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THEMATIC ESSAY  

 

Democracy and the Environment: An Ecological 
Economics Research Agenda 
 

Prakash Kashwan   
 
1. INTRODUCTION 

This essay offers a brief overview of some of the key arguments about the 
relationship between democracy and the environment. Each of these 
arguments centres on the different dimensions of the relationship between 
democracy and the environment. The goal is to inform new research in 
ecological economics, so that it may engage more centrally with social 
science research—especially in the area of the political economy of 
institutions, which is my area of expertise. To this end, I begin with an 
overview of the assumptions that inform competing perspectives on the 
role of the state, markets, and citizens in environmental policymaking and 
enforcement.1 

 

2. STATES AND MARKETS: TWO DOMINANT PILLARS OF 
ENVIRONMENTAL GOVERNANCE 

One dominant way of thinking about environmental governance considers 
environmental protection an uncontroversial and politically neutral policy 
agenda that the state is duty-bound to pursue. It holds that inadequate state 
capacity, especially in developing countries, is the main barrier to the 
success of environmental governance. This core assumption explains why 

                                                        
 Teaches comparative and international environmental policy and politics at the University 
of Connecticut, Storrs, CT 06269, USA; prakash.kashwan@uconn.edu 

Copyright © Kashwan 2018. Released under Creative Commons Attribution-
NonCommercial 4.0 International licence (CC BY-NC 4.0) by the author.  

Published by Indian Society for Ecological Economics (INSEE), c/o Institute of Economic 
Growth, University Enclave, North Campus, Delhi 110007.  

ISSN: 2581-6152 (print); 2581-6101 (web). 

DOI: https://doi.org/10.37773/ees.v1i1.8  

1 Scrutinizing the assumptions that inform a theory or model is at the core of positive theory 
building, and is not the same as engaging in interpretive analysis. A detailed discussion of 
these differences is beyond the scope of this essay. For an excellent scrutiny of some of the 
foundational concepts in environmental policy, see Bromley (2004). 

https://doi.org/10.37773/ees.v1i1.8


Ecology, Economy and Society–the INSEE Journal [34] 

international agencies often emphasize the need to invest in a state‘s 
organizational capacity, and in its legal infrastructure, which is needed to 
support the effective enforcement of environmental laws and regulations. 
The role of democracy is circumscribed by the assumptions about the 
liberal state‘s core functions—for example, protecting the freedom of 
information and of the press, and the independence of the judiciary, which 
ensures that the state enforces its environmental laws within a rule-of-law 
framework.  

The institutions of democracy also have a representative function—that is, 
they are supposed to represent the interests of the majority. However, such 
interests are often precluded from national environmental governance, 
especially in developing countries, because of the underlying assumption 
that most citizens are too poor to care about the environment and are stuck 
in a poverty-environment trap. This assumption is the basis of ecological 
modernization, a thesis which remains popular in the field of environmental 
economics. A recent review of the scholarship on poverty traps shows that 
scholars of ecological economics are expanding their scope of analysis to 
include socio-ecological systems. Even so, they do not pay adequate 
attention to the ‗interdependencies between ecological and social processes 
that affect the provision and use of natural capital and thus the persistence 
of poverty‘ (Haider et al. 2018). 

Market-based governance of the environment—using tools such as cap and 
trade, reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation in 
developing countries (REDD+), and payment for environmental services—
has gained popularity in recent times. Noticeably, it is informed by the core 
tenets of the liberal democratic framework, albeit with a significantly 
attenuated role for the state (Sampford 2002). In this perspective, properly 
regulated markets, functioning under the strict oversight of regulators held 
accountable by public watchdogs, will respond to incentives for efficient 
and eco-friendly production processes. While state institutions and 
regulatory functions are critical to the effective functioning of markets in 
any context, the ideology of untethered free markets has infiltrated the 
arguments for market-based environmental governance (McCarthy 2012), 
which is increasingly being reduced to purely voluntarist actions on the part 
of market actors. However, Peter Dauvergne (2015) shows that relying on 
corporations to voluntarily make production and consumption processes 
more efficient encourages the ‗business of more‘—more revenues, more 
stores, more profits—as corporations invest the gains from efficient 
production in expanding their supply chain and finding new consumers. 
Market-based environmentalism, as practised in most cases, is undermining 
efforts to promote social justice, economic inequality, and ecological 
integrity; yet, from an institutionalist perspective, markets can be governed 



[35] Prakash Kashwan  

in a variety of ways, and thereby lead to varying effects on the goals of 
ecological conservation and social justice (Dauvergne 2015; Corbera et al. 
2007; Lele et al. 2010; Kashwan 2017). 

In markets, state intervention—such as through taxes, subsidies, or other 
kinds of incentives and disincentives—could play an important role in 
ecological protection (Bagstad et al. 2007). Yet, the success of such 
instruments depends critically on a well-functioning state machinery that—
even without heavy-handed interventions—prompts non-state actors to 
comply. In societies with effective states, such regulatory success may create 
an impression that the state has very little role to play in environmental 
governance, and lead some—in countries without an effective state 
machinery—to overestimate the potential contribution of transparency and 
disclosure in ensuring market-based environmental governance (for a 
critical review of this, see Haufler 2010). 

 

3. VARIETIES OF ENVIRONMENTALISM: IMPLICATIONS 
FOR ECOLOGICAL ECONOMICS 

Earlier, I described the two dominant approaches to environmental 
governance. Each assumes a monolithic and apolitical understanding of the 
environment. However, these assumptions are challenged by the 
scholarship on varieties of environmentalism, which posits at least two 
competing types: environmentalism of the rich, which goes beyond market-
based environmentalism to also include state-dominated approaches; and 
environmentalism of the poor, which puts poor people at the centre of 
environmental governance.  

The main feature of the environmentalism of the rich is that it values the 
environment for its aesthetic value and brackets it away from society, which 
it supposes is dominated by values of consumption. Such assumptions—
clearly a legacy of the compartmentalization of nature and society in post-
industrial societies—prompt the likes of Harvard evolutionary biologist 
E.O. Wilson (2016) to advocate setting aside half the earth exclusively for 
the goals of nature conservation. We have extensive evidence to show that 
such enclosures trigger land conflicts, social injustices, and human rights 
violations (Kashwan 2013; Duffy 2016). However, what is less often 
discussed is that the enclosure-based model of protected areas has not been 
an outstanding conservation success either. A fine-grained analysis of 
British plants and animals showed that two of the main premises for setting 
up protected areas do not hold up to empirical evidence (Prendergast et al. 
1993): (1) species-rich areas (‗hotspots‘) frequently do not coincide for 
different taxa; and (2) many rare species do not occur in the most species-



Ecology, Economy and Society–the INSEE Journal [36] 

rich squares. Recent research shows that little has changed in nearly a 
quarter century since. Conservation biologists show that even if one were to 
assume that every species present in a legally designated area is effectively 
protected, 20 per cent of threatened species remain beyond the purview of 
protected areas, while the biodiversity in many protected areas is not 
critically endangered (Rodrigues et al. 2004; Naughton-Treves et al. 2005). 
These findings reinforce the argument that the rapid growth in protected 
areas witnessed since the 1970s has been driven by political-economic 
interests—as opposed to a sincere effort to protect ecosystems (Kashwan 
2017a). Therefore, contentions over protected areas are about whose vision 
of—and interests in—the natural environment this model of conservation 
promotes, and not about trade-offs between the environment and 
development.  

Environmentalism of the poor presents an alternative lens for thinking 
about these debates. In this perspective, environmentalism is a product of 
‗actions and concerns in situations where the environment is a source of 
livelihood‘ (Martinez-Alier 2014, 240). In the face of threats to their 
livelihood, those affected are likely to act, especially under the conditions of 
successful institutions of democracy. Former Minister of Environment and 
Forests (India) Jairam Ramesh refers to this as ‗livelihood 
environmentalism‘ (Ramesh 2010). A focus on livelihood dependence, as 
opposed to a focus on the poor, reduces the risk that poor people‘s 
interests in and views about the environment are ‗essentialized.‘ To meet 
livelihood goals, productive use of environmental resources is required. To 
develop models of environmental governance that promote such 
productive use, interdisciplinary research is needed into the links between 
social justice and concerns of land productivity; protection of water bodies 
and of grazing lands and forests; and preservation of sacred places (Ramesh 
2015). This points to a productive agenda for ecological economics research 
that links wildlife and biodiversity conservation to productive, healthy, and 
socially just landscapes.  

Agricultural practices developed by indigenous and other rural groups often 
existed in tandem with the non-domesticated parts of natural landscapes. 
Such practices are captured in the phrase ‗agrarian environments‘ (Agrawal 
and Sivaramakrishnan 2000), and in recent arguments about reconsidering 
the binary of land and water within the rubric of ‗hybrid environments‘ 
(Lahiri-Dutt 2014). Research by ecologists in tropical landscapes shows that 
the best conservation outcomes occur when fragmented biodiverse 
landscapes are surrounded by high-quality agriculture matrices. Ecologists 
argue that small-scale farming coupled with alternative agro-ecological 
techniques—as opposed to industrial monocultural agriculture—lead to 
such outcomes (Perfecto and Vandermeer 2010). These arguments about 



[37] Prakash Kashwan  

the intricate links between nature and society question the applicability of 
popular models of land-sparing and forest transition to most parts of the 
world (for an excellent argument, see, Tscharntke et al. 2012).  

The brief discussion above suggests that there are diverse ways of 
conceptualizing the nature-society relationship, each with significantly 
different implications about the links between the environment, 
development, and social justice. Some authors have used these insights to 
do critical scholarship that deploys an interpretive methodology. The 
fundamental insight from this literature is that different conceptualizations 
of the environment inform competing perspectives about environmental 
governance. By bringing concrete interdisciplinary insights to these debates, 
and thereby illuminating them, ecological economists can help policymakers 
determine how the different configurations of nature-society relations 
would affect the goals of social justice and ecological restoration. Making 
such research findings available is an extremely valuable activity in a society, 
even though political and policy processes heavily influence how policy 
problems are framed, policies designed, and programmes implemented 
(Kashwan 2017). This brings us back to the role that institutions of 
democracy have to play in environmental conservation, and the 
implications for ecological economics research, which are the topics of the 
concluding section below. 

 

4. INSTITUTIONS OF DEMOCRACY AND ENVIRONMENTAL 
PROTECTION 

The highly schematized arguments presented above suggest that effective 
environmental governance rarely results from thinking about nature and 
society in isolation or antagonism and relying on the fiat of the state, or the 
invisible hand of markets, which are the dominant ways of thinking about 
ecological conservation. Conventional approaches to forest and wildlife 
conservation that rely on enclosures and exclusions do not yield superior 
conservation outcomes but impose significant social costs. The existence 
and well-being of nature and society are closely intertwined, and can be 
managed only by cultivating a set of social, cultural, and economic relations. 
In the complex societies of developing countries, however, social, cultural, 
and economic relations contribute to ecological stewardship only if such 
relations are institutionalized appropriately—in this context, 
institutionalization means a society-wide acceptance of the rules, norms, 
and conventions meant to steer nature-society interactions.  

As discussed above, one of the core functions of democracy is the 
representation of social interests within the political and policy arenas. Even 



Ecology, Economy and Society–the INSEE Journal [38] 

though democracies with majoritarian voting systems are meant to 
represent the interests of the majority, they often fail at it, and end up with 
systems that are dominated by powerful interests. Worldwide, new 
empirical research shows, economic inequality—coupled with poor 
democratic institutions—contributes to the designation of a larger 
proportion of national territories as protected areas; yet, in well-established 
democracies, inequality acts as a barrier against designation of protected 
areas (Kashwan 2017a). Inequality presents a significant barrier to both 
democracy and environmental governance. When seen in conjunction with 
the findings reported above—high-quality agriculture matrices are 
important for successful conservation outcomes—these findings present a 
unique research opportunity for ecological economists. 

The discussion above brings up a research question worth pursuing: In the 
presence of appropriate social relations and institutions, does the diversity 
of human interests (political and economic pluralism) support biological 
diversity? Future research could test this hypothesis by combining 
ecological and social science research. Students of ecology could examine 
the scale at which the diversity of human interests may not only coexist 
with biological diversity but promote it. Imagine two cross-cutting matrices: 
the diversity of human interests intersecting with biodiversity (technically 
speaking, gamma diversity defined as a function of the within-habitat 
diversity, that is, alpha diversity, and the cross-habitat diversity, that is, beta 
diversity) (Swift et al. 2004). These relationships can be tested through a 
combination of ecological and social science research within settings that 
offer opportunities to study the effects of different types of institutional 
arrangements. The following concrete examples illustrate how such a 
research programme might be operationalized in rural and urban settings.  

The first illustration, of the institutionalization of innovative rules of social 
and environmental engagement, relates to the provisions of critical wildlife 
habitats (CWH) in India‘s Forest Rights Act (FRA). If a committee of 
biological and social scientists, elected representatives, and social activists 
set up specifically for the purpose concludes after investigation that the 
exercise of forest rights in a forestland may cause ‗irreversible damage‘ to 
critically endangered biodiversity or wildlife, that area may be declared a 
CWH. In such cases, people living in a CWH may be relocated, but only 
after their forest and land rights have been recorded and the state 
guarantees livelihood security for the affected families. The FRA‘s CWH 
provisions can greatly enhance the legitimacy of conservation institutions 
and create many opportunities for policy-relevant research on the 
relationship between social organization and biodiversity conservation. 
However, such opportunities are being frittered away at the behest of a 
state machinery that has gotten used to a territorial—as opposed to an 



[39] Prakash Kashwan  

institutional—approach to biodiversity and wildlife conservation (see 
Kashwan 2016). 

The evolution of ‗eco-political‘ change in Denmark presents another 
interesting illustration of the research programme proposed above. Læssøe 
(2007, 231–232) argues that Denmark‘s environmental governance has 
evolved from a grassroots movement—characterized by contestation of 
values and political ideology—to professionally and commercially mediated 
consensus in favour of laissez faire. At the same time, as evident in the 
debates over ecological tax reform (ETR), Denmark continues to work to 
secure the widest possible social acceptability. Klok et al. (2006) attribute the 
limited acceptance of ETR to their observation that ETR proponents 
oversold the environmental benefits while not investing enough to 
popularize its social and economic benefits. These findings challenge many 
of the popular beliefs about Scandinavian ecosocialism.  

A consideration of values, social relations, ideology, and politics is central to 
reimagining the relationship between ecology and economy (Söderbaum 
1999). Even so, it is important to mention that none of these factors 
operate in isolation from other socio-economic factors or biophysical 
processes. Addressing the effects of these various intersectionsrequires 
innovative research methodologies that cut across the divides of natural and 
social sciences (see, for instance, Swyngedouw 2004). A consideration of 
the relationship between the political economy of institutions and 
environmental change opens up productive opportunities for research and 
scholarship, including for those interested in the emerging agenda of urban 
sustainability (Elmqvist et al. 2013). Ecological economists are best placed 
to examine how socio-economic and political factors mediate the framing, 
design, and implementation of policies and institutions meant to foster 
socially just environmental protection efforts.  

 

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 

The author gratefully acknowledges the comments on an initial draft by two 
anonymous reviewers. 

 

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