Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Canterbury, 2006. / Typescript (photocopy). Includes bibliographical references (leaves 311-330). Also available via the World Wide Web.

Various writers, for example Rudolf Bahro and Arne Naess, have for a long time associated Green politics with an impulse toward deepening democracy. Robert Goodin has further suggested that decentralisation of political authority is an inherent characteristic of Green politics. More recently in New Zealand, speculation has been raised by Stephen Rainbow as to the consequences of the direct democratic impulse for existing representative institutions. This research addresses that question. Examination of the early phase of Green political parties in New Zealand has found that the Values Party advocated institutional restructuring oriented toward decentralisation of political authority in order to enable a degree of local autonomy, and particpatory democracy. As time has gone on the Values Party disappeared and with it went the decentralist impulse, this aspect of Green politics being conspicuously absent in the policy of Green Party Aotearoa/New Zealand, the successor to the Values Party. Since this feature was regarded as synonymous with Green politics, a certain re-definition of Green politics as practised by Green political parties is evident. This point does not exhaust the contribution Green politics makes to democracy however, and the methodology used in this research, critical discourse analysis (CDA), allows an insight into what Douglas Torgerson regards as the benefits in resisting the antipolitical tendency of modernity, of politics for its own sake. This focusses attention on stimulating public debate on fundamental issues, in terms of an ideology sufficiently at variance with that prevalent such that it threatens to disrupt the hegemonic dominance of the latter, thereby contributing to what Ralf Dahrendorf describes as a robust democracy. In this regard Green ideology has much to contribute, but this aspect is threatened by the ambition within the Green Party in New Zealand toward involvement in coalition government. The final conclusion is that the Green Party in New Zealand has followed the trend of those overseas and since 1990 has moved ever closer to a commitment to the institutions of centralised, representative, liberal democracy and this, if taken too far, threatens their ideological integrity.

Since World War Two the world has undergone a profound economic and political transformation, from an international economy and internationalist politics to a global economy and globalist politics. The Bretton Woods international financial institutions have 'structurally adjusted' Third World countries, and similar structural reforms have occurred in First World countries. The environmental consequences of globalising economic activity have been severe and also global; the social consequences of the structural reform process are equally severe. National sovereignty has been radically compromised by globalisation, and previous nationally-based initiatives to manage the activities of capital in order to mitigate its negative impacts on society and the environment, such as social democrat/labour politics, have ceded their authority to globalism. Green parties have arisen to contest the negative environmental and social consequences of the global expansion of capital, and are replacing socialist parties as a global antisystemic political force. Green politics had its origins in the world-wide 'new politics' of the New Left and the new social movements of the 1960s, and the world's first two Green parties were formed in Australia and New Zealand in 1972. A general history of the global forces which gave rise to Green politics, and a specific history of the first two Green parties, demonstrate the interplay of global and local political forces and themes, and provide an opportunity to redefine the core elements of Green politics.