Ecological Democracy: Statist or Transnational?

Robyn Eckersley’s book The Green State approaches political ecology from a helpfully critical perspective and presents some interesting arguments in favour of an ecologically aware yet still state-centered approach to dealing with global environmental problems. The brief analysis and critique that I undertake here will provide some opportunity to determine whether in fact political ecology can remain focused on the nation-state, however ‘green’, or whether we need a more fully transnational, or even global, approach to dealing with the weighty environmental issues that confront us. By way of appreciation, we can note Eckersley’s use of critical social theory, particularly Habermassian discourse theory, and conceptions of deliberative democracy to address political ecological issues. She brings a critical approach to bear on international relations theory as well, which she interprets in a social constructivist perspective. In dialectical fashion, her work (like that of several other theorists, including my own) seeks to mediate between liberal democratic and communitarian approaches, and she explores how this mediated position can be used to address ecological issues. As in my contemporaneous work Globalizing Democracy and Human Rights (2004), Eckersley attempts to give due weight to considerations of membership as well as to ‘being affected’ by decisions and policies in order to resolve the question of who gets to participate in which decisions in an increasingly global context. Further, although Eckersley’s concerns are primarily with ecological democracy, she briefly recognizes the need for economic democracy as well. She also adopts a social ontology similar to the one that I introduced in Marx’s Social Ontology (1978), which conceptualizes individuals as fundamentally socially related (or mutually constituting, as what I call ‘individuals-in relations’) and understands these individuals as internally rather than externally related to each other. Eckersley