The use of community consultation to address socio-environmental degradation is entwined with contested democratic principles polarising views of its role. I frame this problem by examining three democratic paradigms faced with two contemporary problems. The deliberative argument that preferences require enrichment with debate mediates between the liberal-aggregative view that preferences are individual, private and amenable to aggregation and the view that participation in public life is foundational. Viewing consultation as deliberative reconciles the liberal-aggregative view of consultation as the illegitimate elevation of unrepresentative minority groups with the participationist view that consultation constitutes a step towards participatory democracy. Theorists of social reflexivity, however, point to an elided politics of knowledge challenging technoscience's exemption from politically garnered consent. Also neglected by much democratic theory is how functional differentiation renders self-referential legal, political, technoscientific and administrative domains increasingly unaccountable. I employ Habermas' procedural theory that public spheres allow social irritations into the political domain where they can be encoded into laws capable of systemic interjection in response, along with a dialogic extension accommodating the politics of knowledge. I then use this procedural-dialogic deliberative understanding of democracy to elucidate the context and outcomes of the NSW State's consultative strategy. The NSW state, institutionally compelled to underwrite economic growth, implicating itself in that growth's socio-environmental side effects provoking widespread contestation. The resulting Environmental Planning and Assessment Act (1979) and its adjunctive consultative provisions helped highlight the socio-environmental degradation of the Hawkesbury Nepean River Catchment via Western Sydney's urban sprawl, politicising the region. The convenement of a consultative forum to oversee a contaminated site audit within the region facilitated incisive lay critique of the technoscientific underpinnings of administrative underwriting of socio-environmental degradation. The discomforted NSW State tightened environmental policy, gutted the EP&A Act's consultative provisions and removed regional dialogic forums and institutions. I conclude that the socio-economic accord equating economic growth with social progress is both entrenched and besieged, destabilising the political/administrative/technoscientific regime built upon it. This withdrawal of avenues for critique risks deeper estrangement between reflexive society and the NSW State generative of electoral volatility.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ADTP/187860 |
| Date | January 2002 |
| Creators | Darbas, Toni, School of Science & Technology Studies, UNSW |
| Publisher | Awarded by:University of New South Wales. School of Science and Technology Studies |
| Source Sets | Australiasian Digital Theses Program |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Rights | Copyright Toni Darbas, http://unsworks.unsw.edu.au/copyright |
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