IEP 511: Environmental Decision Making

AWAYMAVE - The Distance Mode of MA in Values and the Environment at Lancaster University

Week 10 Deliberative democracy and the sources of legitimacy

Some further links are to be added to this week shortly

What is deliberative democracy?

Deliberative democracy - a forum through which judgements and preferences are formed and altered through reasoned dialogue against the picture of democracy as a procedure for aggregating and effectively meeting the given preferences of individuals.

It is consistent with several answers to legitimacy.

a. Epistemic:

Edmund Burke’s address to the electors of Bristol:

Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgement; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion…[G]overnment and legislation are matters of reason and judgement, and not of inclination; and what sort of reason is that, in which the determination precedes the discussion; in which one set of men deliberate and another decide…Parliament is not a congress of ambassadors from different and hostile interests; which interests each must maintain, as an agent and advocate, against other agents and advocates; but parliament is a deliberative assembly of one nation, with one interest, that of the whole…(EB 3.19-20)

b. Presence:

The inclusion of ‘inclusionary’ - that deliberative institutions should be such that they give equal access to all relevant voices.

Alejandro problems: Individuals have a complex set of identities under different descriptions.

‘What…is an appropriate mechanism for deal with political exclusion? Can Asians be represented by Afro-Caribbeans, Hindus by Muslims, black women by black men? Or do these groups have nothing more in common than their joint experience of being excluded from power?’ (Anne Phillips ‘Dealing with Difference: A Politics of Ideas or a Politics of Presence’)

Think

In focus groups who are Blackburn Asian women, or unemployed young men from Morecambe supposed to represent?
Of whom should a retired manual worker on a citizens jury about a wet fen site be taken to be a representative?

Alejandro solutions?

c. Authorisation and accountability:

Absence of either
Many recent experiments in inclusionary deliberative institutions such as citizens’ juries, citizen’s panels, consensus conferences in-depth discussion groups, or focus groups no one is authorised to speak for any group they are taken to ‘represent’, or is accountable to them

[The Athenian solution - ‘For they rule and are ruled in turn…’ Aristotle Politics II.ii]

Giving voice to the voiceless: nature and future generations.

Problem

Non-humans and future generations – neither presence nor authorisation is possible.

Standard solution – Proxy representation

Current generations authorise or act as trustees on behalf of the interests of non-humans and future generations.
Proxy representatives:

• the state (Pigou)
• representatives from the environmental lobby (Dobson)
• citizens who have internalised those interests (Goodin)

Problems with proxy representation

Historical precedents

• Used to justify the representation of women by husbands and servants by masters.
• Whig notion of virtual representation employed to limit the extension the suffrage.
• Virtual representation is that in which there is a communion of interests, and sympathy in feelings and desires between those who act in the name of any descriptions of people, and the people in whose name they act, though trustees are not actually chosen by them. This is virtual representation. (Burke, 1792)
• Even granted the legitimacy of virtual representation it appears ill suited to deal with the representation of non-humans and future generations.
• Their interests are not identical to those of current generations of humans. Non-humans and future generations are rather like the Catholics in Eighteenth Century Ireland whom Burke claimed had no virtual representation since none with the same interests is ‘actually represented’ in the political process (Burke, 1792).

Responses:

1. The historical precedents

The historical illegitimacy of proxy representation need not spill over to the representation of non-humans and future generations.

It does not involve the relations of power and subordination that are involved in the illegitimate historical precedents, nor the failure to recognise the dignity of those denied direct representation.

If individuals or groups can speak for themselves, then they should do so.
Where they cannot there is no loss in dignity nor assumed power relations in others speaking for them: the representation of infants through the adults who care for them, while imperfect, is not illegitimate.

Hence there is nothing as such illegitimate about representing the interests of future humans and non-humans through current persons (Goodin, 1996)

2. The lack of identity of interests

The publicness condition on deliberation (Kant):
‘All actions affecting the rights of other human beings are wrong if their maxim is not compatible with their being made public’ (I. Kant, (1793) Perpetual Peace')

Reasons must be able to survive being made public.
Publicness forces participants to offer reasons that can withstand public justification and hence to appeal to general rather particular private interests.
Hence, reasons for action that appeal to wider constituencies of interest – including those of future generations and non-humans – are more likely to survive in public deliberation than they are in private market based methods for expressing preferences.

Goodin
Through such deliberation wider interests are internalised - democracy ‘as a process in which we all come to internalize the interests of each other and indeed of the larger world around us’ (Goodin, 1996, p.844). Through the internalisation of interests of nature those interests can be virtually represented:

Much though nature’s interests may deserve to be enfranchised in their own right, that is simply impracticable. People, and people alone, can exercise the vote. The best we can hope for is that nature’s interests will come to be internalized by a sufficient number of people with sufficient leverage in the political system for nature’s interests to secure the protection they deserve. (Goodin, 1996, p.844)

Questions

How adequate is Goodin’s response?

What, in the absence of authorisation, accountability or shared identity can legitimate any particular individual or group making public claims to speak on behalf of the interests of others?

What are the sources of the claims to legitimacy of those who claim to speak on behalf of nature and future generations?

please note down your answers to these before reading further.

Some thoughts

Epistemic and special care:
In the absence of authorisation, accountability and presence, the remaining source of legitimacy to claim to speak for others is epistemic. For example, natural scientists, biologists and ecologists make special claims ‘to speak on behalf of nature’ where their claim to do so is founded upon their knowledge and interests.

The arguments in political epistemology about whose knowledge counts is in part an argument about the legitimacy of representation – who can claim to speak on behalf of others, where the central claims for legitimacy are knowledge claims, not authorisation or presence.

Representing which nature?

The question ‘Who is being represented and under what descriptions?’ raises difficulties for non-human as well as human entities.

Is it as individuals (animal rights activists)?

Is it as members of a species or as part of an ecosystem?

Nature and the politics of representation

Can representatives of nature sometimes have too much voice rather than too little?

The conflict with communities with an already marginalised voice who are policed in and excluded from ‘nature reserves’ justified by natural scientists.

• The Nagarhole National Park, where there have been moves from the Karnataka Forest Department to remove 6000 tribal people from their forests on the grounds that they compete with tigers for game.
  Spokesperson for the Wildlife Conservation Society - 'relocating tribal or traditional people who live in these protected area is the single most important step towards conservation'
• Comments of a local living by the natural park of Sierra Nevada and Alpujurra granted biosphere status by UNESCO and Natural Park status by the government of Andalusia:
  ‘[Miguel] pointed out the stonework he had done on the floor and lower parts of the wall which were all made from flat stones found in the Sierra. I asked him if he had done this all by himself and he said ‘Yes, and look, this is nature’ (‘Si, y mira, esto es la naturaleza’), and he pointed firmly at the stone carved wall, and he repeated this action by pointing first in the direction of the Sierra [national park] before pointing at the wall again. Then, stressed his point by saying: ‘This is no nature, it is artificial (the Sierra) this (the wall) is nature’ (‘Eso no es la naturalesa, es artificial (the Sierra) esto (the wall) es la naturalesa).’

Web notes by John O'Neill March 2005