Democratic Norms of Earth System Governance: Deliberative Politics in the Anthropocene

Abstract

Climate change has made it clear that humans are facing one of their most daunting challenges: to reach broad awareness of the unsustainability of current trajectories of development and to change the route. However, the global environmental issues at hand are not limited to climate change. Humanity has come to interfere with several planetary boundaries, including biodiversity loss, chemical pollution, and freshwater use (Rockström et al. 2009). Human interference with planetary systems and its fundamental environmental consequences have led to the conclusion that we have entered a new geological era. We are now living in the Anthropocene. The concept of Anthropocene suggests that no part of the natural world is untouched by humans. This implies that humans have broad responsibility for nature and that solutions to environmental problems need to place humans near the center (p. 11). One of the most dramatic consequences of these insights is that humans are (or should be) competing against time to limit the negative consequences of the current environmental crises. Democratic Norms of Earth System Governance: Deliberative Politics in the Anthropocene, by Walter Baber and Robert Bartlett, starts with this daunting challenge, arguing that ‘‘[t]he processes that must be confronted and reflexively transformed lie at the heart of modernity, notably the forces and relations of economic production, the ways that risk is managed, and the processes of knowledge generation and dissemination’’ (p. 1). But the challenge does not end there. In a global world economy and political order, successful governance measures need to address local to global levels through institutions that are not only flexible and adjustable to context but that are also accountable and serve to protect nature and humans in a just and responsible manner. Due to the limited time frame that is available to address these challenges before they grow even more severe, Baber and Bartlett suggest that the existing global administrative bureaucracy is bound to have a key role in this transformation. A deliberative model of administrative accountability may serve to increase its legitimacy and efficiency, as well as moral accountability. The book, as I read it, fills two purposes. The first one is to map the terrain of global environmental governance, and the second one is to propose and argue for institutional changes suitable for environmental governance in the Anthropocene. When mapping the terrain, Baber and Bartlett start with five dimensions of global environmental governance that have been key topics within academic debate over the last decades. There has been an extensive debate regarding the role of the state as well as the influence of a broader set of actors in governance networks. When accounting for agency in global environmental governance, Baber and Bartlett give specific attention to academics, activists, billionaires, and bureaucrats; people or groups within the established system with the potential to push and challenge the system to accomplish transformative change. The other dimensions are the architecture of environmental governance (its institutional structures), such as global agreements and frameworks, partnerships and networks; issues of accountability and legitimacy; equal allocation of resources; and the adaptiveness of governance systems to different contexts and circumstances. The chapters of the book are structured to sketch the key connections between these five dimensions of environmental governance (agency, architecture, accountability, allocation, and adaptiveness) and five normative democratic criteria of good environmental governance, namely that it should be empowering, embedded, experimental, equivocal, and equitable. These normative criteria are argued to be critical for effective environmental governance in the Anthropocene. Equivocality and being experimental are norms that are particularly critical for global environmental governance in the Reviews 317