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

Deliberative democracy is well-suited to the challenges of governing in the Anthropocene. But deliberative democratic practices are only suited to these challenges to the extent that five prerequisites - empoweredness, embeddedness, experimentality, equivocality, and equitableness - are successfully institutionalized. Governance must be: created by those it addresses, applicable equally to all, capable of learning from (and adapting to) experience, rationally grounded, and internalized by those who adopt and experience it. This book analyzes these five major normative principles, pairing each with one of the Earth System Governance Project's analytical problems to provide an in-depth discussion of the minimal conditions for environmental governance that can be truly sustainable. It is ideal for scholars and graduate students in global environmental politics, earth system governance, and international environmental policy. This is one of a series of publications associated with the Earth System Governance Project. For more publications, see www.cambridge.org/earth-system-governance.

Walter F. Baber is Professor in the Environmental Sciences and Policy Program and the Graduate Center for Public Policy and Administration at California State University, Long Beach. He is also Affiliated Professor at the Raoul Wallenberg Institute of Human Rights and Humanitarian Law in Lund, Sweden. He has published many research articles and five previous books, including four co-authored books with Robert V. Bartlett. Most recently this has included: Environmental Human Rights in Earth System Governance: Democracy Beyond Democracy (Earth System Governance Elements series, Cambridge University Press, 2020). He has been a Lead Faculty of the international Earth System Governance research alliance since 2012, and has had Fulbright scholar appointments in Italy, Sweden, and Austria.

Robert V. Bartlett is the Gund Professor of the Liberal Arts in the Political Science Department and the Environmental Program at the University of Vermont, where he is also a Fellow in the Gund Institute of Environment. He has published many research articles and eleven previous books, several of which have won prizes. He has been a Lead Faculty of the international Earth System Governance research alliance since 2012, and has had Fulbright scholar appointments in New Zealand, Ireland, Italy, and Austria.