Deliberation and ecological democracy: from citizen to global system

ABSTRACT

Ecological democracy confronts a challenge of not only reconciling democracy and ecology, but doing so where human activities and their environmental consequences are increasingly global. Deliberative scholars dealing with these issues emphasise reflexive governance, involving the contestation of discourses, as part of the solution, mostly aimed at high-level institutions and intergovernmental cooperation. However, even at this level democracy demands responsiveness to the citizen. To this end, the paper explores citizen-level deliberation to inform possibilities for ecological democracy writ large, via a growing literature on deliberative governance and polycentrism. Different system levels are connected via ecologically reflexive capacity and the discursive conditions under which it is enhanced, including in small-scale minipublics. This understanding informs mechanisms for ‘scaling up’ deliberative quality to the wider public sphere via regulating the manipulation of public discourse. Minipublic deliberation, properly harnessed, can serve to decontaminate public debate of anti-reflexive strategic arguments and reshape public discourse. Such anti-reflexive strategies seek to shape the public will, specifically by de-emphasising ecology via intuitive arguments that short-cut public reasoning. Acting as discursive regulatory trustees, minipublics can improve reflexivity in the wider system via a nested polycentric approach that discursively connects citizens’ deliberation to the global system both horizontally and vertically.

KEYWORDS:

• Deliberative democracy
• global environmental governance
• citizen deliberation
• scaling up deliberation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Simon Niemeyer is an Associate Professor and co-founder of the Centre for Deliberative Democracy and global Governance at the University of Canberra, formerly at the Australian National University, from where he also obtained his PhD. His research focuses on empirical examination of the ‘micropolitics’ of deliberation and the implications for theories of deliberative democracy and the operation of deliberative systems, as well as environmental governance. He been awarded a number of research fellowships, most recently an Australian Research Council Future Fellowship.

ORCID

Simon Niemeyer http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3048-5697

Notes

1 More recently, Wong (2016) has formally examined the problem to identify solutions, but in ways that maintain an assumed fundamental tension between environment as an end and democracy as a means.

2 Another is that climate change is a hoax perpetrated by left-leaning elites seeking to remake the world order in their own image, which harnesses the well understood psychological phenomenon of group identity, where creating a threat associated with a ‘them’ invokes symbolic reaction.

3 For a summary of these concerns see Curato et al. (2019).

4 There remain important considerations in term of the specific design features of minipublics for achieving scaling up discourse reshaping. Space dictates these cannot be elaborated upon here, but are discussed in (Niemeyer & Jennstål, 2018).

5 The abovementioned example of the Danish Board of Technology (Besdted & Klüver, 2009) is an interesting example where a decommissioned government initiative now operates in civil society, although it is conceivable that this development can work in both directions. The mechanisms in play are slightly different, but exclusive to those considered by Hendriks (2006a) and, to some extent Stevenson (2013) where the role of civil society here is commission citizen deliberation in order to harness to specific citizen trust mechanism identified Warren and Gastil (2015).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Australian Research Council [grant number FT110100871]; Vetenskapsrådet [grant number 2013-45234-103279-25].