IEP 411: Environmental Decision Making

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

Week 9 The Environment and the Politics of Representation

For this week read Chapter 11 'Representing people, representing nature, representing the world' available from the discussion site.

Some further links are to be added to this week shortly

Failures of representation

• Contingent failures - given a different political and economic order they could be represented: some indigenous populations, sections of the working class, peasants, many groups of women, and ethnic minorities.
• Problems about the very possibility of representation: future generations and non-human beings pose problems of representing those who cannot speak and have in that sense no possibility of voice or presence in processes of environmental decision making.

Failures of representation and legitimacy

• legitimacy of decisions made in the absence of their voice
• legitimacy of environmentalists’ claims to speak and act on behalf of those who are without voice.

Markets deliberation and representation

Particular problems of representation posed by different institutional structures and arrangements employed in environmental decision making.

Market-based approaches

The use of market and surrogate market prices as a basis of environmental choice involve failures of representation.

• The poor are underrepresented: raw willingness to pay measures will give greater weight to the preferences of the rich – ‘the poor sell cheap’.
• The interests of non-humans and future generations cannot be directly represented at all through willingness to pay
• they are indirectly represented at best precariously through the preferences of current consumers

Deliberative democracy

Democracy as a forum through which judgements and preferences are transformed through reasoned dialogue between citizens

(Against the economic picture of democracy as a surrogate market procedure for aggregating and effectively meeting the given preferences of individuals)

'New' experiments in deliberative democracy: citizens' juries, citizens' panels, in depth discussion groups, focus groups, consensus conferences, and round tables - particularly developed in the environmental sphere

Problems

• Willingness and capacity to say and to be heard is unevenly distributed across class, gender and ethnicity.
• The direct voice of future generations and non-humans is necessarily absent.
• Particular experiments in deliberative institutions – citizens’ juries, in depth discussion groups, consensus conferences and the like – are normally small and are open to the criticism that they are ‘unrepresentative’ of the populations to be affected by decisions.

Representing people, representing nature, representing the world.

The Alejandro solution
J. L. Borges, The Congress

‘Don Alejandro conceived the idea of calling together a Congress of the World that would represent all men of all nations…Twirl, who had a farseeing mind, remarked that the Congress involved a problem of a philosophical nature. Planning an assembly to represent all men was like fixing the exact number of platonic types – a puzzle that had taxed the imagination of thinkers for centuries. Twirl suggested that, without going farther afield, don Alejandro Glencoe might represent not only cattlemen but also Uruguayans, and also humanity’s great forerunners, and also men with red beards, and also those who are seated in armchairs. Nora Erfjord was Norwegian. Would she represent secretaries, Norwegian womanhood, or - more obviously – all beautiful women? Would a single engineer be enough to represent all engineers – including those of New Zealand?’

The perfect representation

The story ends with an echo of another of Borges stories on development of cartography which attains its highest point when the perfect map is identical to the area it maps: ‘the College of Cartographers evolved a Map of the Empire that was of the same Scale as the Empire and that coincided with it point for point’.

Similarly the only adequate congress of the world is discovered to be the world itself.

‘It has taken me four years to understand what I am about to say’ don Alejandro began. ‘My friends, the undertaking we have set ourselves is so vast that it embraces – I now see – the whole world. Our Congress cannot be a group of charlatans deafening each other in the sheds of an out-of-the-way ranch. The Congress of the World began with the first moment of the world and it will go on when we are dust. There’s no place on earth where it does not exist.’

The characters go back out into the city ‘drunk with victory’, to take part in the life of the Congress in which all men and all things are represented perfectly by themselves.

What are the criteria for saying who or what should be represented and whether representation is adequate or legitimate?

The problem is not philosophical in the sense of correctly fixing on Platonic forms.

Two independent answers

• Prediction and explanation
• Normative and political

Representation: social scientific or political

Objection: Deliberative institutions e.g. citizens’ juries are unrepresentative.

What is the objection?

• Statistical representation
  The samples are too small to be statistically representative. We could no make no significant generalisations about behaviour of larger populations on the basis of the populations employed.
• Policy Effectiveness
  Will not provide the policy maker information about the effectiveness of policy instruments.

Standard response

• Depth
  Small deliberative institutions offer potentially offer both hermeneutic and explanatory depth that large-scale statistical studies cannot provide.
  This is compatible with the primary value effectiveness in the delivery of policy - qualitative research techniques are used for clearly strategic purposes.
• Democratic legitimacy
  The norms of communicative rationality rather than instrumental rationality guide the process.
  Extension of democratic dialogue by including in deliberations voices that would otherwise be unheard

Democratic theory and the problem of representation

1. Who is being represented in the political or decision-making process - individuals, functional groups, economic classes, cultural identities, gender, ethnicity, current generations, future generations, nonhumans? Normative not a statistical question.

2. What is being represented - particular interests, common interests, values, beliefs, opinions, preferences, and identities?

3. Who is doing the representation and what relation do they have to the represented?

4. What is the source of the legitimacy of the representation?

a. Authorisation and democratic accountability. Authorisation as such renders offers no answer to the question of who does the representing secondary: the representative can be entirely different from the person represented.

b. Presence: Shared identity matters. Feminism and socialist theory (self-emancipation) Just as a nobleman cannot represent a plebeian and the latter cannot represent a nobleman, so a man, no matter how honest he may be, cannot represent a woman. Between the representatives and the represented there must be an absolute identity of interests. Politics of presence – quota systems, ethnicity, gender, class.

c. Epistemic values: Knowledge, expertise or judgement that allows an individual to speak or act on behalf of the objective interests of some group (Burke, Mill, Lenin)