Designs for environmental discourse revisited: a greener administrative state?

Abstract

In this chapter I will try to navigate a path through these thickets. I will begin by setting out the administrative state and a discursive democratic alternative in ideal-type terms, and examine their strengths and weaknesses in a way that is comparative but static. This comparison will come down in favor of discursive democracy as being intrinsically more likely to promote ecological values. However, diagnosis of the faults of the administrative state can be instructive, not just by pointing to the qualities that any institutional alternatives should seek, but also in identifying traps into which these alternatives might themselves fall. I then move to a more nuanced and analysis of the relationship between the administrative state and democracy, showing that green democratization of the administrative state is a worthwhile project but exactly how and when it can take place depends crucially on the political-economic context. Show more