ABSTRACT
Robyn Eckersley’s chapter (above) serves to illustrate the fact that it has become central to the green or ecological view of democracy that it should be based primarily on a form that is deliberative in character. This will, it is argued, not only secure the promotion of green values, but will also enable self-development and the excavation of deeper societal ethical norms. However, the nature of environmental risks and, indeed, the green values that often identify them, are not necessarily best served or resolved through deliberation alone. While deliberation does have its benefits, to focus on deliberation without considering its constitutional context, is to miss much of the political benefit of constitutional change. We suggest that constitutionalism (a much-neglected feature of ecological democratic thinking) provides a mechanism whereby ecological values and pervasive societal risks may be reconciled. This chapter argues that a preoccupation with deliberation is not unproblematic. We suggest a greater emphasis on constitutional engineering as a more fruitful mechanism for securing ecological goals within a broadly liberal democratic framework. The purpose of constitutionalism in this context is to resolve a number of the difficulties with deliberative forms of democracy. In particular, we claim that deliberation is limited in its ability to deal effectively with issues of risk and hence we suggest that boundaries need to be set on the deliberative (or any other democratic) process itself. In this way the selfbinding nature of democracy is retained and, importantly, questions of severe ecological risk are not subject to the arbitrary outcomes implicit in the deliberative process. Even models of democracy which are ostensibly ecological and seek to adjust the representative mechanism by the innovative use of the proxy (Dobson 1996b) do so in ways which simply replicate, rather than overcome, the problems implicit in the representative model. So, whilst sympathetic to the distinctive position adopted by Eckersley, we wish to emphasize the importance of the constitutional dimension in innovative ecological visions of democracy.
