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Aug 1, - Big Society plan, addressed to understand if it entails a paradigm change for the British Welfare State or just an incremental policy change.
Table of contents
There is evidence to suggest that under the particular conditions of modern consumer society, democracy may indeed be assuming a shape that is geared more towards stabilizing than radically changing the unsustainable status quo. Doubts about the capacity of democracy to deal with environmental problems are, of course, not entirely new.
It has often been pointed out, for example, that democracy is anthropocentric and has only limited potential to represent that which has no political voice. Notably, electoral democracy has a strong fixation on the present, in other words it prioritizes the interests of today and is structurally inclined to discount those of future generations.
Moreover democracy encourages compromise, although compromise solutions are often ecologically ineffective. Democratic procedures are time- and resource-consuming and therefore inappropriate wherever fast and decisive action is necessary. Instead, democracy aligns politics with the electoral majority, even though the preferences of the majority — witness, for example, the addiction to car- or air-travel — are rarely sensible in terms of sustainability. Democratic systems are hard pushed to generate majorities for policies that burden citizens with costs or restrictions mainly for the benefit of people in faraway parts of the world and for something as abstract as the global climate.
And, perhaps most importantly, democracy is always emancipatory, in other words it always centres on the enhancement of rights and material living conditions.
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It is not really suited to restricting the rights or material conditions affecting the majority — unless, as with the rule that red traffic lights must be observed, the benefits are immediately tangible. All these concerns have articulated by eco-political sceptics of democracy for a long time. Throughout the s and s, the ongoing process of modernisation reinforced emancipatory claims for individual freedom, self-determination and self-fulfilment, but also deepened doubts about whether democracy is suitable as a political tool for restructuring contemporary societies towards sustainability.
Relevant developments have included:.
The new patterns of governance are increasingly undemocratic opaque, unaccountable , with the state only one of several actors with its sovereignty noticeably castrated. The most important risks cannot be directly perceived by citizens but are measured, framed and communicated by scientific experts. Invariably, this implies the disempowerment of the democratic sovereign.
Introduction
In both private life and public policy, thinking beyond the crises of the day and taking decisions for an entirely unpredictable future becomes increasingly difficult. Effectively, national democratic structures have turned into a means of legitimizing the externalization of ecological and social costs. These developments, which are inherent to the ongoing process of modernization and hardly controllable, progressively undermine the ability of democracy to devise and implement appropriate strategies against the sustainability crisis.
No wonder that suspicions about the eco-political failure of liberal democracy re-emerged in the late s. Contrary to the democratic optimism of social movements and Green Parties, some, for example Laura Westra, 19 have seen democracy increasingly to be part of the problem. More recently, David Shearman and Joseph Wayne Smith have concluded that the underlying cause of the sustainability crisis is not the capitalist growth economy but, ultimately, liberal democracy itself. Thus, whilst some diagnose a democratic deficit and call for a comprehensive democratization of democracy, others detect insurmountable deficits in democracy itself and consider top-down approaches to eco-politics more effective.
To be sure, democracy and democratization can only be seen as a suitable means for ecological and social ends insofar as the institutionalized authorities and elites are regarded as representing the alienating and destructive logic of unsustainability. According to this view, citizens or civil society are understood as the subject of a social-cum-ecological reason, which must be empowered if self-serving elites are to be held to account and the transition to authentic fulfilment and sustainability initiated.
Put the other way round, emancipatory-democratic optimism loses its foundations if emancipation, rather than being understood as liberation from the alienating and destructive logic of productivism, efficiency, growth and consumption, is seen as being compliant with the established system — in other words as the realisation of ever more individualised freedom and choice, ever more flexibility and, in particular, increasingly consumerist lifestyles.
Exactly this, however, is arguably what characterizes contemporary consumer democracies. It would be mistaken, of course, to assert that there has ever been a Golden Age when all citizens were deeply committed to the tenets of political ecology and campaigned for a radical departure from consumer capitalism.
Yet the belief that industrial modernity and consumer culture are profoundly alienating and that individual fulfilment, collective happiness and lasting social peace can only be attained beyond the established system of competitive consumerism was widely shared in the s and early s — and well beyond the narrow circles of political ecologists. In contemporary consumer democracies, however, such beliefs have less and less political purchase, since the prevalent understanding of freedom and emancipation and the predominant patterns of self-fulfilment and self-experience have changed fundamentally.
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Social and political scientists have long acknowledged this. These are not only the imperatives of the modern labour market, they also appear to open up new options for a richer experience of life and more personal fulfilment. Accordingly, modern citizens have adapted their understanding of their self and their norms of identity, to become more complex, flexible, innovative and tolerant towards intrinsic contradictions.
For democracy and for the prospect of a democratically organised restructuring of modern society towards sustainability, this shift is important. First, it is by definition flexible, fluid and volatile, in other words precisely not stable and sustained. Second, this new self-conception focuses very strongly on the present. It is constantly reinvented in accordance with the conditions given at a particular point in time, it is not committed to consistency with the past, and it is not overly concerned about the increasingly unpredictable future.
Third, this contemporary ideal of identity strongly relies on acts of consumption as its most important means of self-construction, self-expression and self-experience. To some extent this consumerism may be ethically and ecologically informed but, crucially, this pattern of identity construction and self-expression relies on the volatile sign-value and novelty-value of consumer goods — which, in turn, necessitates an ever-accelerating pace of resource- consumption. This shift towards the inherently unsustainable self has by no means fully replaced more traditional notions of identity, 25 and it is not equally prevalent in all social milieus.
But it is particularly strong in the most innovative, entrepreneurial and pace-setting parts of society, and as these patterns of self-construction and self-experience become prevalent, citizens will demand to see them represented by democratic processes and institutions. For a democratically legitimised transition towards sustainability, the implications of this are dire. The limits to growth considerably accelerate the dynamics of this modernisation-induced cultural shift, at the same time causing social competition to become increasingly fierce and governments to enforce policies of privatisation, welfare retrenchment and self-responsibility.
It becomes ever more difficult for policy makers to resolve the old tension between democratic principles of liberalism and redistributive egalitarianism, and the democratic paradox 26 again becomes politically virulent. The notion of emancipation is reconfigured in a way that prioritises liberalism over egalitarianism. In fact, at the limits to growth, a second-order or reflexive emancipation supersedes traditional or first-order emancipation. The latter may be understood to refer to the s and s, when increasingly self-confident citizens, conceiving of themselves as the subject of authentic reason, struggled for liberation from the guardianship of traditional elites and were determined to assume responsibility for the common good, which they aimed to negotiate and implement in participatory-democratic ways.
Second-order or reflexive emancipation, by contrast, refers to a trend noticeable since the s, entailing partial deliverance from the very responsibilities that citizens had previously enthusiastically fought for. In particular, it seeks liberation from moral and intellectual overload and calls for reassessment of restrictive social or ecological imperatives.
Citizens continue to see themselves as the political principal and articulate demands accordingly.
However wherever it promises to pay off, they delegate social and political responsibility to service providers, hoping to gain both more effective interest representation and additional leeway in the private pursuit of self-fulfilment. Clearly, this second phase of the emancipatory project is closely connected to the rise of liquid identity; together they form the core of what I have called the post-democratic turn.
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These institutions and processes invariably fail to organize, articulate and represent the complexity and dynamics of modern needs and identities. Yet in actual practice, democracy entails ever less of a guarantee, be it for the already marginalised or excluded who are increasingly turning away from political engagement , or for those trying to utilise their available resources to secure personal advantage in the growing struggle for opportunities. In the wake of the post-democratic turn, the sustainability of democracy itself may well become a problem, and the capacity of democracy to initiate a turn towards sustainability may be permanently impaired.
But democracy comes in many shapes and forms, of course, and political scientists have always praised its great flexibility and adaptability. They have drawn hope from its proven problem-solving capacity and its ability to reflexively address its own faults. The Arab Spring, meanwhile, seems to provide strong evidence of the ongoing appeal of democratic ideals worldwide, and in the industrialised nations democracy has powerful allies firmly committed to its defence. Nevertheless, given the cultural shift outlined above, a revitalization of democracy as envisaged by Leggewie and Welzer, Crouch, Hamilton, Hausknost and so many others will not easily be feasible.
For in the wake of the post-democratic turn, the structural limitations that have always existed are powerfully reinforced by new cultural limitations that essentially stifle all hopes for the profound value change necessary for any democratic transition to sustainability. Indeed, contrary to the narratives of an emerging alternative hedonism, it is to be feared that, under the conditions of advanced modern societies, more democracy could imply even less sustainability.
None of this implies that expertocratic-authoritarian policy approaches are in any way more promising. Dangerously, however, this proposal fails to recognize the extent to which democracy is quietly changing its quality. Subsequently, making use of civic involvement survey's figures, it will be evaluate the viability of the plan implied in the willingness of the British citizen to be accountable of the public sector and an analytical study will provide data for the first achievements of the Big Society devolving power to local communities and charities in the sake of fighting for the welfare sustainability, threatened by the red tape cut back.
The ensued limitation of the methodology adopted during six months of scrupulous research at the London School of Economics and Political Science, dwells in the short-term of the policy implementation, requesting time to reach a new conception of civic involvement and of public sector accountability.
Nevertheless, the comparative and historical approaches revealing continuity in the British social policy allow some forecasts regarding the trend of the plan. Product Details. Average Review. Write a Review. Related Searches. I leoni di Sicilia. Le vicende e i sentimenti umani sono sorretti da una scrittura solida, matura, piena di passione e di grazia. Stefania Auci View Product. Textbook of Diabetes and Pregnancy. Babies of women with diabetes are nearly five times more likely to be stillborn and Babies of women with diabetes are nearly five times more likely to be stillborn and almost three times more likely to die in the first three months.
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