Disempowerment and democracy

Whether expressed as the ‘emancipatory’ critique of the modern liberal state (Eckerlsey 1992) or more directly as the structural inability of liberal democracy to foster participatory forms of governance and citizen empow­erment, or the unwillingness of liberal democracy to extend democracy to the spheres of production (as eco-Marxists propose), reproduction (as some eco-feminists argue) and science and technology (Beck), greens find the modern liberal state wanting on democratic as well as ecological grounds.

Representative democracy, based around a competitive party system with periodic elections offers a very ‘thin’ account of active citizenship, one that is both reduced to the citizen as a bearer of formal legal rights and where the primary relation is between state and citizen and the compliance of the citizen in the ordering processes of the state. As one of us has argued elsewhere (Barry 2005), arguments and analyses of ‘Green citizenship’ need to be linked to work on developing new Green theories of the state as well as insights into the ‘greening of the state’ and the characteristics of a ‘green state’. Green citizenship is not exclusively attached to the state and also needs to be located within civil society (as Dryzek etal. suggest below), as well as organized to enable transnational forms of democracy (Eckersley, 2004) and to be especially cognisant of ‘resistance’ forms of green citizenship, which, are absolutely central to the creation of ‘greener’ states.

Greens, in criticizing the liberal state along these lines, have also drawn attention to the ways in which liberal democracy leads to the promotion of the consumer and of consumer values and practices over other interests and forms of identity, including those associated with active citizenship (Barry 1999a; Sagoff 1988). For the eco-authoritarians, the consequence here is that democracy itself has to be sacrificed in the pursuit of sustainability, precisely as democracy is understood to require the pursuit of material affluence for its legitimacy.

The eco-authoritarian argument turns on the prioritization of ‘survival’ and ‘security’ over ecologically unsustainable and crisis-producing material affluence and the democratic political arrangements that affluence sustains. But it also turns on the assumption that all forms of democracy suffer from the same weaknesses as the liberal kind; namely that they structurally tend to promote individualism, consumerism, etc. But Greens rather argue for a deepening of democracy, for forms of participatory democracy which are not premised on such individualist principles, but rather regard individuals as embedded in communities and in responsibilities both within and beyond those communities (see more below on notions of ecological democracy).