ABSTRACT
As the aims and claims of the environmental movement have come (slowly) to the attention of political theorists, several aspects of the green prospectus seem particularly worthy of investigation. One of the main ones is the claim made by greens (often implicitly) that ecologism is necessarily a democratic political ideology. A large proportion of the attention paid to green theory has been devoted to exploring the relationship between the aims it espouses and the processes by which it seeks to achieve them. The dominant opinion at present, it seems, is that there is no necessary connection between the two to the extent that green processes need to be democratic processes. In what follows I shall outline the problem as it has been expressed in work by Goodin (1992) and Saward (1993), and then explore John Dryzek’s work on discursive democracy and Robyn Eckersley’s on rights and autonomy to see whether green and democratic thinking can be brought more closely-and necessarily-together than Goodin and Saward suggest they can. This leads to an ‘argument from preconditions’ and an ‘argument from principle’, both of which contain significant insights, but neither of which can do without the other. I show how a combination of the two simultaneously democratises green theory and sensitises democratic theory to environmental concerns.
