ENVIRONMENTAL POLICY
quite rare, there is growing evidence of the transformative power of these
various citizen forums, with participants becoming much better informed
and often changing their judgements and preferences. For example,
deliberative polls run by Texas public utilities asked citizens to choose
between four resource planning options: renewable energy; fossil fuel plants;
investment in energy conservation; or importing energy from elsewhere.
Before deliberation, citizens wanted renewable energy; afterwards, while
still keen on it, they swung strongly behind energy conservation as the
most cost-effective solution (ibid.: 88; Fishkin 1997 : 200–3). Both citizen juries
(used in several countries, especially Germany where they are called plan-
ning cells) and consensus conferences (common in Denmark) produce rec-
ommendations that take environmental concerns far more seriously than
existing policy, whilst demonstrating that citizens are capable of deliber-
ating about complex issues. All three techniques are open to criticism; for
example, over whether they should be representative, or whether they are
open to manipulation, or whether they suppress conflict (Smith 2003 : 90–
3; Meadowcroft 2004 ). Nor should they replace existing democratic mech-
anisms. But they do offer a very promising complement to representative
structures by obtaining citizen opinions about tricky environmental issues
and providing useful recommendations that can be fed into the policy pro-
cess (Smith 2003 : 93).
However, it is important to recall that democratic mechanisms do not
guarantee environmentally benevolent outcomes (see Chapter3). They may
open up policymaking but pluralistic processes are frequently hijacked
by powerful actors, especially as producer interests can exercise first-
dimensional power by mobilising greater resources in their cause. Alter-
natively, radical voices may be co-opted into the policy process and tamed.
Even if the ‘democratic will’ (whatever that may be) does prevail over power
politics, it may not represent a victory for sustainable development. As the
example of UK wind energy illustrates, local planning decisions may produce
conflict between the democratically expressed preferences of a local com-
munity and the sustainable development strategy of the elected national
government (see Box11.5). More broadly, as thenext chaptershows, elected
governments frequently desist from implementing radical environmental
initiatives such as regulating car use or imposing eco-taxes for fear of upset-
ting the will of the majority at the next election.
Such dilemmas are in the nature of democracy, and they underpin a
difference in emphasis between sustainable development and ecological
modernisation. Sustainable development acknowledges the imperfections
in democracy but believes in its potential to educate citizens to behave
more considerately towards the environment and to improve environmen-
tal policymaking. By contrast, ecological modernisation places greater trust
in the capacity of technological innovation and the market-place, rather
than the wilfulness of democratic mechanisms, to bring about a sustainable
society.