Environmental Democracy Facing Uncertainty

Abstract

This collective work provides a reflexive reading of environmental democracy as a new method of governance of the contemporary ecological issues that declining biodiversity, climate change and sustainable development present. The authors examine the links between the environment and democracy by questioning the status of actors, the manner of their involvement, the various ways of mobilising knowledge and the mechanisms of dialogue and decision-making based on study cases observed in different national contexts (Italy, France, Ireland, Germany, the Netherlands, Russia, Canada and Brazil). This international approach sheds light on the means of appropriation of environmental democracy on a local level and its ability to promote universal characteristics or to standardise the connection to the environment and politics. The originality of this work comes, among other things, from its transversality, associating texts with differing theoretical outlooks and methodology in an innovative way. Through this perspective on-going processes of redefining environmental problems are revealed via the prisms of risks and uncertainty, thus assigning them a new role in aiding decision-making in a sociology that is in turn critical and committed.