Deliberative Democracy and the Environment.

By Graham Smith. New York: Routledge, 2003. 163p. $90.00 cloth, $27.95 paper.

Criticizing liberal democracy as inadequate to environmental challenges, green political theorists have recently tended to embrace key tenets of deliberative democracy. Graham Smith follows this tendency in a concise, engaging, and highly accessible volume that combines a critique of the environmental inadequacies of liberal democratic institutions with an account of the potential merits of deliberation in promoting “ecological democratisation” (p. 101).

Smith's account is far from a simple exercise in cheerleading for deliberative democracy, however, and he especially emphasizes that it cannot supply a complete model of democracy, due to the political necessity that discussion end at some point in order for decisions to be made. What Smith particularly endorses is not the wholesale replacement of liberal democracy but the fostering of deliberative institutions within it. Although this book largely constitutes a summation and assessment of an emerging trend in green political theory, Smith also makes an important and original contribution (of relevance to the literature of deliberative democracy as well) through his precise and extensive appraisal of deliberative institutions that have so far been brought to bear on environmental problems.

Environmentalism may be viewed, in general terms, as a response to the industrialist tenet that humanity has both the collective capacity and the collective right to dominate nature. Smith sees in deliberative institutions, not a guarantee that this industrialist tenet will be rejected in favor of an environmentalist one, but rather a potential: that of opening up serious consideration of a plurality of perspectives on the environment that are typically foreclosed by the established institutions of liberal democracy.

Environmentalist perspectives suggest that the human capacity to control the natural environment has conventionally been greatly overestimated, thanks to reductionist moves that deflect attention from problems of complexity and unpredictability. Largely following John Dryzek, Smith argues that more “ecologically rational” institutions are needed (p. 61). Deliberative institutions have the advantage of helping to expand “limited and fallible perspectives” (p. 62), and Smith crucially includes the perspectives of experts. Drawing upon a large literature critical of the role of experts in environmental politics (e.g., Ulrich Beck, Brian Wynne, Frank Fischer), he points to deliberation as an “ingenious mechanism” for democratically regulating the authority of experts while fostering ecologically sensitive judgments (p. 63).

Smith emphasizes a plurality of views in environmental ethics that challenge the conventional anthropocentric position that human beings have the obvious right to dominate nature. Deliberative institutions, he indicates, are necessary both for this position to be challenged and, more generally, for there to be a discussion that effectively includes the plurality of environmental values. For his own part, Smith does not altogether abandon anthropocentrism in favor of ecocentrism. Stressing the inescapable centrality of human judgment in ethical and political deliberation, Smith instead recommends an ecologically enlightened or “weak” anthropocentrism (p. 13)—though presumably one could, while retaining the same substance, just as well turn this formulation around to speak of a weak or qualified ecocentrism.

For Smith, deliberative institutions are oriented, not necessarily to consensus (à la Jürgen Habermas), but to a “mutual understanding” (p. 59) in which the exchange of differing opinions serves to enhance the quality of judgment. Here Smith relies particularly on Hannah Arendt's account of the “enlarged mentality,” though he also endorses Iris Marion Young's concern that the distinctiveness of differing voices needs to be heard. Such a concern guides his detailed assessments of deliberative institutions—e.g., those he terms “citizen forums” (p. 86)—in terms of their differing capacities to enhance discussion, to expand participation, and to resist co-optation by powerful interests. Yet Smith is right to note that a concern with voice encounters “ontological dilemmas” (p. 107) when combined with aspirations for an ecological democracy capable of adequately taking into account the complex plurality of environmental values. The obvious conundrum, especially when one entertains an ecocentric perspective, is that human beings are going to be the ones doing all the talking. In this regard, Smith makes the astute move of suggesting that the way out may lie less in a reductionist focus on rules and procedures than in the potential emergence of an “ecological culture” (p. 116) that could be encouraged (though not guaranteed) by enhanced deliberation.

Deliberative institutions are principally understood by Smith as mechanisms for the development of “reflective” public opinion and its transmission to centers of decision making in the liberal democratic state (p. 76). Smith also speaks of linking these institutions to “a more radical project of ecological democratisation” (p. 81). The substance of his discussion in this regard centers, however, on envisioning in institutional terms “the possible shape” of the goal of ecological democratization (p. 127). Although Smith does make a valuable contribution here, the focus on goals tends to neglect the daunting question of the political means necessary to fulfil such a radical project.

Although Smith is by no means oblivious to problems of power and co-optation that are stressed from more critical perspectives, he acknowledges that he tends to be rather “optimistic” about the potential of the liberal democratic state (p. 126). Smith here replicates and renders explicit a common tendency of the deliberative literature to be fairly sanguine about prevailing power structures, and to take at face value their supposedly democratic character.

This orientation neglects the authoritarian and oligarchic features of what are conventionally labeled “liberal democracies.” These features, although fairly obvious in any case, become unmistakable in concrete, critical assessments of the way serious environmental initiatives—the kind Smith might advocate—typically are deflected or co-opted by the powers-that-be in advanced industrial societies. From such a critical perspective, the model of deliberative democracy would not be taken as an adequate guide for democratic action, but could be valued as one source of strategic initiatives in an uncertain, continuing struggle for democratization.