Greening Liberal Democracy: Practice, Theory and Political Economy

Abstract

It seems to be a more or less settled opinion that green politics is ‘postnot anti-liberal’: as Eckersley maintains, it is ‘decidedly post- rather than anti-liberal’ (Eckersley, 1992, p. 30), a theme shared in much recent green political theorizing (Doherty and de Geus, 1996; Stephens, 1996; Wissenburg, 1998; Barry, 1999b). At the same time, there are those who claim that there are resources within liberalism for addressing the normative and material aspects of problematic social– environmental interaction (Wissenburg, 1998; de-Shalit, 1997; Sagoff, 1988).

I would like to thank all the participants at the ECPR workshop, and Marcel Wissenburg in particular, for helpful comments on this chapter.