TY - JOUR
T1 - Deliberation as a catalyst for reflexive environmental governance
AU - DRYZEK, John
AU - Pickering, Jonathan
N1 - Funding Information:
We are grateful for comments on this research from Carolyn Hendriks, Jensen Sass, Ana Tanasoca and two anonymous reviewers. We received valuable feedback on this research from presentations at the Centre for Deliberative Democracy and Global Governance at the University of Canberra, and the University of Tasmania. This research was supported under the Australian Research Council's Laureate Fellowship funding scheme (project number FL140100154 ).
Publisher Copyright:
© 2016 Elsevier B.V.
PY - 2017/1/1
Y1 - 2017/1/1
N2 - Ecological or ecosystemic reflexivity involves the capacity of social-ecological systems to reconfigure themselves
in response to reflection on their performance. In this paperwe argue that deliberation is central to reflexive governance,
mainly because it can reconcilemany if not most of the sometimes contradictory claims that are made in
the literature about its drivers. We take four key dimensions along which reflexivity may be sought, each of
which features a binary that puts two plausible drivers of reflexivity in tension with one another: (i) sources of
knowledge (public participation versus expertise); (ii) composition of public discourse (diversity versus consensus);
(iii) institutional architecture (polycentricity versus centralization); (iv) institutional dynamics (flexibility
versus stability). In each case, we demonstrate that deliberative ideas can manage the tension between the two
plausible drivers of reflexivity.
AB - Ecological or ecosystemic reflexivity involves the capacity of social-ecological systems to reconfigure themselves
in response to reflection on their performance. In this paperwe argue that deliberation is central to reflexive governance,
mainly because it can reconcilemany if not most of the sometimes contradictory claims that are made in
the literature about its drivers. We take four key dimensions along which reflexivity may be sought, each of
which features a binary that puts two plausible drivers of reflexivity in tension with one another: (i) sources of
knowledge (public participation versus expertise); (ii) composition of public discourse (diversity versus consensus);
(iii) institutional architecture (polycentricity versus centralization); (iv) institutional dynamics (flexibility
versus stability). In each case, we demonstrate that deliberative ideas can manage the tension between the two
plausible drivers of reflexivity.
KW - Reflexive governance
KW - Reflexivity
KW - Environmental governance
KW - Deliberation
KW - Deliberative democracy
KW - Polycentric governance
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84989157869&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1016/j.ecolecon.2016.09.011
DO - 10.1016/j.ecolecon.2016.09.011
M3 - Article
SN - 0921-8009
VL - 131
SP - 353
EP - 360
JO - Ecological Economics
JF - Ecological Economics
ER -