Democracy and Global Warming

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. 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. The author also explores the role of cosmopolitan 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. The work concludes with an assessment of the extent to which contentions of this sort are – or need to be – realistic rather than utopian.

Author Biography

Barry Holden lectured in Politics at the University of Reading from 1963 until his retirement in 2001. His publications include The Nature of Democracy (1974); Understanding Liberal Democracy (1988 and 1993) and (as editor) Global Democracy: Key Debates (1999).