The problem with 'greening liberal democracy'

Abstract

A frequently heard claim is that liberal democracies are not reacting effectively to the environmental challenge. One important explanation is that liberal democracies have a problem justifying environmental policies. Greening liberal democracy is maybe the most dominant intellectual response to that problem. However it has been suggested that the environmental issue could not be resolved within the liberal democratic moral framework and therefore that this 'greening' of liberal democracy is a mere modus vivendi. In response I shall argue that there are good reasons to doubt the neutrality of liberal democracy with regard to environmental values. In that sense there is indeed a problem with 'greening liberal democracy'. However, when looking deeper into the question we also see that this problem is partly due to the fact that certain basic aspects of environmental political thought fundamentally resist some of the background ideas, which provide the rationale for the liberal democratic idea of neutrality. And this, I shall argue, raises some doubts regarding the environmentalist position, which justify at least some aspects of the greening thesis.