Sustainability 2010, 2, 3399-3417; doi:10.3390/su2113399
sustainability
ISSN 2071-1050
www.mdpi.com/journal/sustainability
Article
Deliberative Ecological Economics for Sustainability
Governance
Christos Zografos 1,
* and Richard B. Howarth 2
1
Institut de Ciència i Tecnologia Ambientals (ICTA), Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, ETSE
QC/3107, 08193 Bellaterra, Barcelona, Spain
2
Environmental Studies Program, Dartmouth College, HB 6182, 113 Steele Hall, Hanover,
NH 03755, USA; E-Mail: RBHowarth@Dartmouth.edu
* Author to whom correspondence should be addressed; E-Mail: christos.zografos@uab.cat;
Tel.: +34-93-586-8260; Fax: +34-93-581-3331.
Received: 29 June 2010; in revised form: 26 October 2010 / Accepted: 27 October 2010 /
Published: 29 October 2010
Abstract: We discuss the recent emergence of ‗deliberative ecological economics‘, a field
that highlights the potential of deliberation for improving environmental governance. We
locate the emergence of this literature in the long concern in ecological economics over the
policy implications of limited views of human action and its encounter with deliberative
democracy scholarship and the model of communicative rationality as an alternative to
utilitarianism. Considering criticisms over methods used and the focus of research in
deliberative decision-making, we put forward a research agenda for deliberative ecological
economics. Given the promising potential of deliberative processes for improving the
effectiveness and legitimacy of environmental decision-making, work in this area could
help advance both theory and practice in environmental governance.
Keywords: sustainability governance; preference formation; deliberative democracy;
environmental decision-making; ecological economics
1. Introduction
―Picture a pasture open to all‖. With this quasi-bucolic image, Garrett Hardin starts his description
of how the Tragedy of the Commons unfolds in his well-known 1968 article in Science. Addressing
OPEN ACCESS
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the Pacific Division of the American Association for the Advancement of Science which he presided
over at the time (the article is a reprint of his address), Hardin used the parable of ‗the commons‘ to
support his argument on the need to effect a moral transformation in governance through regulation
and education in order to deal with the issue of overpopulation. Hardin argued that in a finite world,
one‘s decision to give birth implied reducing available resources for the rest, and paralleled this
decision to that of using resources in what he called ‗a commons‘. Using the example of a commoner
deciding whether to add one more animal to his herd [1], Hardin posed that:
As a rational being, each herdsman seeks to maximize his gain. Explicitly or implicitly,
more or less consciously, he asks, ―What is the utility to me [2] of adding one more animal
to my herd?‖ [3]
He then went on to explain that this utility has a positive and a negative component, the former
consisting in the herdsman reaping benefits from selling additional animal products and the latter
mainly comprising the overgrazing created by the additional animal. However, the adverse effects of
overgrazing are shared by all commoners, which results in our commoner‘s utility being negatively
affected only by a fraction of the whole negative impact making the decision to add one more animal
in the herd as the only sensible course of action. With this logic, our herdsman carries on adding
constantly more animals to his herd. What‘s more, what is reasonable to him seems reasonable to the
rest of the commoners. Thus each and every rational herdsman sharing a commons does the same,
i.e., adds more animals to his herd. That leads Hardin to conclude that:
Therein is the tragedy. Each man is locked into a system that compels him to increase his
herd without limit—in a world that is limited. Ruin is the destination toward which all men
rush, each pursuing his own best interest in a society that believes in the freedom of the
commons. Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all. [3]
In the last forty years, numerous objections have been raised against Hardin‘s assumptions as well
as the implications of his conclusions. Nevertheless, the model of human action he put forth has been
extensively used to justify and indeed legitimise natural resource management policies promoted by
national governments and influential international organisations (e.g., the World Bank). Given some
adverse social implications of those policies, several scholars have argued in favour of using other,
broader models of human action when analysing environmental decision-making [4].
The aim of this paper is to explore the challenges this agenda poses for research and praxis in
ecological economics. Ecological economics emerged as a field in the late 1980s in response to
perceived deficiencies in neoclassical economics and its application to environmental policy and
governance. On the one hand, ecological economists have sought to understand the links between
economic and biophysical systems: how economic activity is supported by the throughput of energy
and material flows; how resource depletion and environmental degradation affect the provisioning of
ecosystem services; and how biophysical limits constrain the sustainable scale of production and
consumption. In this sense, ecological economics is potentially understood as a materialist, empiricist
science: Costanza [5] defined the field as ―the science and management of sustainability.‖
Yet ecological economics is also tied to a long-standing critique of mainstream welfare
economics—specifically the notion that environmental values can be reduced to preferences that are
Sustainability 2010, 2 3401
subject to objective measurement and aggregation. In contrast to this vision of ―economism‖ [6],
ecological economists have emphasized the socially constructed nature of preferences and the role of
moral principles in justifying environmental policies. Daly [7], for example, calls for restructuring
economic institutions in a manner that respects both the biophysical limits imposed by nature and the
―ultimate end‖ of society as defined by philosophical and spiritual engagement. This framing explicitly
rejects the dichotomy between facts and values that underlies positivism.
In a similar vein, ecological economists have long argued that informing environmental policy
decisions requires a ―post-normal‖ or problem-oriented approach to scientific inquiry that is
values-sensitive and engaged with the interests and knowledge of lay stakeholders [8]. This highlights
the point that ecological economics is not simply a subdiscipline of economics, but rather a
transdisciplinary field that seeks to understand and manage the links between the economy, the
biosphere, and the social structures that support and sustain human flourishing.
In the succeeding sections of this paper, we present a body of recent ecological economics research
that moves beyond the stylized behavioral model that gives rise to the tragedy of the commons. We
begin by describing some undesirable implications of using Hardin‘s view of human action to analyse
environmental issues to derive policy conclusions. We then move on to briefly explain some key
theoretical arguments regarding the limitations of this model and to present an alternative model of human
action (communicative rationality) as a basis for developing effective and legitimate environmental
decision-making. Furthermore, the paper describes the work of ecological economists in this area—which
has given rise to a body of literature we call ‗deliberative ecological economics‘ [9]—and sketches the
main traits of this work, to finally conclude with an outline of possible future research issues in that
area emerging as a response to perceived weaknesses of existing research.
2. Environmental Policy Implications of ‘Rational’ Action
Hardin‘s explanation of environmental degradation has been duly criticised from various
perspectives. First and foremost, it has been pointed out that his model does not describe a common
property regime but rather an open access situation where the use of natural resources is not regulated
by any rules at all. Instead, supporters of this thesis argue, ‗commons‘ are well-defined systems
governed by mutually beneficial and compelling regulations [10]. Others have taken issue with some
of Hardin‘s suggestions that privatising commonly-held resources could be the best solution for
protecting valuable resources as it gives a private incentive to conserve them for private benefit. Critics
point out that commons have successfully supported populations living in marginal (in terms of fertility
potential) areas [11] and that commons privatisation results in making a few already rich landowners
even richer [12] while transforming commoner populations to social and economic pariahs [13].
Enclosure of the commons results in the private appropriation of what used to be a common
benefit [14]. Moreover, Hardin‘s critics argue that practice shows it is actually private owners
(enclosers) who not only benefit from but also contribute to the demise of the commons, as they move
in to aggressively exploit resources to their full potential and then quickly sell them off in order to
acquire more promising resources in other areas [11].
A central aspect of Hardin‘s article, which has also been duly criticised, refers to his treatment of
human behaviour as depicted in his example of the ‗rational‘ herdsman. Specifically, this being is
Sustainability 2010, 2 3402
meant to make decisions by carefully weighing the utility gains and losses of alternative decisions.
This is hardly an original view of human action as it is the one adopted by perhaps the most influential
branch of economics: neo-classical economics. Standard neo-classical economics textbook definitions
of human behaviour have it that rationality entails making decisions after careful weightings of costs
and benefits, always opting for that alternative that offers the higher utility gains to oneself. Herbert
Simon [15] defines this conception as substantive rationality, contrasting it with the complementary
notion of procedural rationality that we discuss below. Philosophically based upon utilitarianism, this
narrow definition of rational human behaviour has dominated mainstream economic models during
the 20th century. Eventually, economists studying environmental issues also found it useful to adopt it
for their analysis. According to this homo economicus model, rational human action as regards how to
use environmental resources boils down to the moral stance of egoism, in which individuals seek to
maximize their own utility without regard for the interests of others. As a result, individuals look at
costs and benefits of alternative actions towards the environment in order to decide which one is best
to follow.
Since the mid-80s, Hardin‘s insights have provided a rational argument for multi-lateral international
institutions and western governments to pursue the widespread privatisation of natural resources and
massive transfers of communal lands to the state or individuals in developing countries [11]. Institutions
such as the World Bank still put forward this logic in order to defend such natural resource
management strategies as regards a new category of commons: the ‗environmental commons‘.
In a 2002 article with the telling title ‗Global Priority‘, the then president of the World Bank James D.
Wolfensohn explained to the readers of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) official
magazine that environmental services such as biodiversity constitute invaluable global commons that
are not effectively protected by individual countries as these have ―limited economic incentives for
taking action on the global environment‖ [16]. But, Wolfensohn tells us, this is something to be
expected as it is exactly in the nature of a global public good such as environmental services to attract
decisions taken at the country level that do not adequately reflect their global impacts. Consider for
example a developing country rich in biodiverse rainforests but drawn into poverty. Its government
would be happy to deplete all resources available in these forests for the country‘s economic
development, no matter if in the course of this use, several ecologically valuable species disappear.
Here, Hardin‘s all-powerful ‗rational‘ herdsman forcefully emerges again, only in this case he comes
in the guise of an ‗individual country‘. The World Bank president further explains that this is what
economists describe as a situation where ―regional and global externalities are not internalised at the
national level‖ [16]. The author then points out that one of the Bank‘s tasks is precisely to generate
those—previously absent—markets in which global environmental goods and services and global
non-market values can be traded. One such example is the Global Environment Facility (GEF) where
those values are captured primarily through international resource transfers.
Similarly, the rational actor model of homo economicus underlies the recently established European
Union (EU) Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) and its counterpart the Clean Development Mechanism
(CDM) that aim to partly tackle climate change. This pollution permits trading scheme is premised on
the idea that industrial polluters will act as ‗rational‘ profit maximisers so that when they cannot afford
to reduce their pollution they will opt for buying a permit from more eco-efficient polluters who have
already managed to reduce their pollution. As a result, the scheme expects to motivate more
Sustainability 2010, 2 3403
eco-efficient producers to reduce pollution themselves in the expectation of gaining money from
selling spare permits. Alternatively of course, the whole scheme allows ‗rational‘ polluters to invest in
CDM projects instead of either trying to reduce their pollution or buy permits. In that case, industrial
polluters, again acting as ‗rational‘ profit maximisers, will prefer investing in sustainable projects that
‗cancel out‘ their pollution (e.g., planting a forest or construct a wind farm in a developing country)
instead of directly reducing the pollution themselves, as long as the second option is more affordable to
them. ETS and CDM are specific examples of institutions set in place to accommodate a
profit-maximiser (homo economicus) rationality in order to achieve sustainability goals. Both
institutions comprise economic and in particular market-based instruments that are used to achieve
sustainable development (halt biodiversity loss and reduce unnecessary pollution). Both of these
economic institutions for sustainable development result from policy initiatives of large and influential
organisations such as the EU and the World Bank, hence their worldwide impact is considerable.
On the ground, however, conflict hinders the success of GEF initiatives. These conflicts can reach
extremities as in the case of the Komodo National Park Collaborative Management Initiative in
Indonesia, where park security personnel fatally shot two local fishermen whom they suspected of
fishing illegally within the park [17]. Research suggests that several GEF projects overlook critical
land tenure and property rights issues and remove control over decision-making and access to areas
traditionally used by local indigenous communities (e.g., as hunting sites) [17]. These criticisms point
out that GEF projects regularly treat local populations as beneficiaries rather than rights holders and
that the whole initiative should adopt policies which secure local people‘s rights to lands and territories,
as well as their free prior and informed consent. Likewise, property rights issues underlie the
limitations of ETS. Tradable pollution permits schemes have been criticised for not modifying the
existing situation of injustice as regards rights and access to carbon sinks and reservoirs [18]. Critics
suggest that climate change policies should instead be looking to create fair shares of environmental
space in terms of emissions equity, so that poorer nations are allowed to emit more greenhouse gases
to develop and provide their citizens with much needed quality of life (e.g., health care improvements).
A similar criticism also applies for the CDM of the ETS scheme, as this transforms local assets into a
mortgage for developed economies to continue growing and polluting, removing at the same time
control over the use of these resources from the hands of poorer local populations [19] through
long-term resource leases and use constraints.
Property rights issues with land and natural resources are at the heart of conflicts and concerns with
economic institutions for sustainable development (such as the GEF, ETS and CDM). These
mechanisms seem to limit local access to the ‗global commons‘ and reduce local control over decisions
made concerning them. The removal of property rights over these resources contributes to a form of
environmental injustice as these mechanisms re-distribute costs and benefits from using resources
(‗global commons‘) to the disadvantage of poorer local populations. Homo economicus is the
discourse used to legitimise and justify such policy instruments that facilitate this resource take-over,
which suggests a crucial link between environmental justice and the use of this model of human action
for policy analysis. Indeed, homo economicus seems to play a key role in this process: it is the central
theoretical concept as regards human behaviour towards natural resources, which supports arguments
used to analyse and chart policy that results in value disputes, conflict and injustice. In this way,
Hardin‘s model of human behaviour is used not only to conceptualise environmental problems but also
Sustainability 2010, 2 3404
to produce conflictive policy solutions. The diagnosis that the existence of facilities to trade
externalities would help resolve environmental problems is entrenched in this homo economicus
reading of human action towards the environment, which holds that individualistic, yet ‗rational‘
behaviour is responsible for generating environmental problems (e.g., biodiversity loss, excessive
pollution). This implies that from an environmental justice perspective, and in particular from the
concept‘s distributional and procedural aspects [20], it would be desirable to seek an alternative model
of human action that can be used in the analysis of sustainability policy.
3. Rational Action: From Instrumental to Deliberative
Further criticism of homo economicus from within the field of economics has pointed out that the
model‘s profit-maximising view of behaviour is unrealistic as it ignores the fact that human action
towards the environment may have broader ethical premises than egoism and that motivation for
environmental action is embedded in multiple and possibly incommensurable environmental values
and not just monetary ones. Moreover, when such a limited view of human action is used as a platform
for the analysis of environmental issues it may end up generating counterproductive or even
undemocratic policies, by crowding out environmental values necessary for sustainability or by
altogether excluding them.
Based on the observation of incommensurable and lexicographic environmental preferences, some
critics have made a strong case that human action towards the environment should be understood in
mainly ethical terms [21]. This implies that environmental preferences correspond to ways that agents
implicitly or explicitly decide how to answer the question ‗what is good and just‘, which is the
essential question in ethics. Importantly, this conception of human action towards the environment
does not exclude a concern for individual welfare [22]. Normative ethics, the branch of philosophy
dedicated to the study of the question ‗what is right and just‘, postulates three major perspectives when
answering this fundamental ethical question [23]: consequentialism, which judges rightness of an
action according to its consequences; deontological ethics, which judges the rightness of action
according to its keeping with pre-established duties and rules; and proceduralism, which judges the
rightness of action according to its keeping with legitimate procedures.
Ecological economists have proposed several models of human behaviour as alternatives to homo
economicus. Most of them seem to fall within those categories of ethical action. For example, utilitarianism
(either self or other-regarding) fits with a consequentialist mode of answering the ethical question [22].
Hierarchies of decision-making (lexicographic preferences) [24], expressive rationality [25],
incommensurability [26], and a concern for protecting the rights of future generations [27] fit quite
well with the deontological perspective. Finally, rule-based behaviours such as satisficing [15],
behaviour under risk and uncertainty [28], and habitual behaviour [28], which are premised on
bounded rationality [15] that acknowledges informational and social constraints on behaviour [29] fit
quite well with the procedural outlook. In several occasions [28] environmental and ecological
economists urge using these alternative models instead of the unrealistic, limited and limiting homo
economicus to conceptualise human behaviour and conduct sustainability policy analysis [30,31].
The need to improve the democratic legitimacy of environmental policies is a key point that
underlies the quest for a broader view of human action that would allow considering plural motivations
Sustainability 2010, 2 3405
and avoid their exclusion from shaping sustainability policy. Norton [32], for example, draws on the
Pragmatism of John Dewey [33] to describe an approach to environmental governance that combines
elements of constructivism and empiricism. Pragmatism explores the interdependence between values
and science in effective problem-solving, emphasizing the role of discourse and deliberation in
legitimising both values and factual understandings.
For the purposes of the present discussion, a central aspect of the homo economicus view of human
behaviour relates to the understanding of human action as instrumental, that is as a means for
achieving predetermined goals, be they specific material (or not) outcomes or the satisfaction of moral
principles and values. Here we turn on the contributions of Jürgen Habermas whose ideas have been
used in public policy studies and have also been noted in ecological economics [34-36]. Habermas [37]
(see also Walzer [38]) considered the influence of instrumental action upon the democratic potential of
institutions, associating the degradation of the democratic potential of major spheres of social life
(e.g., state, social organisations, etc.) to their being taken over by models of strategic and instrumental
rationality. According to him, this logic submits areas of public life under the logic of efficiency and
control propagated by forces of economic (market) and administrative (state) rationalisation, which
reduce human relations from communicative concerns to instrumental norms.
Instead, Habermas advances communicative action as an alternative to instrumental action.
Communicative action is based on the premise that the essence of rational action can also be to reach
understanding between oneself and other actors or society in general instead of achieving instrumental
goals. Such understanding is generated via inter-subjective communication between actors in the
course of which they formulate views (change or else ‗shift‘ their preferences) by reflectively
considering the viewpoints of those with whom they communicate. In that sense, the type of action that
is rooted on communicative rationality can reflect logics that go beyond instrumental seeking of
pre-defined ends, which is the logic of action entrenched in homo economicus. Habermas believes that
communicative rationality is better placed than instrumental rationality to advance the democratic
development of society through discussion and quest for consensus instead of instrumental action that
seeks to achieve one‘s own ends.
With this in mind, advocates of deliberative democracy have established communicative action as
the basis of a model of ‗genuine‘ democracy due to its potential to generate consensus solutions
through dialogue, reflection and preference change. Communicative rationality has been adopted by
democratic theory to strengthen the argument that a deliberative form of decision-making—which
facilitates reflective consideration of preferences—is the most legitimate form of democracy.
Dryzek [39] argues that during the last fifteen years democratic theory has taken a ‗deliberative turn‘,
which aims to establish deliberation as a source of democratic legitimacy. Deliberative democrats
stress the procedural aspects rather than the institutionalized mechanisms (such as elections,
parliamentary procedures, etc.) of democratic decision-making [40]. Arguing that those subject to a
decision must be provided the ability or opportunity to engage in effective deliberation prior to
decision-making in order for a decision to be legitimate, deliberative democrats postulate deliberation
as the source of democratic legitimacy of public decisions. Another development related to the recent
policy emphasis on deliberation, concerns the failure of the scientific discourse in some cases to
provide definitive answers for some environmental issues (e.g., debate on global warming) which has
helped substantiate the claim that scientific values are merely one more set of values that needs be
Sustainability 2010, 2 3406
considered side by side with other (e.g., lay) values. This has contributed to the emergence of
post-normal science [41] and the promotion of more interactive and inclusive forms of decision-making
such as extended peer reviews, activist knowledge, etc. These processes bear the characteristics of
deliberative decision-making and are favored by post-normal science scholars among other reasons
due to their increased capacity to improve policy assessment by incorporating new types of knowledge.
Moreover, deliberative processes are likely to generate decisions that are more acceptable, hence
effective, due to their value-inclusive nature: experience shows that decision-making that excludes
plural agent values is more likely to be perceived as illegitimate, meet resistance and not complied
with [42].
Scholarly preference for deliberative decision-making has not been based merely on an appreciation
of its substantive (improving policy quality) and instrumental (improving levels of policy acceptance
via value inclusion) capacity, but perhaps more significantly on its democratic and legitimacy-bound
significance. Deliberative democracy is embodied in the assumption that individuals can be
transformed in the course of deliberative processes that bolster communicative rationality [39]. An
effective and legitimate type of deliberation requires the absence of power and coercion, the
predominance of rational argumentation and critical discussion in order to promote reflection and
enable a change of preferences [39]. Such processes serve to formulate communicative rationalities
that can then legitimately guide public decision-making. Importantly, ‗the only condition for authentic
deliberation is then the requirement that communication induces reflection upon preferences in
non-coercive fashion‘ [39].
Deliberative democracy seems to have a considerable capacity for generating genuinely inclusive
and deeply democratic institutions and political processes. Not surprisingly, then, deliberative
decision-making has been strongly advocated as a way towards creating an authentically responsive
and responsible democracy, which in turn has prompted practitioners (e.g., government officials, civil
society, etc.) to devote time and energy for strengthening citizen engagement through deliberative
forums. Ever since its inception, ecological economics has developed a distinguishable line of research
that focuses on environmental decision-making through work on multi-criteria analysis and in
particular participatory environmental decision-making. As a result, ecological economists have not
overlooked these developments side-by-side with the growing social science literature on the role of
participation in environmental governance.
4. Deliberative Ecological Economics
Ecological economists were quick to recognize the value of deliberative democracy for the study of
environmental decision-making. The potential of deliberative processes to improve the legitimacy of
policy decisions seems an obviously attractive prospect to a field long concerned with the legitimacy
shortcomings of conventional methods of environmental decision-making such as cost-benefit
analysis [42,43]. As the capacity of preference aggregation to provide a genuinely democratic means
for capturing the social value of the environment comprises a main concern with such methods [26] the
possibility of reflection and deliberation towards establishing some sort of ‗consensus‘ group values
advanced by deliberative decision-making unavoidably resulted attractive to ecological economists.
Moreover, the communicative action view that preferences are formed during inter-subjective
Sustainability 2010, 2 3407
communication also coincides with ecological economists‘ insistence that rational action may be better
understood as procedural rather than substantive [28]. The emphasis on considering preference
formation as a process, instead of seeing preferences as a priori held like conventional environmental
decision-making methods such as cost-benefit analysis do, has proved useful to ecological economics.
As ecological economics has long held that preference formation is socially constructed through
institutional influences [36,42] it has also argued that an attention at securing open, encompassing and
democratic ‗value articulating institutions‘ is crucial for legitimate and successful environmental
decision-making [44]. Deliberative democracy‘s aim to pursue a public sphere of information,
reflection, deliberation and consensual decision-making free of coercion as a policy objective, provides
a pertinent model of such a desirable value articulating institution.
The view of preferences as procedurally-formed, non-aggregative and socially constructed and the
suggestions in the deliberative democracy literature as regards desirable types of value articulating
institutions prompted some ecological economists to consider using deliberative-type forums in order
to study and elicit group environmental values via a method of ‗deliberative environmental
valuation‘ [45-47]. Deliberative valuation comprises an attempt to turn the value elicitation process
into a preference-constructing process in order to deal with the issues that people do not hold
pre-determined preferences towards the environment and that such preferences should be
deliberatively derived [48]. Such attempts have provided interesting insights as regards the
applicability and improvement of environmental valuation [49] but have also attracted scepticism over
the potential to combine what appear to be two potentially conflictive processes of valuing the
environment, namely the deliberative process of deliberative valuation and the calculative process of
cost-benefit analysis and contingent valuation, [50] and whether such a method is trying to combine two
incompatible valuation processes [51]. Some ecological economics scholars have even argued that in
practice deliberative valuation serves to justify stated preference methods by adding often superficial
forms of deliberation or discussion and that relevant studies in essence establish that the economic
model they use is unsuitable for understanding particular sets of social values as regards the
environment [52].
Ecological economists have also shown interest in combining multi-criteria analysis with deliberative
processes in order to arrive at more ‗precise‘ and legitimate environmental preferences [53]. This is not
surprising given this methodology‘s concern with incorporating multiple values in environmental
decision-making [54] and the interest of scholars in the potential of multi-criteria evaluation to
transform policy analysis into a learning (communicative) process [55,56]. On the main, most attempts
employ processes of deliberation and reflection for getting at a decision over the allocation of weights
habitually used in multi-criteria analysis as a proxy for social preferences regarding the importance of
the various goals that the model tries to satisfy. Relevant applications have proved useful for revealing
the thinking and reasons lying behind environmental preferences [57], have shown potential to help
understand crucial aspects of complex decision-making problems [58] and have produced critical
insights regarding the contrast between stakeholder policy priorities (derived via deliberative
multi-criteria analysis) and government allocations of available resources for tackling environmental
issues [59]. Although this literature has not yet been critically assessed, the applicability of the
criticism regarding the superficiality of deliberation raised against deliberative valuation should also be
considered here—particularly for studies where deliberation is reduced to a one or two-day process.
Sustainability 2010, 2 3408
A further criticism of deliberative approaches to environmental valuation relates to issues of
representation [43]. Work by social psychologists, for example, suggests that deliberative mechanisms
function best when they involve small groups of no more than fifteen participants. It is important that a
variety of perspectives be represented to facilitate dialogue and agreement across difference. In
practice, deliberative groups often involve carefully selected stakeholders who are supposed to
represent the beliefs and values of broader communities. Yet this raises the question as to whether
groups of elite and sometimes self-selected stakeholders can reasonably act on behalf of society as a
whole. Davies et al. [60] have proposed a way round this ―representation problem‖ with the use of Q
methodology prior to deliberation which helps choose representative viewpoints and participants for
deliberative forums. Q methodology is a mixed quantitative and qualitative method used to study
people‘s subjectivity by means of identifying the full range of discourses held around a topic (for more
on Q see [61], which could allow designing deliberative forums that reflect a broad range of existing
points of view around the issue at stake. Nevertheless, the representation problem is exacerbated by the
high cost and demanding nature of deliberative processes, which can require multiple days of effort by
the individuals involved.
A second area of enquiry of the literature that combines deliberation with ecological economics has
recently emerged. This goes beyond the preference formation applications to focus on the study of the
politics of sustainable development and their influences upon environmental policy decisions [48]. At
the basis of the deliberative democracy paradigm lies an awareness of the need to acknowledge and
legitimize plural values in public policy and decision-making. Several contributions in ecological
economics share a concern towards the potential of today‘s materially-intensive and growth-oriented
capitalist economy to achieve genuine ‗green‘ outcomes [62] and its apparent failure to dematerialize [63].
Given that the imperatives or emergent properties sought by such a system may end up punishing the
introduction of some types of necessary ‗green‘ structures in the economy [39], the study of
institutional orientations (rationalities) that do not exclude non-utilitarian values has become an
important aspect of research in ecological economics [35,44].
This field has emphasised the need to investigate the politics of sustainability and in particular the
linkages between these and environmental policy by stressing the importance [40] and showing the
value [64] of embracing a plurality of epistemological and normative ideas, interpretations and
practices as regards sustainable development. Furthermore, it has underlined the need to open up
public spaces for debating and enacting a politics of sustainability that will advance the concept and
practice of sustainable development [64]. Calls for value pluralism both in its epistemological and
political dimensions also favour the adoption of critical views regarding the marginalisation of plural
values as valid discourses and practices of sustainable development and raise attention to issues
relating to conditions and principles that are necessary for facilitating deliberative sustainability
politics. Contributions in this field of cross-fertilisation between ecological economics and deliberative
democracy have examined the importance of inclusive discourses over policies addressing serious
environmental challenges such as climate change [65] in an effort to identify policy principles better
placed to facilitate inclusiveness of views and deliberation over sustainability. They have also
examined the value of deliberative processes for encompassing a broad spectrum of epistemological
perspectives in the diagnosis of environmental issues within the context of politically influential
international initiatives such as the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment [64].
Sustainability 2010, 2 3409
On-the-ground experience with deliberative forums for environmental planning, however, shows
that formal and informal aspects of power prevent a fulfilment of public participation based on the
power of citizens or the empowerment of weak groups in the sense of Habermasian communicative
rationality [66]. This effect has been attributed to the fact that power relations are not simply left at the
door of deliberative forums the moment that actors enter them but are instead brought into and end up
significantly shaping deliberation processes. For example, dramaturgical behaviours [67] have been
observed within deliberative forums, whereby front-stage performances or modes of interaction
adopted by actors hide a very different power-shaped reality that exists at a back stage, although
ironically those artificial front-stage attitudes are taken to represent reality. This is the case of business
representatives in some deliberative forums who avoid openly expressing their values and objectives in
the deliberative process thinking that they may be too conflictive and instead prefer ―alternative
communicative channels to make their ‗substantive‘ representations‖ [68] to influential bodies such as
government agencies. Moreover, the heavy focus on ways of improving and innovating the format of
deliberative institutions seems to have resulted in deviating attention from thorny issues such as the
study of forums‘ actual impacts on existing institutions and structures of decision-making [68], hence
the argument that efforts which emphasise the fairness and competence of decision-making processes
are important, but more basic questions regarding the distribution of political power (inside and outside
deliberative forums) and the institutional capacity for democratic change need be addressed to fully
consider the importance of deliberative institutions [68]. Similar points have been made in the past
regarding ways in which the participatory management of local natural resources by village
communities, which is now widely accepted as an institutional imperative in development initiatives,
can exclude significant sections (e.g., women) and hence generate ‗participatory exclusions‘ [69] and
‗value exclusions‘ [70].
These points reflect a deeper, more conceptual criticism of Habermas‘s ideals regarding the creation
of ideal public spaces as a goal for public policy for its failure to take into account the power
dimensions of discourse in the sense meant by Foucault [71]. This perspective underlines the
normative effects of discourses upon social practices, i.e., that particular discourses involve a language
of power communicated by and embodied in the specifics of particular social practices (e.g., legal
punishment). In that sense, scholars criticise deliberative ideals for failing to notice that ―participation
(or discourse) is constrained by, hides and at the same time perpetuates certain sets of power
relations‖ [68]. As a result, contributions in the planning literature flag the concern that the result of
struggling to find shared values through deliberative processes may sometimes be the silencing of
values instead of giving them voice [72].
5. A Deliberative Ecological Economics Research Agenda
Deliberative ecological economics could be fruitfully advanced by researching the implications of
deliberative procedures for preference formation and the politics of sustainability. In this section we
outline several potential research priorities.
First, comparatively little empirical work has been conducted on the influence of deliberation on
preference formation. One early contribution is Davis & Whittington‘s [73] analysis of a public works
project in Uganda. In this case, participation in structured community forums refined and enhanced
Sustainability 2010, 2 3410
respondents‘ willingness-to-pay as measured using stated preference techniques. On a different plain,
Gregory & Wellman [53] employed deliberative methods in a multicriteria decision analysis of wetlands
restoration in coastal Oregon. Further examples are provided by Álvarez-Farizo & Hanley‘s [74] case
study of the Water Framework Directive and by Dietz et al.‘s [75] analysis of people‘s preferences
regarding climate change mitigation policy. See also Hermans et al.‘s [76] study of watershed
management in rural Vermont.
Concerning the second strand of research in deliberative ecological economics that focuses on the
politics of sustainability, power-related issues are at the heart of concerns raised as regards the actual
potential of deliberative processes for policy-making. As a result, a broader conceptual point as regards
this second strand of research in deliberative ecological economics is that, given the centrality of
power concerns in criticisms over the capacity of deliberative politics, researchers need to be clear
about what they mean and understand as ‗power‘ and ‗politics‘. Here, researchers could benefit from
the work done in the field of political ecology which studies the relevance of power for environmental
issues in particular looking at the influence of power over environmental change and conflict. For
example, Paulson et al. [77] advance a political ecology approach to power that goes down two main
lines of enquiry. First, in line with Hornborg‘s [78] definition of power as ―a social relation built on an
asymmetrical distribution of resources and risks,‖ they emphasise the importance of exploring how
power circulates among and between different social groups, resources, and spaces. This is a view of
power as something that ―presses on the subject from the outside, as what subordinates‖ [79] which
has proved very useful for political ecology research. The second way of looking at power is by
examining the ways people, resources, and places are constituted. This outlook follows Foucault‘s
view that power is formative, that it becomes embodied in social practice (it can even literally form the
shape of human bodies) and that in this twisted way it may be seen ―as providing the very condition of
[a subject‘s] existence and the trajectory of its desire‖ [79].
In turn, politics are ―found in the practices and mechanisms through which power is circulated‖ [77].
Environmental politics in particular, are a contested and negotiated domain expressed in ―the practices
and processes through which power, in its multiple forms, is wielded and negotiated‖ [77] on multiple
scales and contexts. These conceptualisations of power and politics are used to operationalise research
on environmental change and conflict in order to better address practical problems such as resource
degradation and social marginalization.
A useful concept here could be that of procedural power, i.e., this sort of ―power which, in the face
of complexity, is able nevertheless to impose a language of valuation determining which is the
bottom-line in an ecological distribution conflict‖ [70]. Procedural power has been used to
conceptualise the operation of particular decision-making ‗shortcuts‘ (e.g., cost-benefit analysis) which
attempt to circumvent the complexity of environmental issues and the ‗stagnation‘ of public
decision-making produced by conflict due to the existence of diverse and opposing environmental
values. In that sense, the concept describes how such ‗shortcuts‘ operate as mechanisms of power,
reducing meaningful discussion and deliberation over environmental priorities and values down to
expert-based scientific assessments (e.g., monetary assessments of environmental assets).
Considering the above-mentioned criticism of the real transformative potential of deliberative policy
processes suggests that similar mechanisms of power may as well be operating within deliberative
decision-making, whether these processes materialise in the form of deliberative assemblies or citizen
Sustainability 2010, 2 3411
juries. Research in deliberative ecological economics could focus on particular cases of deliberative
forums for environmental governance and use participant observation (e.g., see [80]) of such forums to
identify power and coercion mechanisms and analyse their operation in order to improve the
democratic legitimacy and effectiveness of such processes. Another useful research priority could be to
seek to establish what type of deliberative ecological economics most limits the influence of coercion
and power by testing for example how different deliberative multi-criteria analysis designs affect power
negotiation (e.g., during the phase of determining criteria weights) [58]. Nevertheless, any attempt
focussing at improving the format of deliberative processes should keep in mind above-mentioned
criticisms regarding the institutional relevance of such processes and the capacity for change of the
broader institutional framework within which deliberation takes place [68]. In that sense, relevant
research attempts in deliberative ecological economics should seek to critically understand and assess
overarching institutional frameworks while exploring e.g., ideal deliberative multi-criteria designs.
From the above it becomes clear that balanced or shared power within deliberative forums is clearly
one criterion for deliberative valuation or more broadly decision-making processes that are more likely
to yield desirable sustainability policy outcomes in terms of legitimacy and effectiveness. Institutional
relevance of deliberative processes, in terms of their outcomes substantially informing and if necessary
changing existing policy priorities, practices, etc. could be another criterion of success. The capacity of
deliberative processes to provide and open space both inside and outside forums for expressing,
debating, and shifting values instead of silencing them or generating ‗participatory exclusions‘ seems
to be another important success criterion. Establishing the implications of continuing deliberations for
the success of forums, which is difficult to grasp due to the fact that participants cannot a priori know
the value of additional deliberations as the benefits of these cannot be known until they have already
taken place, could provide information for developing further criteria of success of deliberative
processes. Future research in deliberative ecological economics could seek to scrutinise the above and
establish and test more such criteria via both theoretical investigations of the relevant literature, past
deliberative initiatives, etc. and empirical testing of their significance in new settings (e.g., through
case studies). Focusing deliberative ecological economics research towards deriving a robust set of
criteria that yield deliberative decision-making successful could help not only boost the field‘s links to
policy-making but also improve sustainability policy design and implementation.
Overall, the relevant literature that has developed during the last ten years or so seems to suggest
that the ideal of communicative rationality is attractive and at least an attempt to approximate it seems
an important goal that should be sought after with public policy [81]. However, observations regarding
the influence of power on communicative planning practice essentially point out that deliberative
inter-subjective communication and decision-making can be distorted by institutionalized forces or
extra-institutional agents. Such distortion may involve not only direct exercise of power, but also
manipulation, propaganda, deception, etc. that can result in the dominance of some ideas over others,
which strips deliberation from its democratic potential. This is why advocates of deliberative
decision-making complement communicative rationality with the requirement that reflection induced
through inter-subjective communication is made in a non-coercive fashion and that it is free from
deception, self-deception, strategizing, and manipulation in order to achieve genuinely democratic
decisions [39]. Research in deliberative ecological economics could add to this direction by asking
Sustainability 2010, 2 3412
questions such as ―why and how does power infiltrate deliberative decision-making over
sustainability?‖ and could use case study research methods [82] to explore this.
There is one clear important sustainability policy implication of instituting deliberative democracy
at the foundation of environmental policy and this is that decision-making processes should function as
‗public spheres‘ for deliberation to take place and facilitate preference shifts. Deliberative policy
analysts agree on the centrality of dialogue for legitimate decision-making and underline the
importance of conceptual tools to make such dialogues possible. Building on work done in interpretive
policy analysis [83] that puts emphasis on the meanings (imposed, challenged, intended and interpreted)
of policies, deliberative policy analysis scholars have focused on discourse coalitions formed around
different meanings of policies [84]. As preferences are seen to shape up in interaction, researchers
suggest tools such as discourse analysis in order to analyze political formation, mutual positioning and
the influence of particular policy discourses that bring together groups in the context of policy-making
[71]. Such analyses explicitly attempt to identify the best means of integrating value pluralism in
policy making by focusing on how ‗identities of shared preferences‘ develop through deliberative
decision-making processes. The objective is to learn more about the conditions where people
re-position their distinct preferences during deliberation occurring in the context of interactive
policy-making practices, particularly inside policy networks and the network society [85]. This is
mostly done by looking at how conflicts of value pluralism and identity are dealt within such processes.
Similar developments in ecological economics have underlined the value of Q methodology for
identifying discourses and linking them to environmental policy in order to improve the latter‘s
legitimacy by including plural and multiple values in sustainability policy [86]. Research in
deliberative ecological economics could contribute to this by combining Q methodology with
participant observation to explore the formation of discourse coalitions and the conditions under which
this occurs in the form of people re-positioning their preferences inside deliberative forums in the
absence of direct or indirect coercion.
Whereas the first strand of research in deliberative ecological economics focuses on bringing in
deliberation for improving the study of preference formation, the second strand of this field is
concerned with the analysis of sustainability policy and politics. This strand uses insights on
deliberation from the broader body of social science (political science, planning literature, human
geography, etc.) to study more ‗traditional‘ ecological economics issues and in particular issues related
to sustainability decision-making. The relative ‗novelty‘ of this strand is that by postulating desirable
sustainability governance as deliberative it focuses attention on analysing the absence of deliberation
in sustainability governance or deficiencies of existing deliberative processes. To do so, it employs the
notion of procedural power, i.e., the power to decide which method or principle of environmental
valuation is relevant for sustainability decision-making, that has been distinctively developed within
ecological economics [70] to address the need to avoid value-excluding decision-making (e.g., one
based upon cost-benefit analysis) and explain mechanisms within the sphere of public decision-making
that generate ecological distribution conflicts. In particular, this strand of deliberative ecological
economics seeks to analyse how decision-making shortcuts and bottom-lines (such as cost-benefit
evaluations) explain deliberation absence or deficiencies and understands these by recourse to a
political ecology explanatory framework of power and politics. As a result, the second strand of
deliberative ecological economics research is important for ecological economics as it aspires to fill in
Sustainability 2010, 2 3413
the research gap of studying procedural power through a combined political ecology/ecological
economics approach as advocated by Martinez-Alier [70]. In that sense, this strand tries to answer two
important research questions posed by ecological economics, namely the one regarding who has the
power to decide sustainability decision-making procedures and ―who has the power to simplify
complexity ruling some languages of valuation out of order?‖ [70].
6. Conclusions
Deliberative ecological economics has sprung out of the preoccupation of some ecological
economists with environmental value exclusion effects of the reductionist model of rational human
action employed by mainstream economics to analyse environmental policy. Considering rational
action as an attempt to reach understanding between oneself and others via inter-subjective
communication, deliberative democracy postulates that decision-making processes should generate
public spheres that establish conditions promoting debate of actors‘ values and preferences in order to
facilitate reflection and preference shift with a view to some sort of future consensus. Ecological
economists have used those insights to improve research on the formation of social preferences
towards the environment by introducing deliberation in environmental valuation exercises and in the
course of developing multi-criteria analysis models. Other ecological economists focus on another aspect
of deliberative environmental decision-making, namely its capacity to produce nuanced, comprehensive
and inclusive visions of environmental issues, integrated into current political processes.
However, work in deliberative environmental preference formation has been criticised for trying to
combine two conflictive processes of valuing the environment (deliberation and monetary valuation)
which results in many studies trying to justify stated preferences methods by often involving
superficial levels of deliberation. Moreover, criticisms from the environmental planning literature
suggest that deliberative political decision-making processes often fail as they ignore the practical
context of power surrounding and pervading environmental planning. To this end, it seems valuable
that future research in this field considers how power intrudes actual deliberative processes of
environmental decision-making in an effort to release their full democratic and transformative
potential. Further work along those lines can help advance both the newly-formed field of deliberative
ecological economics and improve knowledge and practice of environmental governance.
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers as well as the Editor of this Special Issue
Robert Krueger for their genuinely constructive and useful comments.
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