Sustaining Democracy in Hard Times: Participatory Theory for Local Environmental Governance

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Frank Fischer
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Environmental Governance ◽  
Theoretical Perspective ◽  
Democratic Politics ◽  
Participatory Governance ◽  
Deliberative Politics ◽  
Hard Times ◽  
Climate Crisis ◽  
Participatory Theory

This final chapter explores ideas previously taken up and relates them to political theory, democratic deliberative politics in particular. Up to this point, these ideas have been presented as theoretical contributions to both participatory governance and the relocalization movement. The discussion here seeks to extend the theoretical perspective more specifically to a number of important but relatively neglected traditions in democratic political theory, especially as they relate to ideas taken from the writings of Bookchin and Sale. This involves the theories of associative democracy, insurgent democratic politics, and participatory or democratic expertise. These theoretical orientations are provided as steps in search of a broader environmental political theory that can address the democratic struggles that are anticipated during the socio-ecological climate crisis ahead.

Climate Crisis and the Democratic Prospect

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Frank Fischer
Keyword(s):  
Environmental Governance ◽  
Global Climate ◽  
Time Frame ◽  
States Of Emergency ◽  
The Social ◽  
Hard Times ◽  
The Media ◽  
Climate Crisis ◽  
Environmental Democracy ◽  
Political Realm

Can contemporary democratic governments tackle climate crisis? Some say that democracy has to be a central part of a strategy to deal with climate change. Others say that experience shows it not to be up to the challenge in the time frame available—that it will require a stronger hand, even a form of eco-authoritarianism. This work seeks to sort out and assess the competing answers to a question that is not easily resolved. While the book supports the case for environmental democracy, it argues that establishing and sustaining democratic practices will be difficult during the global climate turmoil ahead, especially if confronted with permanent states of emergency. This inquiry undertakes a search for an appropriate political-ecological strategy capable of preserving a measure of democratic governance during hard times. Without ignoring the global dimensions of the crisis, the analysis finds an alternative path in the theory and practices of participatory environmental governance embodied in a growing relocalization movement, and a form of global eco-localism. Although these movements largely operate under the radar of the social sciences, the media, and the political realm generally, such vibrant socio-ecological movements not only speak to the crisis ahead, but are already well established and thriving on the ground, including ecovillages, eco-communes, eco-neighborhoods, and local transition initiatives. With the help of these ideas and projects, the task is to shift the discourse of environmental political theory in ways that can assist those who will face the climate crisis in its full magnitude in real terms.

scholarly journals Civil Economy in the Social Market Economy: a Theoretical Perspective

2018 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 87-98
Author(s):  
Flavio Felice
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Market Economy ◽  
Theoretical Perspective ◽  
The State ◽  
Social Market Economy ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Galaxy ◽  
Civil Economy ◽  
State And Market ◽  
Social Market

Abstract What do we mean by “civil” and “civil society”? This paper attempts to describe a complex notion of “civil economy” in Sturzo’s theoretical perspective of the social market economy. According to this political theory, “civil” is not opposed to “market,” which is not opposed to “the political” (the state). Rather, instead of being the transmission belt between the state and market, civil is the galaxy in which we find also the market and the state (but not only), each with its own functions. This tradition – rooted in Christianity – was able to oppose both Nazi and communist totalitarianism, while many Catholics made an impossible attempt to exhume corporatism.

Does Queer Political Theory Have a Future?

Shame ◽  
2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bogdan Popa
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Political Thinking ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
The Future ◽  
Eve Sedgwick ◽  
Lauren Berlant

In this final chapter I reflect upon the possibilities unleashed by recent scholarship in queer political theory. First, I discuss the future of queer political thinking by insisting that the act of interpretation has to draw on how one becomes both irritated by and surprised by scholarly arguments. As an affective practice, irritation offers the incentive to challenge what is already known while the surprise opens up a new territory for investigation. Second, to enact my interpretative method, I critically engage with the work of Eve Sedgwick, Leo Bersani, José Esteban Muñoz, and Lauren Berlant to argue that queer practices can articulate an equality-oriented vision of politics.

Jacques Rancière

In the Street ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 121-150
Author(s):  
Çiğdem Çidam
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Democratic Theory ◽  
Democratic Politics ◽  
Political Actors ◽  
Theory Of Education ◽  
Democratic Action ◽  
Action Taking ◽  
As If

This chapter demonstrates that Rancière’s journey to democratic theory started in the aftermath of May 1968 with his efforts to overcome the problematic transformation of political theory into “a theory of education.” For Rancière, unpredictability is integral to democratic politics. Thus, in an anti-Rousseauian move, he emphasizes the theatrical aspect of democratic action: taking on a role other than who they are, acting as if they are a part in a given social order in which they have no part, political actors stage their equality, disrupting the existing distribution of the sensible. Rancière’s focus on the moments of disruption, however, opens him to the charge of reducing democratic politics to immediate acts of negation. Insofar as he erases the role of intermediating practices in the stagings of equality, Rancière imposes on his accounts a kind of purity that his own work, with its emphasis on broken, polemical voices, cautions against.

Global Environmental Governance

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
John S. Dryzek
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Global Governance ◽  
Environmental Governance ◽  
Economic Governance ◽  
Global Environmental Governance ◽  
Environmental Challenges ◽  
Global Environmental ◽  
Global Economic Governance ◽  
Dynamic Criteria

Long subordinate to global economic governance, global environmental governance currently fails to produce responses that match the urgency and depth of global environmental challenges, as well as being short on justice and democracy. Environmental political theory can speak to this condition though the critique of the deficiencies of governance, scrutiny of reform proposals, and development of dynamic criteria to seek in improved governance. At issue here are not just institutions generally recognized as environmental, but the system of global governance in its entirety. In the Anthropocene, ecosystemic reflexivity can be recognized as properly the first virtue of global environmental governance.

scholarly journals The democratic legitimacy of public participation in planning: Contrasting optimistic, critical, and agnostic understandings

2020 ◽  
Vol 19 (4) ◽  
pp. 349-370
Author(s):  
Sherif Zakhour
Keyword(s):  
Public Participation ◽  
Environmental Governance ◽  
Democratic Legitimacy ◽  
Social Perceptions ◽  
Participatory Governance ◽  
Democratic Institutions ◽  
Research Engagement ◽  
Individual Citizen ◽  
Perceptions And Expectations

How does public participation in planning and environmental governance engender democratic legitimacy? Drawing a distinction between the optimistic and critical participation literature, I argue that both these strands of research have tended to neglect the public’s perspective on this question. This oversight has, in effect, produced strongly normative and essentialist understandings of democratic legitimacy that treat legitimicy as intrinsic to either process or substance of participatory governance. Proceeding from an anti-essentialist understanding of democratic legitimacy, which primarily relies on contemporary social perceptions and expectations of democratic institutions, I outline a normatively agnostic framework for exploring how legitimacy is engendered through participation. Using this framework to investigate citizen experiences of participation processes in Sweden, I highlight how democratic legitimacy can gainfully be understood as a multidimensional, provisional, and contingent quality that individual citizen participants “confer” and “retract” in a plurality of ways. Based on this, I conclude by suggesting that sustained research engagement with the public’s expectations and experiences of participatory governance can reveal critical insights into the potentials and challenges for realizing democratic planning outcomes.

scholarly journals The Passion for Civility

2016 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 344-354 ◽  
Author(s):  
Derek Edyvane
Keyword(s):  
Theoretical Analysis ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Social Cohesion ◽  
Democratic Politics ◽  
Vital Function ◽  
Liberal Democratic ◽  
New Synthesis

This article challenges and clarifies everyday thought about the idea of civility in society and politics by subjecting it to theoretical analysis. It contributes to research on citizenship, toleration and social cohesion by developing a new synthesis of the presently fragmented literature in contemporary political theory on the concept of civility and its place in liberal democratic politics. It first considers the meaning of civility, identifying some difficulties of definition and elaborating a distinction between civility in conduct and civility in attitude. It then assesses the most prominent debates around civility’s value by contrasting arguments that civility serves a vital function in the moderation of democratic conflict with arguments that it threatens the basic values upon which democracy is founded. The article finds that the debate about civility is misconceived and that the literature is diminished by its failure to engage directly with the problem of incivility. In so doing, it establishes the parameters for a new agenda of civility research.

Inventing Un-America

2013 ◽  
Vol 47 (4) ◽  
pp. 881-902 ◽  
Author(s):  
BRIAN STEELE
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Large Degree ◽  
Thomas Jefferson ◽  
American Identity ◽  
The Other ◽  
Democratic Politics ◽  
National Purpose

No writer is more closely bound up with our deepest sense of the meaning of the “American” than Thomas Jefferson and it is difficult to imagine America's national purpose without some reference to his words. Yet Jefferson's projection of American identity also assumed and even constituted, of necessity, the un-American and it is in this sense that the un-American provided the necessary contours of what became the “American.” Jefferson's various projects are often seen in tension with one another. But this dialectic between the American and the un-American helps reconcile many of them. Federalists, Jefferson believed, assumed that governing Americans demanded the force and corruption that had long kept Europeans in order, whereas Americans, he believed, had an experience of history that rendered them capable of transcending such political theory and practicing democratic politics. This paper explores this dialectic between the American and the un-American in Jefferson's thought as a problem of national self-definition and argues that Jefferson's overwhelming confidence about American identity rested to a large degree in the shudder produced by his experience of the other. Years before Joseph McCarthy and HUAC, Jefferson's project of defining the nation created the un-American, rendering Americans ever since profoundly, however paradoxically, ambivalent about the prospects for revolutionary republicanism abroad.

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