Deliberative Policy Analysis

2021

Recent trends in environmental governance have seen a shift in policymaking and regulating that are beginning to question the efficacy of democratic systems, possibly in favor of corporate environmentalism and authoritarian regimes. This line of questioning has left many to wonder where the role of democratic national governments now lies when it comes to climate change governance norms and policy innovations. Using three case studies of successful deliberative mini publics, this paper argues that when democratic institutions use deliberative mechanisms at local, regional, and national levels, effective governance can be achieved, and that these achievements reflect legitimate collective action. Yet, because democracies have the unique ability to create spaces of free expression and loyal oppositions, a deliberative system model can be opened in a way that allows radical policy shifts which may not be achieved otherwise. Through various mechanisms of dissent ranging from boycotts to...

Ecological Economics, 2017

The Centre for Deliberative Democracy & Global Governance working paper series makes preliminary findings of research on deliberative democracy publicly available in advance of publication in journals and books. The series aims to present new research that makes original, high-quality contributions to the theory and practice of deliberative democracy informed by recent literature in the field.

Environmental Politics, 2018

The main achievements of the debates on deliberative democracy and democratized science are investigated in order to analyse the reasons, meanings and prospects for a democratisation of global environmental policy. A deliberative systems approach, which emphasises the need to explore how processes in societal spheres interact to shape the deliberative qualities of the system as a whole, is adopted. Although science plays a key role in this, its potential to enhance deliberative capacity has hardly been addressed in deliberative theories. The democratisation of science has potential to contribute to the democratisation of global environmental policy, in that it also shapes the potential of deliberative arrangements in the policy sphere. Deliberative arrangements within the policy sphere may stimulate the democratization of science to different degrees.

2005

begin their book Deliberative Environmental Politics: Democracy and Ecological Rationality with a review of the scathing indictments that have been made by environmentalists against a view of democracy typically described as "interest-group liberalism." Charged with using language that is "stunted and shallow" (p. 1) and being "virtually obsolete" for the environmental movement (p. 2), how can democracy be rehabilitated from its less than stellar performance in handling the world's most pressing problems? In other words, is green democracy theoretically possible? For Baber and Bartlett, the answer is yes. Trained in the fields of Public Policy Studies and Political Science, respectively, Baber and Bartlett attempt to bridge the gap between theory and practice that has plagued environmental politics for so long. For these authors, democracy must take a deliberative turn if it is to avoid being relegated to the trash bin of useless ideas. In chapters one and two, Baber and Bartlett follow others in their respective fields who believe a deliberative approach is "the only way to overcome the failings of interest-group liberalism," contending deliberative democracy has the potential to produce better environmental policy decisions (p. 6). Although Baber and Bartlett acknowledge that "deliberative democracy" is difficult to define, they argue it is a school of political thought that presumes the essence of democracy is "deliberation rather than voting, interest aggregation, or rights" (p. 6). For deliberation to work, participants must also be politically equal and engage one another in the "weighing, acceptance, or rejection of reasons" (p. 6). Of course, the authors also attempt to argue that Horkheimer and Adorno's observations about instrumental reason in The Dialectic of Enlightenment can be addressed by deliberative democracy scholars. In chapter three, realizing different conceptions of deliberative democracy have drastically divergent assumptions, Baber and Bartlett wisely take three models of deliberative democracy as their "points of departure." In chapters four, five and six, Baber and Bartlett explore the ideas of deliberative democracy as it has been articulated by John Rawls, Jürgen Habermas, and thinkers such as Amy Gutmann, Dennis Thompson, and James Bohman. Rawls represents the "public reason" approach to deliberative democracy, Habermas the "ideal discourse" perspective, and Gutmann, Thompson, and Bohman the "full liberalism" version. It is in these chapters that the authors are at their best. Baber and Bartlett tackle complicated material and make it accessible to readers

American Journal of Evaluation, 2006

Deliberative democracy has attracted increasing attention in political science and has been suggested as a normative ideal for evaluation. This article analyzes to what extent evaluations carried out in a highly government-driven manner can nevertheless contribute to deliberative democracy. This potential is examined by taking the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development's environmental performance reviews as an example of an expertled evaluative process built on the ideals of representative democracy. The author argues that although they are not participatory, these reviews lay the groundwork for deliberative democracy by "empowering" weaker actors within governments and by improving the factual basis for political debate and decision making. This example suggests that to enhance deliberative democracy, the evaluation process need not be highly inclusive, dialogical, and deliberative but that a broader view is needed, encompassing the indirect impacts of evaluation on power relations and on the knowledge basis on which decision making relies.

Journal of Environmental Policy & Planning, 2019

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 shortcut 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.

greentheoryandpraxis.org

Knowledge and space, 2020

Deliberative democracy is characterized as an approach to governance that valorizes the operation of reason (Chambers, 2012; Cohen, 2007). Although there is a danger of this interpretation implying hyper-rationalism, as some researchers have suggested, considerable scope exists for understanding the relationship between knowledge, reason, and governance in a broader sense using a deliberative lens (see Bächtiger, Niemeyer, Neblo, Steenbergen, & Steiner, 2010). To begin, the emphasis on deliberation implies that the mere fact of knowledge is insufficient to derive legitimacy for any particular action. An actor may use knowledge to demonstrate the existence of climate change, for example, but the choice of what action to take involves normative questions about what the polity values, which can only be addressed with reference to citizens. At the same time, the relationship between citizens, knowledge, and collective choices is not improving, and may possibly even be deteriorating (Capstick, Whitmarsh, Poortinga, Pidgeon, & Upham, 2015). The problem is not ignorance per se, nor a lack of baseline will (O'Brien, 2012). When surveyed, most citizens endorse environmental sustainability, but the message is often lost in political translation. However, it is important to understand the broader dynamics of knowledge, and the processes whereby these are translated into action. Take for example the "governance trap," where basic acceptance of the fact of climate change fails to translate into action, because citizens and the government each attribute responsibility for such action to the other, thus ossifying inaction (Pidgeon, 2012). In this chapter, I seek to develop an understanding of these processes through a deliberative framework. To this end, I begin the chapter with a survey of the challenge of translating knowledge into political action, demonstrating how a governance lens, particularly

Environmental Values, 2009

In response to what has been called the discursive dilemma, Christian List has argued that the nature of the public agenda facing deliberative bodies indicates the appropriate form of decision procedure or deliberative process. In this paper I consider the particular case of environmental policy where we are faced with pressures not only from deliberators and stakeholders, but also in response to dynamic changes in the environment itself. As a consequence of this dilemma I argue that insofar as the focus of a policy forming body is on the formation of viable environmental policy, rather than on a set of pre-existent ideological commitments, deliberative agents should be responsive as a unified body to the pressures of precedent, the best available science, and their own best individual judgments. In the case of environmental policy the dilemma pressures deliberative bodies to display what Ronald Dworkin has called integrity even in cases where this requires those deliberative bodies to sacrifice being maximally responsive to the preferences of individual deliberators.