5 - Deliberative democracy and participatory biodiversity

Summary

It has always been a liberal ideal that ‘the people’ control their destiny. From Aristotle onwards, the notion of kratos (rule) by the demos (people) set the basis for a struggle over power and enlightenment. Needless to say, putting such concepts into practice is hugely problematic, since there is no agreement over how rules should be created or obeyed, let alone who constitutes ‘the people’. What we learn from the troubled history of democracy is that any movement to inclusionary and deliberative practices is deeply embedded in institutions of power, social relationships and cultural expectations. It is possible there can be no deliberative democracy, only many quasi-deliberative democracies, each imperfect and only partially tested for equity and effectiveness. And, as we noted in chapter 1, there may only be a biodiversity that is the result of some form of participatory perspective, whether by agreement or by rule, or by a messy combination of science, politics and imperfect institutional design. There is apparently not a ‘biodiversity’ that is other than socially constructed, and managed by the exercise of power, authority and empathetic care.

The purpose of this chapter is to examine the drift towards a more inclusionary and deliberative politics in the modern age, to assess how far attempts to incorporate such approaches have worked in biodiversity management, and to take a cool, hard look at its prospects in an emerging world where enduring biodiversity may well have to be participatory.