Paradoxes of Green Democracy
Harlan Wilson
Western Political Science Association Meetings, Albuquerque
Oberlin College
March 2006
1. Introduction and caveats
This paper makes a sweeping argument about the prospects for 'environmental' or 'green'
democracy in too few pages. The argument is directly political. I focus on the United States,
because it is the country with which I am most familiar, and because the United States'
environmental impact is greater than that of any other country in the world.
The problem-focus of this paper comes from two contentions. One is that much of the
recent work in environmental or green democratic theory is more visionary than diagnostic. It
seeks to envision a democratic green future, perhaps by building on the present. In the
meantime, the prospects for green democracy are being undermined by both partisan and
structural tendencies. Green democrats, while they should argue among themselves about how
to understand green democracy, also should pay more attention to these adverse tendencies.
My other contention is that democratic political theorists in the non-environmental
'mainstream' of political theory give little attention to environmental sustainability. Yet
sustainability is unavoidably a condition of any kind of 'sustainable' democracy in the long run.
The consensus in much of the environmental political theory literature seems to be that
there is a strong affinity, even reciprocity, between democracy and sustainability. Yet that
relation should not be simply assumed. This is particularly the case if democracy is conceived in
process or procedural terms. Thus the green theorist Robert Goodin, in a quotation that has
become well-known, challenges green democrats as follows: “To advocate democracy is to
advocate proceduralism; to advocate environmentalism is to advocate substantive outcomes.”
[Goodin, 1992, 168] Robert Paehlke, an environmental theorist sympathetic with democratic
and progressive politics, nonetheless points out that democracy is not a core environmental value
[Paehlke, 1989]. And Robert Dahl, decidedly not a green theorist, has asserted that "no one
substantive outcome should take priority over process." [Dahl, 1989] If democracy is understood
only procedurally, in terms of ‘neutral’ processes to mediate conflict and permit ‘fair’ outcomes,
it cannot represent a substantive green vision.
Nevertheless, many environmental theorists would insist that democracy be understood in
non-procedural, substantive terms, stressing its deliberative and discursive qualities. Similarly,
environmental theorists often reject purely instrumental conceptions of democracy (to be
evaluated in terms of its achievements) in favor of a notion of collective self-government or
politics as an intrinsically valuable way of life. Yet substantive notions of environmental
democracy presume or imagine that democratic publics acting inside or outside the state do
accept strong norms of sustainability, or at least can be educated to do so.
‘Green’ commitments can be in tension with democratic politics in other ways, too. The
authority of scientific elites to frame environmental issues with authority has a peculiarly
important, if contested, role in environmental politics. Limits to substantive environmental
democracy are also posed by state bureaucracy as a means of enforcing environmental
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