Book Review: Deliberative Environmental Politics: Democracy and Ecological Rationality by Walter F. Baber and Robert V. Bartlett

Abstract

Walter F. Baber and Robert V. Bartlett begin their book Deliberative Environmental Politics: Democracy and Ecological Rationality with a review of the scathing indictments that have been made by environmentalists against a view of democracy typically described as “interest-group liberalism.” Charged with using language that is “stunted and shallow” (p. 1) and being “virtually obsolete” for the environmental movement (p. 2), how can democracy be rehabilitated from its less than stellar performance in handling the world’s most pressing problems? In other words, is green democracy theoretically possible? For Baber and Bartlett, the answer is yes. Trained in the fields of Public Policy Studies and Political Science, respectively, Baber and Bartlett attempt to bridge the gap between theory and practice that has plagued environmental politics for so long. For these authors, democracy must take a deliberative turn if it is to avoid being relegated to the trash bin of useless ideas. In chapters one and two, Baber and Bartlett follow others in their respective fields who believe a deliberative approach is “the only way to overcome the failings of interest-group liberalism,” contending deliberative democracy has the potential to produce better environmental policy decisions (p. 6). Although Baber and Bartlett acknowledge that “deliberative democracy” is difficult to define, they argue it is a school of political thought that presumes the essence of democracy is “deliberation rather than voting, interest aggregation, or rights” (p. 6). For deliberation to work, participants must also be politically equal and engage one another in the “weighing, acceptance, or rejection of reasons” (p. 6). Of course, the authors also attempt to argue that Horkheimer and Adorno’s observations about instrumental reason in The Dialectic of Enlightenment can be addressed by deliberative democracy scholars. In chapter three, realizing different conceptions of deliberative democracy have drastically divergent assumptions, Baber and Bartlett wisely take three models of deliberative democracy as their “points of departure.” In chapters four, five and six, Baber and Bartlett explore the ideas of deliberative democracy as it has been articulated by John Rawls, Jurgen Habermas, and thinkers such as Amy Gutmann, Dennis Thompson, and James Bohman. Rawls represents the “public reason” approach to deliberative democracy, Habermas the “ideal discourse” perspective, and Gutmann, Thompson, and Bohman the “full liberalism” version. It is in these chapters that the authors are at their best. Baber and Bartlett tackle complicated material and make it accessible to readers