Governing Biodiversity through Democratic Deliberation

This book discusses political controversies involved in global biodiversity policy, and the practical opportunities that are opened up in solving them through increased citizen participation and democratic deliberation. It examines the emerging practice of deliberative global governance and its political consequences.

The collection focuses on the intersection of global biodiversity policy and the promise of deliberative democracy. In doing so, it examines how new discursive logics emerge in global citizen deliberation that might destabilize the impasses encountered in biodiversity negotiations, how a "global citizens’ voice" emerges in deliberative processes despite the dominance of national institutions in the lives of those citizens, the most effective and innovative ways to amplify the results of large-scale deliberations to policy makers and broader audiences, and how future citizen deliberations can be designed to make them fair, feasible and consequential processes, in general and for biodiversity issues in particular.

This highly original contribution to the field provides theoretical discussions, empirical analyses and local experiences of biodiversity policy, making it an invaluable resource for students and scholars of environmental politics, governance and sociology, particularly those interested in deliberative democracy, citizen participation and biodiversity.

Mikko Rask is adjunct Professor and senior researcher at University of Helsinki, Finland

Richard Worthington is Professor at Pomona College, California, USA