The linkages among society and the environment generate normative challenges
across at least three distinct dimensions. First, environmental change imposes
costs (both individual and collective) that fall disproportionately on various
social groups, often those who have historically suffered from disadvantage
and disenfranchisement. Second, the necessity to create institutional
arrangements for managing environmental change and integrating those decisions
with collective choices in other areas poses value-laden questions of policy
design. Third, the human causes and consequences of environmental change and
the collective choices they involve pit citizens and their understandings of
the world against one another at the level of social action. The task
confronting environmental governance analysts in responding to these
challenges is to describe accurately and progressively develop the normative,
political, and social consensus necessary for managing society-environment
linkages in ways that are both ecologically sustainable and democratically
legitimate. The work of deliberative theory offers a coherent approach to this
task when deliberative techniques are mapped onto these human dimensions of
environmental change. Deliberative democrats analyze the issues of
distributional justice and social equity by using hypothetical case scenarios
in juristic modeling exercises to describe existing elements of normative
consensus regarding general legal principles. They employ techniques of
deliberative polling to measure support for alternative policy paradigms that
institutionalize policy goals and objectives related to the society-
environment linkage. And deliberative democrats promote stakeholder
partnerships that allow contending local discourses regarding the
implementation of environmental policies to be reconciled through the
coproduction of regulatory programs and procedures. Mapping and specifying
these approaches to developing normative consensus for governance (as
represented in a 4 X 3 table which, unfortunately, we cannot attach or present
here) is the objective of this paper
