On the Modern and the Nonmodern in Deliberative Environmental Democracy

Kersty Hobson
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Kersty Hobson: Kersty Hobson is a Lecturer in human geography and environmental politics at the Fenner School of Environment and Society, The Australian National University (ANU). Her past research has examined the politics and practices of sustainable consumption, and has been published in journals including Environmental Politics, Social and Cultural Geography and Ethics, Place and Environment. Her current research focuses on methods for examining social responses to climate change, undertaken as part of an ANU multi-disciplinary research project into climate change and society in Australia.

Global Environmental Politics, 2009, vol. 9, issue 4, 64-80

Abstract: The "deliberative turn" in green political theory and applied environmental decision-making is now well-established. However, questions remain about the applicability of its concepts and methods to non-Western or "nonmodern" contexts, to use a term from Gupte and Barlett's 2007 article in this journal that is the stimulus to this article. In such places the societal pre-conditions of modernity deemed theoretically necessary for "authentic deliberation" to occur are mostly absent. Yet, authentic deliberation does take place, prompting questions about the geographical and cultural bias of the deliberative environmental democratic project. This article takes up such questions, arguing that in deliberative theory modernity is more than a bias, which is highlighted when the nonmodern is counted in. Instead, in its noun-form modernity suggests a particular type of deliberating subject, replete with specific capacities and knowledge, which the nonmodern is, in true binary fashion, deemed to lack. This article draws on qualitative data from deliberative workshops in northern New Mexico, USA, to argue that such categorizations do not hold up to empirical or conceptual scrutiny, particularly in light of Bruno Latour's work on modernity and the Modern. Thus, this article argues that deliberative environmental democracy research should therefore be recast as an ethnographic and context-based project, and explores how such a project could be carried out. (c) 2009 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Date: 2009
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