Confronted with any failing governance system of crucial global importance, it is important to be both critical and realistic. While recognizing our critical impetus—and the validity of the broadly deliberative view of politics in which it is grounded—Biermann faults the analysis in Democratizing Global Climate Governance for occasionally conceding too much to realism, with the result that some of the proposed reforms look too limited to make much of a difference. It is true that some of our more marginal suggestions (such as a facilitator rather than a chair for international negotiations) would in and of themselves make only a marginal difference. However they should be read in the context of our more thoroughgoing suggestions, such as the reconceptualization of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change as a meta-governance institution—and indeed the need for disruption of the system through movement activism.
If all our suggestions were followed, would that prove adequate? The answer is we do not know, but in a way that is precisely the point: What global earth system governance needs above all is a more reflexive capacity to question and correct its own shortcomings, and we believe a deliberative approach is well-placed to foster such a capacity. In this light, Biermann’s own set of mostly multilateral prescriptions, while perfectly plausible, may involve jumping ahead too quickly and too confidently. The problem is that when it comes to climate governance in particular, time is short, so any learning that does take place cannot do so at a leisurely pace.
Biermann also suggests that our deliberative systems analysis does not easily apply when it comes to kinds of governance where divisions between public space and empowered space are blurred. We address such forms of networked governance at length; their problem is precisely that divisions are blurred, such that they generally lack any public space at a critical distance from empowered space. That is the main reason such initiatives are currently not making enough difference.
Applying deliberative democracy in an unequal world is of course a challenge, but one that is increasingly being met. Experience shows that the capacity to deliberate is a universal human capability, it is just a matter of figuring out how to involve the poor and marginalized more effectively. In these terms, successes at the local level are much easier to identify than at the global level—but we are trying, and the fault for the moment lies more in the recalcitrance of global institutions than in the efforts of deliberative democrats.
More important than the specifics developed by either Biermann or Stevenson and myself is the larger, urgent enterprise of making global environmental governance more effective, egalitarian, and legitimate, and in recognizing this urgency there is no difference between us and Biermann. I hope he would join me in urging that such pressing matters be covered more extensively in the pages of Perspectives on Politics and elsewhere. To adapt Weber’s famous comment (noted by Biermann), global environmental politics must now involve the strong and fast boring of hard boards, engaged by many hands.
