Introduction

This chapter examines the vexed issue of whether democracy represents part of the problem or part of the solution for efforts to forge an ecologically sustainable future. This is a debate that first emerged in the 1970s and that has recently been rekindled by the failure of national governments to reach international agreements with respect to reductions in carbon emissions and climate change mitigation. In response to this debate, the chapter offers two central arguments. First, it advances the view that Churchill's famous maxim ‘Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others which have been tried from time to time’ clearly applies to sustainability issues. Second, it proposes that governing for sustainability will require an active, urgent process of policy learning to ensure that the advantages of democratic approaches can be harnessed. These lessons will need to inform the framing of environmental policy at all levels of decision-making.

This first half of the chapter reviews the debate about authoritarian versus democratic approaches to environmental problems. It notes that many of the same shortcomings of existing representative democracy with respect to sustainability are identified by both schools of thought. The central point of disagreement relates to whether further ecological degradation is best achieved by limiting democracy or by deepening and extending it. The second half of the chapter then turns to examine the relative merits of democracy and non-democracy from both a theoretical and empirical perspective. The weight of evidence points clearly to the conclusion that democratic decision-making provides the preferred route to a sustainable future, if only as the ‘least worst’ option. Having concluded that democracy offers relative advantages over authoritarian approaches, the remainder of the chapter addresses the question of how democracies can better adapt to the challenges of sustainability.

Democracy and sustainability: two schools of thought