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