Achieving Ecological Reflexivity: The Limits of Deliberation and the Alternative of Free-Market-Environmentalism

Justus Enninga and Ryan M. Yonk ()
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Justus Enninga: Department of Economics, New York University, New York, NY 10012, USA
Ryan M. Yonk: American Institute for Economic Research, Great Barrington, MA 01230, USA

Sustainability, 2023, vol. 15, issue 8, 1-14

Abstract: Environmental problems are often highly complex and demand a great amount of knowledge of the people tasked to solve them. Therefore, a dynamic polit-economic institutional framework is necessary in which people can adapt and learn from changing environmental and social circumstances and in light of their own performance. The environmentalist literature refers to this knowledge producing and self-correcting capacity as ecological reflexivity. Large parts of the literature agree that deliberative democracy is the right institutional arrangement to achieve ecological reflexivity. Our paper sheds doubt on this consensus. While we agree with the critique of centralized, technocratic planning within the literature on deliberative democracy and agree that ecologically reflexive institutions must take advantage of the environmental ‘wisdom of the crowd’, we doubt that deliberative democracy is the right institutional arrangement to achieve this. Ecological deliberation fails to address its own epistemic shortcomings in using crowd wisdom: Rational ignorance, rational irrationality and radical ignorance weaken the performance of deliberative institutions as an alternative and reflexive form of ecological governance. Instead, we propose an institutional order based on market-based approaches as the best alternative for using the environmental wisdom of the crowd.

Keywords: ecological reflexivity; market environmentalism; deliberation; environmental economics; rational ignorance; environmental groups (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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