This chapter summarizes the arguments of the book. It highlights that for judges who are democratically committed, the book has offered the theories and tools to help them build institutional resilience and contribute to democratic values. These tools cannot guarantee these democractic outcomes, as there is a limit as to what judges have control over in authoritarian environments. Nevertheless, constitutional courts are often heavily involved in the shaping of constitutional norms and structures. By pushing beyond the boundaries set by conventional conceptions of the judicial role, this book hopes to have instilled optimism in politically challenging environments and demonstrate how judges who are committed to the democratic cause can improve the chances of survival and success of constitutional courts.

Socioeconomic factors and power dynamics shape climate change responses. Some succeed, but maladaptations occur due to limited intelligence functions, poor problem definitions, and regulation over-reliance. Adaptive capacity varies according to income levels. Economic growth has expanded middle-income cohorts and increased environmental activism. Even wealthier countries still have rural poverty. Expanding private sectors and "Big Business" – often coordinated by overseas Chinese – dominate in infrastructure and agriculture, frequently through public–private partnerships. This reinforces high wealth concentration, allowing the rich to adapt at the poor’s expense and gain greater policy influence, although societal disruptions sometimesimprove the standing of previously excluded groups. Center–periphery economic differences allow lowland elites to penetrate remote areas, displacing marginalized communities to expand ventures like oil palm plantations. The international context is favorable, with trade, investment, and assistance coming from all quarters. Wealthy Western countries could provide more climate finance to ease the transition away from fossil fuels.

This chapter examines what judges can do inside the courtroom to promote democratic norms amid authoritarian pressure. It proposes a two-step adjudicative framework – that of “Sustainable Democratic Adjudication,” which allows judges to systematically incorporate both constitutional legal principles and judicial strategies. Under step one, judges need to form an initial view on what the law requires under the democracy-orienting approach proposed in Chapter 4. During this step, they must apply a presumption of “institutional blindfold,” ignoring the possible influence of prudential considerations. This book terms the tentative conclusion reached at this stage the “formal legal position.” The second step involves judges lifting the blindfold to check whether, and if so how, the formal legal position should be supplemented with or adjusted by strategic considerations. These are questions determined by the level of risk incurred by maintaining the formal legal position. The chapter also examines the strategies in relation to outcome, reasoning, language, and timing that judges can deploy during the adjudicative process.

This chapter argues that courts should play a role in protecting and promoting democratic values in a hybrid regime and lays out how that can be done. The chapter opens with the argument that the counter-majoritarian objection is singificantly less relevant in a hybrid regime context, contending that its reduced relevance permits the constitutional court greater latitude in its support of democratic ideals in a hybrid regime. Five different democracy-enhancing roles of a constitutional court are then proposed, alongside tools that would help facilitate the realization of these roles. The five democratic roles include: (1) The referee role, (2) the interpretative role, (3) the participatory role, (4) the quasi-representative role, and (5) the educative role. The chapter then addresses how competency concerns impact the democratic roles proposed. It argues that the democratic roles are justifiable because there is a lack of better alternatives in a hybrid regime. Courts are a second-best solution: They may not normally be the best institution to tackle certain political failures, but the inadequacies of the political process in a hybrid regime offer reasons for a constitutional court to act.