Description

How can democracy facilitate an effective response to the problem of global warming? Barry Holden discusses this question from two perspectives. First he looks at the suitability in principle of democratic decision-making for generating responses to the problem: to what extent is popular decision making a viable method of dealing with the complex matter of global warming? Second, he looks at the issue of whether, or to what extent, democracy can exist on a supranational scale, since according to received ideas, democracy occurs only within states and has not been thought applicable to the international realm. Emerging ideas and practices of transnational or global democracy have begun to challenge this perception. Holden looks at the role of global democracy in helping to overcome the crucial difficulty of generating, in a world of individual sovereign states, the collective global response that the global warming problem requires.Democracy and Global Warming will engage and challenge readers with interests in democratic political theory and those concerned with environmental issues and threats.