Green Paper 08 — Ritual and Repair
Green Papers: Notes Toward Planetary Guardianship
Author’s note — AI co-creation. These papers are working notes authored by Lars A. Engberg. They were drafted and edited in conversation with an AI language model (GPT-5 Thinking mini). The AI assisted with phrasing, organization, and initial drafting; the author curated, edited, and is fully responsible for substantive claims, omissions, and interpretations. Where passages were substantially shaped by the AI, this is indicated in the editorial log. The work is offered as field notes and an experiment in collaborative composition rather than a finished, peer-reviewed product.
Abstract
Repair is not simply technical restoration; it is a civic capacity bound up with meaning, trust, and belonging. Rituals — public acts of recognition and reintegration — are central to repair because they stabilize relationships after rupture.
This paper treats ritual as practical infrastructure: predictable, rule-guided practices that reestablish norms, distribute responsibility, and hold grief. Rituals are not ornament; they are mechanisms for social metabolism.
1. Repair as civic capacity
Repair presumes a shared system worth restoring. Civic repair is therefore an investment in shared capacity: resources, time, and frameworks to address harms and restore cooperative relationships.
2. Rituals as stabilization
Rituals mark transitions: they make rupture legible and provide forms for reintegration. Their power lies in predictability, collective participation, and symbolic clarity.
3. Practices of grief and acknowledgment
Grief must be socialized. Practices that allow communities to name loss, honor it, and then proceed are essential.
4. Trust restoration and reparation
Repair is both forward- and backward-looking: it restores relations and adjusts accounts. Trust is rebuilt when obligations are clear, reparative acts are visible, and governance reflects lessons of failure.
5. Designing repair rituals
- Make rituals accessible: low ceremony can be powerful if regular and public.
- Pair symbolic acts with tangible reparation (material repairs, policy adjustments).
- Institutionalize ritual moments: yearly, after major decisions, and at boundaries of care.
- Train mediators and ritual facilitators as part of civic infrastructure.
- Create shared narratives that do not obscure culpability but make repair possible.
Methods / Editorial note
These Green Papers are written as field notes and working reflections. The drafting process combined (1) authorial writing and revision, (2) iterative prompts to an AI language model for drafting and editing, and (3) conventional editorial revision. Key practices:
- AI assistance: The AI produced early drafts and suggested language; the author reviewed and revised every paragraph.
- Sourcing: The papers use a “working bibliography” as orientation rather than a formal literature review. Citations are selective; empirical claims should be verified before formal use.
- Verification: The author is responsible for verification of cited sources and accepts responsibility for errors. Prior to academic submission, each reference and empirical claim should be independently checked and expanded.
- Versioning: Each paper carries a version line (v0.1). Substantial revisions will be tracked in a change log at Planetary Guardians / Spiralweb.
Closing questions
- What small, repeatable rituals help communities metabolize institutional failure?
- How to pair symbolic recognition with meaningful reparation?
- Which actors should hold responsibility for convening repair rituals?
- How can rituals avoid becoming mere performance?
- What training and resources do facilitators of repair need?
References (Working bibliography — selected, APA 7)
- Bachelard, G. (1958). The Poetics of Space. Beacon Press.
- Bateson, G. (1972). Steps to an Ecology of Mind. University of Chicago Press.
- Durkheim, É. (1912). The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (English translations available).
- Illich, I. (1973). Tools for Conviviality. Calder & Boyars.
- Latour, B. (2005). Reassembling the Social. Oxford University Press.
- Lederach, J. P. (1997). Building Peace. USIP Press.
- Meadows, D. H., Meadows, D. L., Randers, J., & Behrens III, W. W. (1972). The Limits to Growth. Universe Books.
- Ostrom, E. (1990). Governing the Commons. Cambridge University Press.
- Putnam, R. D. (2000). Bowling Alone. Simon & Schuster.
- Raworth, K. (2017). Doughnut Economics. Chelsea Green Publishing.
- Rockström, J., & Steffen, W. (2009). A safe operating space for humanity. Science.
- Sennett, R. (2008). The Craftsman. Yale University Press.
- Simon, H. A. (1997). Administrative Behavior. Free Press.
- Steffen, W., et al. (2015). Planetary boundaries update. Science.
- Tronto, J. C. (1993). Moral Boundaries. Routledge.
- Turner, V. (1969). The Ritual Process. Aldine.
- Weick, K. E. (1995). Sensemaking in Organizations. Sage.
- Winnicott, D. W. (1971). Playing and Reality. Tavistock Publications.
License & archival recommendation
These working papers are released under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0). You are free to share and adapt with attribution. Please cite the version line (v0.1, January 2026) when re-using this material. For archival stability and citation, consider depositing a revised version in an open repository (e.g., Zenodo or OSF) to obtain a DOI.