Abstract
Among Bryan Norton’s most influential contributions to environmental philosophy has been his analysis and evaluation of democratic processes for environmental decision-making. He examines actual cases of environmental decision-making in their legal, political, ethical and scientific contexts, and, with contextual constraints and goals in mind, he theorizes concerning what they accomplish and how they can be improved. Informed by the political theories of both John Dewey and Jürgen Habermas, Norton’s pragmatist approach holds that appropriate democratic decision procedures will generate broadly defensible decisions. Thus, his view of environmental decision-making is based in—and requires—inclusive, democratic, empirical inquiry. While accepting these criteria, I examine how, in practice, it is difficult to identify when these conditions have been adequately met. I investigate the limitations of Norton’s proceduralist approach through a case study in community-based forest management in a New York State urban old-growth park. I argue that Norton’s procedural priorities are too rigid given the contextual constraints of local decision-making. While they are useful for guiding an ideal, high standards sense of the decision-making process, less rigid Deweyan considerations of social learning and community engagement often provide sufficient guidelines for evaluating success.
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Notes
- 1.
While I will examine the outcome of focusing on the policy process as a form of inquiry rather than a contest over political authority, it’s worth noting that Deweyan pragmatism has been criticized for its lack of attention to structural political inequalities (Hildreth 2009). Norton’s approach, for instance, ought to be augmented by explicit attention to the distribution of credibility and epistemic authority in environmental decision-making (Brister 2012).
- 2.
Of course there is a presumption that participants are public-minded, tolerant, and willing to observe the conditions required for civil, democratic discourse. It is also legitimate to assume that they agree to abide by policy decisions. In theory, then, Norton’s account cannot be applied in cases where self-interested stakeholders or corrupt public or private entities are involved. One point I argue later is that, in practice, it can be difficult or impossible to tell when these conditions are met, and thus difficult or impossible to set up a democratic process that protects and reproduces inclusivity.
- 3.
Sarkar (2012) raises the problem of stakeholder legitimacy explicitly, noting that as an ethical, rather than legal, issue, it has not received the amount of critical examination it deserves.
- 4.
This criticism of Dewey’s ungrounded optimism was articulated already in the 1920s by Randolph Bourne, by Walter Lippman, and by others (cf. Misak 2013, 135–138). One could excuse Dewey’s naiveté and idealism by claiming that the realm of theory shows us what is possible, whether or not it can be applied to real democratic processes. But Dewey’s goal was always to engage with and influence real situations.
- 5.
The degree of content neutrality that Dewey endorses is contested; critics accuse Dewey of relativism, while supporters defend his more substantive vision of a democratic way of life. What matters here is that in cases of environmental decision-making, there are commonly conflicting values at stake—for cultural goods and for natural goods—that are endorsed by members of a democratic community.
- 6.
The procedural aspects of Norton’s view likely play a more important role in cases where the federal government is involved, where deliberative procedures have been tested and routinized over time, and where there are significant differences in the magnitude of stakeholder power and access to government consideration.
- 7.
I argue below that there are multiple possible explanations of the community’s failure to agree upon a set of management actions. The short time frame, as well as a lack of imagination and experiential knowledge, can explain the failure without undermining a commitment to value pluralism or to Norton’s convergence hypothesis. Much depends on how the context—or, as Dewey would say, the problematic situation—is defined. For a variety of empirical and theoretical responses to the convergence hypothesis, see Minteer (2009).
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Acknowledgements
My knowledge about the case study comes from public meetings, from conversations with Brian Liberti, head of the Forestry Division for the City of Rochester, NY, and from planning documents distributed by the City of Rochester. Thanks go to William Throop for asking questions that directed my thoughts about the case, to Matthew Brown for sharing ideas about Deweyan inquiry, and to Charles Burroughs for encouragement to write about the much-loved Washington Grove. Patient and insightful audiences at Green Mountain College, the University of Waterloo, and an International Society for Environmental Ethics conference in Kiel, Germany made helpful contributions, and Ben Minteer, Sahotra Sarkar, and Paul Thompson improved my ideas and their expression immeasurably.
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Brister, E. (2018). Proceduralism and Expertise in Local Environmental Decision-Making. In: Sarkar, S., Minteer, B. (eds) A Sustainable Philosophy—The Work of Bryan Norton. The International Library of Environmental, Agricultural and Food Ethics, vol 26. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-92597-4_10
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