Skip to content

Democracy and Earth System Governance

Dryzek, John S, Hayley Stevenson. 2010. Democracy and Earth System Governance. Earth System Governance Working Paper, No. 8.

Abstract

A revised version of this working paper has been published as:

Dryzek, John S. and Hayley Stevenson. 2011. Global democracy and earth system governance. Ecological Economics, 70 (11): 1865-1874.

The issue of climate change confirms the global reach of earth system governance, whose legitimacy and effectiveness could gain from democratization. While electoral democracy as practiced in states provides no model for global democracy, lessons drawn from the performance of and history of states prove helpful in identifying the elements that a well functioning ecological democracy ought to strive for. We capture these elements through reference to the idea of a deliberative system, and show how the idea of such a system can be used to analyse, evaluate, and provide prescriptions for the global governance of climate change.

Key Words: Earth system governance, deliberative democracy, climate change, deliberative system

You might like these publication categories

Recent publications

Building Capabilities for Earth System Governance

This Element develops a new Strategic Capabilities Framework for studying and steering complex socio-ecological systems. It is driven by the…

Trade and the Environment: Drivers and Effects of Environmental Provisions in Trade Agreements

The mushrooming of trade agreements and their interlinkages with environmental governance calls for new research on the trade and environment…

The Politics of Deep Time

Human societies increasingly interact with processes on a geological or even cosmic timescale. Despite this recognition, we still lack a…