Transformative Constitutionalism Around the World: Some Notes on the Concept

Scholarship on transformative constitutionalism has been largely centered around a single political valence and a narrow set of constitutional contexts, limiting its reach. This essay examines the concept's general features across material, cultural, anti-colonial, and reactionary dimensions arguing that transformative constitutionalism is best understood as any constitutional project that commits a polity to dismantling a “deeply unsatisfying status quo” and not as inherently left leaning. It evaluates the spectrum of judicial enforcement available to advance transformation, finding that strong-form enforcement faces serious difficulties given the polycentric complexity of transformative goals, while collaborative and weak-form judicial approaches offer more sustainable pathways. The essay further argues that anti-colonial and reactionary variants of cultural transformative constitutionalism illustrated by Bolivia, South Africa, Hungary, and India deserve greater attention, demonstrating that the idea of transformative constitutionalism can be used to analyse constitutional developments divorced from an inherent political valence.