Representation, Participation or Deliberation? Democratic Responses to the Environmental Challenge

Abstract

The environmental question poses four challenges to democracy: global justice, intergenerational justice, the value of non-human species and technocratic decision-making. This article discusses these challenges in the light of three values or dimensions of democratic theory: representativity, participation and deliberation. It is found that even, if participation and deliberation by a broad set of actors are crucial to integrate democratic decision-making and environmental concern, there is also a need for representative institutions at all levels of society. The democracy–environment relation is not just about values and ideas. It also requires global, international, regional, national and local institutions armed with power resources.

Notes

1. Biocentrism claims that all biological life has an intrinsic value, while ecocentrism even includes non-living entities such as landscapes, water, air and minerals (DesJardins 2005, pp. 131, 150).

2. Even animal rights philosophers are strongly critical of ecocentrism. If one believes that the integrity of ecosystems is the highest value, then a protected flower can have a greater value than a human being and it would therefore be more wrong to pick the flower than to kill the person. This is ‘environmental fascism’, according to Regan (1984, p. 362) because the rights of individuals are subordinated to biotic wholes.

3. In 1999 UN General Secretary Kofi Annan launched the ‘Global Compact’ in order to make the business sphere into a response to the global challenge. Global Compact seeks to get companies to take greater social responsibility for human rights, employment, environment and anti-corruption. At the World Economic Forum 2002, the declaration of global corporate citizenship was accepted, being signed by representatives of 34 multinational corporations.

4. Intergenerational justice raises two problems: the ‘population problem’, that today we participate in determining which human beings will be born in the future, and the ‘identification problem’, that we do not know what interests future generations will have (for further discussion, see Stenmark, 2002, pp. 52–73).

5. One of the best-known examples of this is Brian Wynne's (1996) study of the Chernobyl disaster's impact in Britain, where he found that sheep farmers made better prognoses than the experts. The reason for this was that these farmers had a more differentiated, detailed and complex understanding of their pieces of land than did the experts who were called in. In their search for optimal agricultural methods, they had gained knowledge of differences in soil type within each valley. The experts, however, disregarded this variation and interpreted different valleys as having the same uniform categories (they assumed that the valleys were dominated by clayey soil). This led the experts to give erroneous prognoses of how long it would take for the radioactive caesium to disappear from the ground.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Rolf Lidskog

Rolf Lidskog is in CUReS—Centre for Urban and Regional Studies, Örebro University, SE-701 82 Örebro, Sweden. E-mail: [email protected].

Ingemar Elander

Ingemar Elander is in CUReS—Centre for Urban and Regional Studies, Örebro University, SE-701 82 Örebro, Sweden. E-mail: [email protected].