability continues to endure, as evident from the current state of global climate governance. This is apparent when examining international or national agreements, as the historical influences of the market-aligned and quantification-based perspective on sustainability shape their frameworks. Consequently, the political structures for adaptation have already been firmly established, although it's important to note that this does not inherently ensure their success. It becomes evident, however, that the preservation of ongoing economic processes takes precedence over more profound transformative changes.

The temporal structure of democratic politics

Another argument supporting the prevalence of the adaptation paradigm relates to the temporal framework of democratic politics. When leaders face the need for reelection every few years, there is a structural incentive to prioritize addressing short-term issues over long-term concerns and immediate problems over distant ones (MacKenzie, 2016). While this shouldn't be misconstrued as an absolute impediment to long-range policy formulation, this argument contributes to explaining some deficiencies within the inherited eco-political framework.

Moreover, we are currently confronting the repercussions of prolonged procrastination in eco-politics. Mitigation-focused policies, which could have been enacted decades ago, are still mired in negotiation. Hindered by corporate and political vested interests, the opportunity for a painless mitigation-exclusive approach has largely evaporated. As time progresses, the necessity for increasingly severe forms of both immediate- and long-term adaptation grows evident due to the inadequacy of prevention measures. Consequently, the tangible pressure to swiftly adapt to real-time hazards will inevitably gain more prominence. Less abstraction and more frequent occurrences of wildfires, floods, or droughts will place precisely these short-term challenges at the forefront, aligning with the intrinsic incentives of democratic politics to address them. Amid the accelerating global ecological crisis, it's likely that these challenges will occupy an ever-expanding portion of society's collective consciousness. This shift will likely bolster post-facto adaptation, both on individual and collective scales. Furthermore, preemptive adaptation could also gain from this shift if matters of self-preservation evolve into a prevailing political focus. In fact, it's difficult to envision a democratic state maintaining widespread loyalty while a pervasive sense of anxiety about self-preservation engulfs a substantial portion of the population without collectively addressing it. Even more so since self-preservation issues seem to underlie the first two imperatives of state legitimacy as stressed historical institutionalists: “to keep internal order” and “to defend against external threats” (Hausknost, 2020, p. 20), both issues which are in the liberal tradition strongly connected to the states duty to ensure the vital safety of its citizens. Consequently, the outcome would be a state basing its legitimacy on a meta-imperative of constant adaptation.

The material trajectory of societies under constant adaptive pressures

Additionally, both the entrenched path dependencies of corporate-driven sustainability and the temporal structure inherent in democratic politics, regardless of their nuanced implications, likely generate a distinct social dynamic related to resource allocation. While allocating financial or other resources toward long-term challenges is not inherently motivated by the temporal framework of democratic politics, democratic states find it difficult to remain uninvolved when faced with tangible hazards and catastrophes. In these situations, substantial resources must be dedicated to damage mitigation, disaster relief, victim compensation, as well as repairing and rebuilding as needed.

While we have inherited an eco-political framework that was originally designed to shield systemic ecological issues from the lifeworld of citizens in prosperous democracies (Hausknost, 2020), this approach is becoming increasingly impractical as these systemic problems shift from abstract risks to tangible threats. Modern societies are confronted with a range of pressing and overlapping emergencies: an ecological crisis due to climate change and biodiversity loss, a crisis of democracy linked to escalating social inequality, a public health crisis triggered by pandemics, economic instability amid geopolitical tensions, and often a crisis of national security due to the spectre of war.

While a single major crisis might force many societies into reactive measures for stabilization, the multitude of challenges faced by late-modern society certainly pushes it in this direction. One can easily observe the strain on states that were already grappling with persistent “structural problems” stemming from the tension between the imperative for economic growth and the citizens’ demand for social safety. Sudden disruptions to the fabric of everyday life—whether through financial crashes, wars, or environmental catastrophes—appear to necessitate “Whatever it takes” approaches from democratic governments in numerous nations. This implies that states must commit to allocating any necessary resources to address a particular problem. Consequently, prosperous societies, weighed down by constant crises, are likely to encounter financial constraints and bureaucratic limitations. The decision between diverting resources from other sectors toward adaptation or delegating responsibility to local communities and individuals may exact a heavy toll on political legitimacy. Irrespective of the chosen course, the result underscores the growing importance of adaptation-related concerns. As the imperative to channel increasing resources—whether on an individual or collective level—toward both proactive and reactive stabilization becomes more pronounced, society will inevitably evolve into an adaptive entity (a concept distinct from achieving uniform “success at adaptation”).

Fiscal constraints on adaptation-as-mitigation

These fiscal burdens directly relate to another problem of contemporary eco-politics. While critical theory has articulated numerous critiques of green capitalism (e.g., Malm, 2020; Fraser, 2023), recent empirical scholarship has pointed out that an energy transition toward green capitalism is currently far from certain (Christophers, 2024). Barriers of entry to the energy market are low, competition is high and profitability therefore remains below investor expectations. Consequently, electricity generation by renewables in Western countries in no way increases fast enough to replace fossil fuels in time. Indeed, the International Energy Agency estimates that both overall CO² emissions of the entire power sector and power generation from gas and coal have even increased in 2023 (IEA, 2024). With the energy sector remaining the single biggest source of greenhouse gas emissions, transition toward clean energy would constitute one of the most pivotal strategies of a mitigation approach.

Against this background, clean energy's lack of windfall profits not only reduces taxable corporate profits but they also requires large-scale public subsidies to make sure the energy transition is happening at all. The combination of corporate power, lack of state capacity, and low profits in clean energy has precipitated the derisking framework, which attempts to steer private green finance via tremendous socialization of risks and costs (Gabor & Braun, 2025). While such subsidies may prove difficult to justify to strained households (see next section), they are still nowhere near enough to mitigate climate change. An alternative route would be to expand state capacity and fund the energy transition via substantial wealth taxes. However, such initiatives would face backlash from private companies and economic elites and thus strain the political legitimacy of governing coalitions.

The perceptual dynamics of even mild adaptation

Despite the relatively modest nature of existing adaptation-related measures when compared to the potential repercussions of inaction, a substantial portion of the population perceives them as considerable pressures within their daily lives. Two facets contribute to this phenomenon.

Firstly, due to the influence of corporate interests and the incentivized structures within democratic politics, there has been a postponement of more robust proactive adaptation (e.g., mitigation). Additionally, successful ecological policies have managed to insulate citizens’ lifeworlds from many systemic risks (Hausknost, 2020). As a result, when ex-ante mitigation efforts are finally initiated, they often appear to be progressing at an unexpectedly rapid pace for many individuals. This sentiment is evident in political conflicts surrounding the phase-out of internal combustion engines or the overhaul of heating systems in European countries. Despite considerable public support for ecological policies in theory and the substantial state subsidies often allocated to such measures, there exists a perception of an unwarranted imposition of adaptive pressure on citizens who are unaccustomed to ecological issues entering their daily lives. With the attempt to meet emission targets intensifying mitigation measures, such adaptive pressure will systematically increase.

Secondly, this logic of perception is rooted in the sociological trajectory of rising social inequality. The secular growth crisis since the 1970s, financialization and debt crises, austerity and the erosion of social welfare have led to a deepening of social inequality across the globe. In classical political sociology, such a scenario would be identified as a breeding ground for “relative deprivation” (Lipset, 1981): Fewer people attain what they believed was legitimately expected from life and more individuals struggle to achieve the decent living they deem warranted, thus experiencing an ongoing strain on their lifeworld. When a greater amount of energy must be expended just to stabilize one's lifeworld, additional requirements within the context of ecological adaptation can be viewed as a considerable provocation. Even measures that might be seen as relatively moderate responses to the crisis of world ecological are then perceived as substantial pressures for adaptation. Consequently, even when practicing restraint with the necessary ex-ante adaptive policies, the maintenance and safeguarding of lifeworlds becomes an increasingly pressing concern on a subjective level. As a result, adaptation is rapidly evolving into the guiding principle of everyday behavior for a growing number of individuals, even in affluent societies, changing demands toward politics and, thus, the sources of political legitimacy.

The technocratic vector

The historical path dependency of corporate-driven sustainability, the temporal structure of democratic politics, the material trajectory of societies facing constant adaptive pressures, the fiscal constraints to socioecological transformation, and the perceptual dynamics of societies worn out by multiple crises all seem to suggest that practices of individual and collective adaptation will objectively and subjectively become more important. As mentioned earlier, this paves the way for a post-emancipatory space within late-modern societies and is opposed to basic assumptions of the EEP. As adaptation becomes the main concern of politics and individuals’ life experiences, a reactive mode of action might take precedence over classically progressive ideals such as autonomy, individual freedom, or progress (Staab, 2022). This does not imply that these motives will completely disappear, or even that they will no longer inspire political action and contribute to the management of political loyalty. However, with self-preservation moving to the forefront, they will likely no longer be the primary focus in terms of gaining political legitimacy (Mittiga, 2024). Instead, problems of stabilization will project a new realm of subjectivity that prioritizes adaptation over individual and collective self-realization. This shift might also give rise to a new framework of political legitimacy.

We have likely observed a potential illustration of such a framework just a few years back. While there are important differences between climate change and the years of the Covid-19 pandemic in terms of timescale, nature of necessary responses, visibility of threats and perceptions of risk (van der Ven & Sun, 2021), the latter could nonetheless be accurately characterized as a manifestation of an almost purely adaptive society. During this time, virtually all social institutions were subjected to the pandemic regime, which prioritized stabilization and the preservation of life as its primary objectives. This is not supposed to imply that all pandemic measures were either successful or unsuccessful in achieving those goals or that any of them were right or wrong in any regard. What appears to be clear in hindsight, however, is how the pandemic altered the expectations of most citizens, societies’ affective portfolio so to speak, thereby reshaping the landscape of political legitimacy. As long as the virus was perceived as a universal health threat, the authority of experts, particularly through virological advisory bodies, and the pursuit of technological solutions (such as contact tracing apps and vaccines) defined the dynamics of political legitimacy.

In this context, we argue that we were witnessing the emergence of what traditional political theory refers to as technocratic rule (Friedman, 2020). In public discourse, technocracy is often portrayed as the governance of necessity, akin to the earlier mentioned TINA principle of neoliberalism. However, more precisely, within academic discussions, technocracy traditionally has referred to either the rule of experts, the rule of technology itself, or a combination of both (Haring, 2010). As such, technocracy represents a depoliticization approach where expertise and technology are invoked to supplant political deliberation and conflicts.

Interestingly, technocracy can depoliticize processes of politicization: as certain issues become politicized, meaning they are viewed as public rather than private concerns, they may simultaneously be depoliticized by being framed as matters of scientific, technical, or legal expertise (Krippner, 2011, p. 146). In the realm of social welfare, in the twentieth century, depolitization of existential threats was achieved by shifting them into the techno-bureaucratic domain rather than the political-deliberative sphere (Starr & Immergut, 1987). Similarly, addressing climate change and the global ecological crisis has increasingly been seen as the responsibility of expert-led institutions, rather than being left to market self-regulation or to individual consumer choices, thereby fostering technocratic tendencies in handling ecological problems.

The central question regarding the relationship between technocracy and legitimacy then becomes: Under what circumstances would polities begin to yearn for depoliticization through expertise or technology? Taking the pandemic as an exemplary case, the answer appears quite evident: Citizens in contemporary liberal democracies expect assurance when issues of “foundational legitimacy” (Mittiga, 2024) like concerns about physical security and existential risks come to the fore. Along with these lines, the adaptive state of the twenty-first century can anticipate a rising demand for the depoliticization of critical life-or-death matters stemming from climate change and related issues. Services to meet this demand are not deliberated but supplied by technocracy, which in turn becomes a prerequisite for political legitimacy. Overt democratic contention regarding opportunities for successful adaptation is currently still confined to marginalized individuals, especially refugees, who lack a voice in democratic discourse.

As a result, when it comes to addressing the crisis of global ecology, endeavors to maintain legitimacy through technocratic rule have become increasingly conspicuous. In instances where self-proclaimed progressives have assumed positions of power in recent years, their primary undertaking has revolved around some form of ecological modernization agenda. These respective programs not only indicate proactive measures being taken to tackle ecological issues related to self-preservation but also typically lack participatory processes. Instead, they tend to fall within the realm of expert-driven governance, with a strong emphasis on technological and digital solutions to ecological problems. Ranging from electric vehicles and smart grids to energy management within household appliances and platforms facilitating automated carbon tracking and individual offsetting, digital solutions assume a pivotal role in these initiatives. By proposing that current levels of energy consumption can be upheld through their decarbonization via digital applications, the political intention is to alleviate citizens from political conflicts concerning self-preservation.

The power and temptations of such imaginations are probably displayed most clearly in radical intellectual visions of technocratic survivalism. In the realm of critical social theory for example, digital technologies are increasingly viewed as essential tools for shaping future society, echoing the resurgence of cybernetic thought (e.g., Bastani, 2019; Morozov, 2019; Phillips & Rozworski, 2019; Jochum & Schaupp, 2022). This trend is rooted in a century-old debate over the feasibility of socialist economic planning. While economic theorists across the political spectrum had been increasingly optimistic about the theoretical and practical feasibility of nonmarket coordination in the mid-twentieth century, the crises of statist projects across the globe since the 1970s and the advent of neoliberalism have rendered public discourse highly skeptical about encompassing economic planning (Sorg & Groos, 2025; Sorg, 2025). Central planning agencies struggle to process information as fast as markets and since much of social knowledge is tacit and embodied in time and place, such knowledge is not available to planning institutions (O'Neill, 1996).

Proponents of nonmarket economies have reopened this debate about markets and planning against the background of new digital technologies, arguing that the latter solve planning's information problems and thus finally make efficient democratic nonmarket coordination possible (Sorg, 2023; Groos & Sorg, 2025). Some of them state that interconnected workplaces, supercomputers, and direct democracy would finally allow forms of optimal planning based on linear programming (Cockshott et al., 2022) and AI (Grünberg, 2023). These are considered far superior to Soviet material balance planning, which had to work with aggregate estimations of productive capacity due to lack of processing power. More importantly, other authors argue that digital networking technologies enable much more decentralized and real-time forms of cooperative-collective self-management in line with cybernetics (Heyer, 2025) and commons-based peer production (Meretz & Sutterlütti, 2025). While the concrete technologies may range from feedback infrastructures (Saros, 2014; Morozov, 2019) and cyber-physical systems (Nardelli et al., 2023) to stigmergic signals (Meretz & Sutterlütti, 2025), the approaches are united in the notion that digital technologies can foster ex-ante collaboration and the sharing of information.

The techno-futuristic imaginations of some advocates of economic planning extend to their conception of social metabolic relations. Phillips and Rozworski (2019) argue that mastery over the economy facilitates mastery over nature, thus ushering in a “good Anthropocene” that includes a vast build-out of dependable base-load electricity from nuclear and hydroelectric plants, supported by more variable renewable energy technologies such as “wind and solar” and “better technology” to decarbonize agriculture. Saros's model of digital socialism does not mention democratic politics or deliberative processes, but features a “Council of Scientists […] composed of the world's most highly trained scientists” (Saros, 2014, p. 181), which “must determine the appropriate use of resources such that needs fulfillment remains within the bounds necessary to achieve ecological and climate goals” (Saros, 2014, p. 192). Cockshott et al. (2022) propose planning algorithms that constrain greenhouse gas emissions to create more sustainable output quotas.

While most conceptions of democratic planning are less Promethean, they similarly aspire to consciously wield modern technology to mediate adaptation. For instance, Vettese and Pendergras'’s (2022) half-earth socialism features a combination of cybernetics and linear programming to create different plans for land use, energy combinations and emissions. The work of Dyer-Witheford most strongly illustrates that something has shifted in postcapitalist imaginations: A decade ago Dyer-Witheford (2013) was among the vanguard thinkers of an algorithmically planned and automated economy to facilitate “red plenty.” In more recent work, he argues that the “centrality of ecological catastrophe to today's polycrisis demands revision” and thus proposes technologies not for endless wealth creation, but for a form of “biocommunism” because the “ecological crisis has entered a new a new phase in which time for averting disaster has expired, and battles are now fought out on already-catastrophized ground, demanding new measures of mitigation and adaptation” (Dyer-Witheford, 2025).

Against such a background, intellectual blueprints for democratic planning should not be understood in the tradition of modern paradigms that merely extend human freedom by expanding democratic rights. In contrast, there is a constant tension in the models between democratic deliberation and concrete ideas of what the outcome of said deliberation should be: needs-oriented production within planetary boundaries. The idea to relocate certain issues from the market to democratic polities thus means that deliberation centers on different strategies to achieve depoliticized (i.e., predetermined) ecological outcomes.

Conceptions of technologies that facilitate ecological relief range far beyond postcapitalist imaginations. Another example of how this thinking is being employed to address ecological issues comes from the renowned cofounder of the Gaia hypothesis, James Lovelock and McMillan (2019). In response to accelerating climate change, he envisions a near future where a digital superintelligence monitors and intervenes in the Earth system to ensure its adaptive stabilization amid catastrophic climate risks. Bypassing any form of democratic deliberation, this system would extend its reach over humanity, protecting it from self-harm and intervening in economic and ecological processes as needed.

Drawing on the Covid-19 experience, Bratton suggests a similar approach by addressing climate change through “positive biopolitics” (Bratton, 2021). According to him, society's fight against the virus exemplified an epidemiological view on society relying on a complex sensor system pooling various data sources for simulations. In this regard, it resembled climate science with its earth spanning data collection and model simulations, which are supposed to inform policy making. What climate science lacks and the pandemic regime developed to some extent is a cybernetic feedback structure, which would facilitate evidence-based interventions into the climate system. The technologically driven adaptation imagined here also bypasses moral deliberations and political institutions. As Bratton writes:

“Climate Science has all of these [technological infrastructures] except the all-Important recursive enforcement part. As of yet, it cannot act back upon the climate that it represents, but it must. Just as a medical model does, it must not only diagnose but also cure” (Bratton, 2021, p. 145). And later: “Perhaps most importantly, its functioning would not be dependent upon the moral performance of its participants nor upon the unpredictable reasonability, superstition, competence, or ignorance of whoever occupies a particular formal government” (Bratton, 2021, p. 156).

What the pandemic and ecological modernization exemplify, along with the visions projected by automated climate governance, is a particular political longing. It is not characterized by essential elements of the EEP, such as subpolitical renewal through civil society (Beck, 1996). Nor does it involve social embedding through welfare infrastructures within the framework of a new liberalism (Reckwitz, 2021), a return to plebeian democracy (Streeck, 2014), or revolutionary mobilization in response to an ecological state of war (Malm, 2020). Instead, it suggests a different way in which Digital and Green might come together. In increasingly ecologically disenchanted polities focused on absorbing adaptive pressure, we might expect a push to depoliticize ecological conflicts through digital technologies. This depoliticization not only provides digital capitalism with a compelling narrative to justify its necessity but it also aligns perfectly with the (neo-)liberal tradition in addressing collective problems as issues best solved by adaptation. As a result, it emerges as the likely default solution for liberal democracies, one that their citizens will expect to grant legitimacy to democratic governance. This represents the technocratic vector in the struggle for political legitimacy.

The negative dialectic of digital eco-technocracy

Can we anticipate successful efforts to depoliticize existential risks through digital technologies in the context of the accelerating crisis of world ecology? Is technocracy a viable source of long-term political legitimacy? For several reasons, the answer seems to be negative. First, it remains uncertain whether liberal democracy, with its strong ties to the EEP and technocratic governance, will withstand the rise of the adaptive society. Factors such as social unrest, the assertive “politics of exclusion” (as articulated by Blühdorn, 2020), and the resurgence of plebeian or cultural tribalism could serve as vectors of transformation, dismantling the currently prevailing liberal framework and its technocratic leanings altogether.

Moreover, there are significant reservations—to put it mildly—regarding the ability of digital technologies to deliver the innovations necessary for the solutions envisioned by digital eco-technocracy. Notably, many aspects of ecological modernization depend on factors that extend beyond the success of digital innovations. As a result, failures often arise from causes unrelated to digital advancements. For example, the capacity to install an adequate number of wind turbines or solar panels to support electric vehicles or net-zero manufacturing facilities is more related to efficient production and management than to digital innovation.

Furthermore, while digital innovation can assist in managing issues of self-preservation within the context of societal adaptation, this does not equate to solving those issues. New technologies cannot singlehandedly resolve Jevons’ paradox (Polimeni et al., 2008) or rebound effects (Herring & Sorrell, 2012), which state that efficiency gains from technological innovation often lead to increased consumption of those technologies. In addition, technological and socioecological development is generally classed and thus also an issue of social inequality. The wealthiest individuals and nations contribute significantly more to environmental degradation through higher consumption and emissions (Chancel & DeBevoise, 2020, 90ff). At the same time, wealthier social groups have better access to clean air, water, green spaces, and other environmental benefits (Chancel & DeBevoise, 2020, 65ff), while marginalized communities are disproportionately exposed to pollution, natural disasters, and climate-related hazards due to their socioeconomic status and geographic location (Chancel & DeBevoise, 2020, 78ff). In addition, policies like carbon taxes can disproportionately burden lower-income groups, who simultaneously often have limited influence over environmental policymaking (Chancel & DeBevoise, 2020, 109ff). These dimensions illustrate how the politics of adaptation are deeply tied to social justice issues. This means that escalating adaptive pressures may in principle precipitate subaltern unrest.

Despite these obstacles, the case of ecological modernization demonstrates that technocratic governance does not necessarily need technology to function flawlessly, as in prohibit ecological inequalities. It simply requires fostering a belief that technological solutions are on the horizon and may help in tackling such challenges eventually. When measures fall short, failures can be attributed to insufficient expertise. As long as adaptive pressure persists, we can expect a continued public demand for technocratic relief.

If this is indeed the scenario, then the relationship between technocracy and legitimacy within the adaptive framework could differ significantly from traditional technocratic arrangements in classical modernity. While the concept of expert rule can be traced back to ancient Greek thought, modern technocracy is closely linked to the technological advancements of industrial society. Drawing on Max Weber's distinction between politics—requiring the affective ability of “enforcing one's own will even against resistance” (Weber, 2019, p. 134)—and science, which is rooted in dispassionate rationality, early technocrats like Veblen (2012) argued that politics disrupted the rational structuring of social production. Veblen advocated for replacing politics with a cadre of technically skilled engineers (Veblen, 2012). In postwar Europe, these ideas gained traction with thinkers such as Jacques Ellul and Jean Meynaud in France, and later with the influential conservative sociologist Schelsky in Germany. Schelsky noted that “modern technology” does not require legitimacy: “With it, one ‘rules’ because it works, and as long as it functions optimally” (Schelsky, 1961, own translation).

While this notion effectively captures what we've outlined as the foundation for the desire for technocracy in the context of adaptation, critical voices in the so-called “technocracy debate” vehemently challenged its efficacy in addressing political stabilization. In doing so, second-generation critical theorists such as Habermas (1976) and Offe (1970) focused on problems strikingly similar to those we have reconstructed as the horizon of statehood under climate change: From the Frankfurt perspective, the political system managed its own legitimacy by administratively depoliticizing issues of material reproduction in contemporary welfare states.

Offe, in particular, analyzed the pitfalls and dilemmas of technocratic policy styles. He identified a specific “dilemma of technocracy” (Offe, 1970) stemming from its inability to prevent the adverse consequences of its own actions. What Schelsky termed the “technical state” would require societal cooperation and constant legitimacy production, just like any other form of government. Technocracy's pursuit of “rational management,” Offe argued, clashed with society's prepolitical cultural orientations and traditions, making it challenging to foster societal cooperation (Offe, 1970, p. 163). Building social consensus around technocratically determined rationalities was difficult because a system of this nature “that derives its impulses solely from the sphere of technological constraints and imperatives of survival […] produces the factors of its own endangerment in the form of outcomes of political alienation. […] This is accompanied by a readiness for myth formation and a loss of reality control, which irrationally bypass the difficulties of adequately perceiving political processes” (Offe, 1970, p. 166, own translation).

These remarks by Offe reflect the processes of classical modernization. When industrial rationality overrides the inherent autonomy of cultural realms in the name of technical constraints, resistance can be anticipated. Offe outlined two strategies for modern capitalist states to navigate such dilemmas: measures of redistribution and participation, both of which he viewed as contradictory and limited (Offe, 1970, p. 169). Measures of redistribution tend to lose their effectiveness as prosperity increases. On the other hand, participatory technocracy must navigate a tightrope: if it does not influence outcomes at all, it is ineffective; however, if it significantly impacts outcomes, it may conflict with predetermined technocratic rationalities or empower participants to challenge the limited participatory channels of technocracy altogether (Offe, 1970, p. 170). Offe argues that the decreasing efficiency of both strategies to achieve political legitimacy successively constitutes a “legitimation crisis” of twentieth-century Keynesian-technocratic capitalism.

Translating Offe's insights into the contemporary social context, technocratic rationality would similarly encounter prepolitical cultural orientations, especially if adaptive policies require, for instance, reduced meat consumption, fewer flights or fewer private vehicles. However, the repertoire of pacification available to digital eco-technocracy differs significantly from the twentieth-century social democratic welfare states of Offe's time. After decades of rising inequality and widespread precarity, redistributive measures to provide existential security for instance in housing, healthcare, and electricity might yield more legitimacy today than at the height of the social compromises of the 1960s in the Global North. However, the current context of secular stagnation, the limited profitability of green sectors, and the need for massive investments leave governments with little fiscal space to pursue such strategies. Distributive-technocratic measures aimed at building legitimacy might thus focus on rationing essential goods and services, as illustrated by the recent gas price crisis, but would first require substantial social mobilization to support related claims.

Considering the second strategy, Offe's assertion that technocracy erodes participatory structures has been evident in the decades of neoliberal transformation that have done precisely (Crouch, 2017; Blühdorn, 2022; Swyngedouw, 2022). The highly politicized distributive struggles of the 1970s, which Offe and contemporaries such as Habermas (1976) and Bell (1976) critiqued, gave way to policymakers who shielded themselves from unpopular decisions by delegating authority to technocratic institutions such as independent central banks and to market forces (Krippner, 2011). As a result, societal trust in political institutions has plummeted (Della Porta et al., 2017, p. 282ff), eroding the popular basis for state action. In this context, technocratic rule today could provide relief from the existential challenges of constant adaptation—challenges that citizens increasingly view as beyond the capacity of contemporary political institutions. Therefore, one might anticipate that with rising adaptive pressure, technocracy will be actively demanded and supported by a significant portion of society.

Simultaneously, the negative consequences of technocratic governance do not vanish in such a scenario. People may initially support pandemic measures or adaptations to climate-induced catastrophes; however, if the Covid-19 pandemic has taught us anything, it is that such support can increasingly be accompanied by “myth formation” and, consequently, an eventual “loss of reality control,” as Offe described. From this perspective, technocracy within the adaptive framework serves both as a source of legitimacy and a potential drain on it. Nevertheless, by examining the underlying motivations behind the popular demand for technocratic depoliticization, we can anticipate that concerns about self-preservation will intensify each time technocracy encounters difficulties—whether due to cultural resistance or fundamental technological constraints. In either case, the underlying issues remain unresolved, further fueling the desire for technocratic solutions.

Hence, in the adaptive constellation, the technocratic dilemma emphasized by Offe could evolve into a negative dialectic in which the inability of technocratic governance to effectively address self-preservation issues strengthens the technocratic vector. In this context, democratic politics would no longer need to primarily respond to demands for democratization to secure legitimacy. Instead, the focus would shift hopes for the technocratic depoliticization of adaptative pressure. Given the unlikeliness that digital technologies will successfully achieve this, the technocratic orientation continues to contribute to a crisis of political legitimacy and is likely to gain stability precisely because it fails to resolve existential threats through technology. Particularly in the realm of eco-politics, we may thus be transitioning away from the prevailing narrative of subpolitical democratization (Beck) toward eco-technocracy, whose central pledge is to finally listen to the science.