Deliberative Democracy and the Environment

One of the key questions to have exercised green political theorists in recent years concerns the relationship of the environment 'agenda' and democracy. Both environmentalists and democrats have a tendency to think of each other as natural bedfellows but in fact there is little theoretical or practical reason why they should be. Indeed some theorists have argued that the environmental movement has grown from fundamentally authoritarian roots and it is arguable that the only really effective way of implementing environmental politics is by imposing them in an authoritarian manner. This book deals with the tensions between democracy and environmentalism from a variety of theoretical and empirical perspectives.

Contemporary democracies are frequently criticized for failing to respond adequately to environmental problems and our political institutions are often charged with misrepresenting environmental values in decision-making processes. In this innovative volume, Graham Smith argues that the enhancement and institutionalisation of democratic deliberation will improve reflection on the wide range of environmental values that citizens hold. Drawing on theories of deliberative democracy, Smith argues that institutions need to be restructured in order to promote democratic dialogue and reflection on the plurality of environmental values. Deliberative Democracy and the Environment makes an important contribution to our understanding of the relationship between democratic and green political theory. Drawing on evidence from Europe and the United States, it systematically engages with questions of institutional design.

Introduction 1. Value Pluralism and Environmental Values 2. Environmental Economics and the Internalisation of Environmental Values 3. Deliberative Democracy and Green Political Theory 4. Three Deliberative Models 5. Towards Ecological Democratisation? Conclusion

Graham Smith is a Senior Lecturer in Politics at the University of Southampton. He is the co-author of Politics and the Environment and has published a numbers of essays on democratic and green political theory.