Environmental knowledge and deliberative democracy

In recent years deliberative democracy has spread to a remarkable pace in environment-related policy-making, affecting especially the way democracy meets scientific expertise. Science has for long time been understood as the social enterprise specialized in producing explanatory and predictive knowledge. This has been brought into question by the growing import and saliency of environmental threats, as a ‘side effect’ of techno-science. The result is what is often described as a paradoxical relationship between science and society. Citizens are increasingly concerned with the unfair distribution of the goods and bads of innovation and the intertwining of science, politics and business; they also regard scientists as provided with too much decisional power and too little responsibilities. If modern science has developed on the basis of an ‘unspoken contract’ between science and society, such contract seems therefore to require some revision. To many deliberative democracy represents a sound reply. Promises and perils, strengths and weaknesses of the latter are extensively discussed. Drawing on a fast developing literature in political theory, environmental sociology and sociology of scientific knowledge I reflect on why public deliberation has been often applied to environmental questions and what are the basic challenges it encounters in this field. The possibility of ‘proper’ deliberations, that is something more than mere negotiations, is limited by many factors. There are systematic mismatches in the way those who gather round a deliberating table address uncertainty. There are strong motivations to hold as much as possible the traditional divide in knowledge production, affecting the design and practice of deliberative processes. Radical views of public deliberation focus precisely on deconstructing the boundaries between production and policy application of knowledge by showing how uncertainty makes such boundaries increasingly debatable, the search for facts and truths being mixed up with normative commitments that cannot anymore be disclaimed or taken for granted. Yet one should reflect on the possible effects of dismantling the institutionalised separation between production and policy uses of knowledge. Its breakdown might lead to decreased, rather than increased, openness to public scrutiny. Deliberative democracy can hardly represent by itself an answer to these problems. Its potentialities may flourish not only as a result of procedural refinements, but of broader social reforms.