written from Upper Rock, Wisconsin
(find your bioregion/watershed)
(find your bioregion/watershed)
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written from Upper Rock, Wisconsin
(find your bioregion/watershed) |
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Title:
Toward a Bioregional State:
A Series of Letters on Political Theory and Formal Institutional Design
as Ecologically Sound Development in the Era of Sustainability
"The most powerful weapon the hands of an oppressor is the mind of the oppressed." -Stephen Biko
ABSTRACT:
These letters are offering my novel democratic political theory ideas and formal institutional design concepts for what formal democracy means in an age of sustainability: the bioregional state. My point is that sustainability requires a different sense of the formal state. The significance of this is that it is the first attempt to plan for sustainability or analyze unsustainability as the outcome of the way formal democratic institutions are organized. Most environmentalists and academics entirely lack the vocabulary to discuss this. There is a complete lack of ecologically sound political economic developmental models as we slouch towards sustainability. It is required to join our sense of formal institutions, environmentalism, and development as interrelated instead of unrelated topics.
The goal of this book is to establish the terms of the debate for a formal democratic theory of sustainability: sustainability as a different formal democratic governmental framework. In the process of discussing why these formal state changes are required, I offer many critiques of the developmental and environmental effects of existing formal political institutions, and discuss the developmental and environmental oversights that were left out when they were instituted which have led to environmental degradation.
Throughout, I offer how unsustainable states can be made over piece by piece into sustainable states that support durable localized consumption and fair trade, now. The bioregional state is organized through formal changes by creating ungerrymandered political districts and novel checks and balances that assure that informal parties act as representative institutions in a competitive marketplace of ideas, instead of in practice acting as divide and conquer ideological tools funded by the same corporations with the aim of gatekeeping against citizenship pressure.
It's worth is that it is a political theory of the origins of unsustainability as caused by multiple and identified informal corruptions in practice, due to oversights of required formal checks and balances in three additional areas:
one, assuring a competitive marketplace of ideas in informal party politics before elections instead of informal gatekeeping on debate and divide and conquer politics funded by the same corporations;
two, assuring formal state frameworks provide a context after elections for checking or balancing informal parties' desire while they are the governmental incumbents to exclude other parties; and
three, assuring geographic expression of citizenship risk instead of informal parties being allowed to create pocket boroughs. The bioregional state touches the organization of applied science, consumption, and finance as well. It's worth is that it is an update to Enlightenment democratic theory for an era of sustainability. From this it is useful prescriptively for drawing up a formal institutional praxis for how to organize a sustainable politics.
ELABORATION:
Preface
There is a dual globalization haunting
the world: transnational state corporatism and localizing consumption. However,
in the latter, localizing consumption, people still mostly consider their moves
in this vein as an exclusively economic issue while concentrating their political
voice on a more reactionary anti-corporate globalization and anti-debt movements--instead
of mobilizing politically as well to institute a localized consumption. Why
this disconnect? If people fail to mobilize politically and proactively as much
for localizing consumption as much as they are mobilizing in a reactionary way
corporate globalization, it is because of a combination of two points. First
there is a lack of ideas on how to connect or channel their citizenship pressure
towards localizing consumption (an issue of ideals and theory). Second, the
formal political institutions of the 19th century state are (I would argue)
innately unsuited to give such environmental based citizenship pressure that
would be useful for localizing consumption and giving the state a full accounting
of the massive human, ecological, and economic externalities that it is supporting
and that it is expanding. The expanding issues of human ill health, ecological
degradation and species loss, and economic self-destruction are systemic issues
of the way democracy is poorly organized. Formal democracy and its practices
are defending the expansion of a near aristocratic corporatism and its externalities,
more than it is in practice defending a democracy is designed to be a feedback
into state developmentalism from the people.
I argue that the 19th century "democratic
state" that has lasted into the 21st century is defunct. It was likely
a dead letter when it began--for many informal rationales of power that were
left out of the checks and balances in the beginning. However, throughout this
period of promised democracy and enacted faux-democracy, we have witnessed a
slow expansion of the democratization of developmentalism and the expansion
of civil rights. Throughout this contentious process, people have attempted
to challenge the informal gatekeeping of the developmentalism of the democratic
state and its protections of environmental degradation as well as its delimited
sense of what a participating citizen is: from propertied males to nearly everyone.
However, propertied males still maintain the formal policy and formal institutional
nexus around the world in democracies, despite formal enfranchisement of many
other groups. This is because of a formal lack of ways to check and balance
the informal power that is held in these contexts by them.
For a short historical review, the
early 19th century saw a change in the participation of state developmentalism.
It moved from royalty conceptions to more aristocratic corporations. The 21st
century will further move this away from aristocratic corporations towards enfranchising
the full people's interests in localizing consumption towards sustainability
and demoting the political economic power of these aristocratic corporation
frameworks that have a stranglehold on formal democratic institutions and formal
policy. I argue that they have such a stranglehold because of inappropriate
formal institutions.
As formal democratic institutional
changes were seen in the early 19th century that set up an aristocratic corporatism
in democratic form, the bioregional state requires a different formal institutional
sense of democratic theory in light of what was left out before, that on retrospect,
has led to a replacement of a royal tyranny with a grander ecological tyranny.
This ecological tyranny is a combination of corporate tyranny, its expanding
political corruption and opportunism, and its (corporate) militarism. Such a
process only has sired democracies that are expanding human ill health, ecological
degradation and species loss, and economic self-destruction.
Can democracies demote these externalities instead, as part of enfranchising
the people in practice in state developmentalism issues? Sustainability requires
stealing the formal state away from a framework that preferentially has been
dominated by the informal gatekeeping of corporations. This requires a change
in state design and of our conceptions of citizenship. On these two points,
states are presently unsuited to channel existing citizenship pressure for sustainability,
or even recognize localized peoples as an important voice or feedback on state
developmentalism. I would argue that state politics-informally and formally-are
presently designed to keep such citizenship pressures and input from ever occurring
in issues of political economy.
We have been told that there is a
formal democratic political theory and a formal economic theory, so to speak,
which pretend to sleep in separate beds (the separate disciplines of "political
science" and "economics"). The bioregional state and the political
theories undergirding it are designed to analyzed politics in practice: the
incestuous political economic interaction when the lights are off and hopefully
no one is watching.
My point is that there is a lack
of merging of the political and the economic going on in people's thought, which
has led to a lack of merged ecologically sound political economic developmental
models traceable from the beginning of the expanding democratization/developmental
movements of the 19th century. The ideas about this separation between politics
and economic are of an older heritage in European thought, traceable to the
1600s.
I aim to rectify this pretended separation by two goals in the book. First, I will describe a history of how democratic political theory and formal institutional design came to be separated from economic theory and how both of these were separated from their environmental contexts in the same intellectual movements. Second, I offer what to do about this, by putting it all together in how it is in practice by wedding politics, economics, and the environment in which it is expressed. I offer that because of this separation all existing formal institutional frameworks of democracy so far have been hollow showpieces and politically illegitimate because they are responsible for setting up an ecological tyranny.
The royal tyranny was replaced with
a corporate and ecological tyranny almost immediately after the early 19th century
democratic revolutions, and in many cases, particularly in England, well before.
I am arguing that the bias in developmentalism
that the world's peoples are experiencing, along with how corporations have
taken state developmentalism policy as their own jurisdiction instead of something
with public feedback as to its direction, can be traced back to systemically
biased formal institutional frameworks and conceptions of democracy that are
designed to demote citizenship from particular spaces and instead to manage,
channel, and deflect citizenship away from developmentalist issues more than
to express it. Nineteenth century conceptions of democracy and democratic theory
were designed to facilitate a gatekeeping corporatism more than they facilitate
citizenship, ecological balance, and state developmental participation. How
do we instead focus and arrange the massive existing citizen pressure against
expanding human ill health, ecological destruction and economic self-destruction
and immiseration?
Sustainability can be facilitated
through formal state institutional change. I suppose I fail to believe in economic
development, which is an oxymoron. There is only political development and different
types of political development. Economic development is only the development
of corporatism, a clientelistic framework that poses and even almost enforces
(since it is based on political repression of other developmental issues in
the state) that the definition of the human is exclusively as a material being,
a consumer, and a shopper. Such ideas of economic developmentalism only served
to mask the interactions of how corporations, corporate science, and consolidated
finance attempted to take state participation away from the people. After the
revolutions for democracy, various clientelistic relations were institutionalized
in addition to the formal state where people's politics and their consumption
were managed and administrated by corporations, science workers, financiers,
and government workers. This corporatism has its gods as well: the idea that
the "market" is outside of human creation. However, like most gods,
markets are indeed human and political creations. And developmental gods that
have been worshiped uselessly are import substitution debt funded and world
global specialization designed by corporations.
The god of the hour is localizing
consumption, and this is a political developmental model. Instead of the definition
of the human as something aiming to purchase more items, the definition of the
human is to maintain community relations in particular geographic areas, to
have a stewardship of the particular land and ecologies and other species in
which they find themselves enmeshed, and to exist within a sustainable developmental
framework of fair trade.
Thus, the aim of this book to establish a democratic theory of sustainability as a formal democratic governmental framework and to offer many institutional ideas and strategies for how to make states that are unsustainable over piece by piece into sustainable states. This is done through formal changes and through recognizing and organizing existing citizenship pressure on its main concerns of expanding ill health, ecological destruction, and economic immiseration is developmental pressure against these externalities. To achieve this goal, the book concentrates on two themes. The first theme is a critique and history of existing humanocentric theoretical premises of democracy, along with the supposed and still neoliberal-popularized divorce of politics from organizational developmental issues that have their origins the same period of modernist theories of the 19th century. Can we recognize and bring these politically separated threads together and recognize that how formal state institutions are organized and how citizenship is expressed is as much a state developmentalism issue, as anything economic? How politics and economics were separated from each other in the theories of the early 19th century in democracy and development, and how both of these were separated from environmental and geographic issues in the Enlightenment, with its postulates of abstract space and abstract citizenship.The second theme is how to put them together in the political theory and political institutional design of the bioregional state.
ELABORATION OF THE BIOREGIONAL STATE:
FOUR POINTS ABOUT DEMOCRATIC POLITICAL THEORY LEFT OUT OF THE ENLIGHTENMENT
THAT HAS ONLY EXPANDED A DIFFERENT ECOLOGICAL TYRANNY UPON THE WORLD, INSTEAD
OF EXPANDED DEMOCRATIC PRACTICES
For the past 10 years after the Cold War, and the collapse of the Soviet Union, there has been precious little inventiveness or investment in visionary prescriptive proposals for what do to about global environmental degradation issues or democratic facilitation issues. Whether we are referring to the widening decline of the meaningfulness of democratic procedure or the expansion of externalities effecting human, ecological, and economic health that comes with environmental degradation and corporate led globalization known as "harmonization," it seems that it is a race to the bottom for democratic participation, regulatory arrangements, and environmental standards. Can it be a race to the top instead, based on raising standards through prescriptive adaptations to formal democratic institutions? In other words, we require a model of action instead of simply protest. Typically these issues of environmentalism and formal democracy have been addressed as separate issues. Instead, my argument is that existing democratic theory and formal institutional design inherited from a humanocentric Enlightenment are irredeemably broken for sustainability issues and require many adjustments to make then ecologically and economically sound. This is done by merging our falsely separated concepts of democracy, environmentalism, and development as influenced by the same issue of formal institutions. Because of this, formal institutions have been built on a false premise in its overlooking the durable human-environmental relations. A second false premise about Enlightenment political theory is found in the assumed separation between political institutional design and economics in issues of state developmentalism.
So the points left out of Enlightenment democratic theory are:
(1) the empirically durable human-environmental contexts of all governmental arrangements,
(2) ideas about the state as an economic developmentalist organization,
(3) the issue of the innate geographical particularities of citizenship, and
(4) ways to check and balance the gatekeeping powers of informal political parties on the state.
To organize democracy formally as an expression of sustainable politics is to create a bioregional state by importing into democratic theories of institutional design an awareness of these durable human-environmental interactions in state politics that have been ignored in the past, and the one large oversight about corruptions in the formal state due to informal political power.
To design formal institutions that
represent a sustainable politics is to merge the separated threads of developmentalism,
political science, economic geography, and ecology, by understanding their empirical
interactions and feedback upon one another they have always had.
I suppose you could call me an ecological Montesquieu, an ecologically minded
political scientist interested in the failings of existing political and institutional
theories of the democratic state when we turn to issues of environmental sustainability.
However, I am rejecting this artificial separation between political science,
economics, and the environment as an unempirical way to proceed. Existing ideas
on democracy in the West are inherited from an Enlightenment that was only interested
in how to facilitate an abstract democracy from posited abstract individualized
citizens, and interested only in checking and balancing an absolute monarchy
and its tyranny as the only danger to democratic durability. The argument here
is that there should be subsequent formal additions of checks and balances to
institutional democratic theory which would take us away from an informally
managed state developmentalism that has unwittingly established an ecological
tyranny. The previous theoretical proposals and institutional designs of the
19th century had huge oversights about human-environmental interactions, and
about considerations of how to check and balance or understand the power of
informal political groups. When the Enlightenment ideas of formal checks and
balances were invented, there was nothing called a party politics in sight to
worry about. After parties became the basic mainspring of formally democratic
states, a whole different level of informal corruption dynamics of the formal
state became involved in practice that was sold as "natural democratic
politics," and the lack of experience with what the difficulties would
be or were becoming were ignored in legitimations of the formal state.
The issues around environmentalism
are typically framed in the media, in academic work and even in activist circles
as an issue of technocratic or economic management. The issues around democracy
are seen in terms of social protest movements or informal political parties.
The whole idea of another route of influence is the formal state and how it
constructs, constrains, and designs the contexts of these situations themselves.
Typically, the idea of changing the formal state as a mechanism of political
change is effectively shielded from elite and popular awareness as a route towards
sustainability. Instead ideas are constrained and guided within existing informal
ideas of what to do, letting existing party frameworks maintain the informal
gatekeeping upon political agendas, stopping any progress towards sustainability.
However, to add other checks and balances on informal parties interacting in
the state is perhaps the only solution to sustainability, if I am understood
in what I mean when I say that these informal corruptions at root in a democratic
state create environmental degradation and gatekeep and ignore citizen feedback
about it.
RECOGNIZING THE ECOLOGICAL CONTRACT BETWEEN THE STATE AND ITS PEOPLES
Four summary points of the principles of the bioregional state that make it different from all other democratic institutional designs can be discussed here.
Any additions to formal democratic theory that would make it a formal ecological democratic theory would first remove the false sense that the state is only a 'social' organization. An ecologically democratic state is instead more empirically described as a formal facilitation framework for economic developmental issues and a feedback mechanism against unrepresentative and unsustainable ones.
Second, to keep this developmentalism on track for sustainability, it is important to consider that a state is always situated either within a particular ecology or more typically includes multiple and varied ecologies, with the state manipulating them for good or ill. When a state's informal politics contributes to its own ecological demise through expanding and underwriting externalities in human, ecological and economic health, it can hardly be called a ecological democratic framework or a sustainable democratic framework in all senses of the word sustainable, because this leads to a form of unsustainable ecological tyranny built equally from political economic corruption and informal socio-political repression against attempts to alter this ecological tyranny. This is the process that is maintained perversely and sadly in the name of 'formal democracy,' as if there is nothing to improve upon. I argue that unless additional checks and balances are added that address from the beginning these biased interactive effects, nothing called democracy can ever be achieved or sustainable-socially or environmentally. Without the bioregional state, all that democracy will ever become is a repetition of aristocratic-royalty states under different symbolic legitimations and under an ecological tyranny. Environmental degradation as a process of informal corruption expansion is innately wound around expanding this ecological and social tyranny in politics as much as in economics. The issue becomes the formal illegitimacy of these existing democratic institutions when it comes to sustainability.
A third point is that there
is nothing called an abstract or individualized citizen in practice. We live
in different bioregional arrangements which have to a large degree of their
own history that makes them very durable human-environmental contexts of politics.
If citizenship is only a particular arrangement dealing with formal rules and
prescriptions, then we require a kind of post-Rousseau Social Contract, or "Ecological
Contract," for understanding how citizenship is changed and how the responsibilities
of the democratic state are changed in an era of sustainability. Toward this
Ecological Contract, the bioregional state is a formal facilitation framework
that checks and balances against informal corruptions and informal gatekeeping
in formal democratic states when such informal parties attempt to demote instead
of represent the politics of particular geographies that want to influence state
development by removing the human, ecological, and economic externalities they
are experiencing. Any informal gatekeeping by political parties against sustainable
politics is an ecological tyranny, as it is against an environmental feedback
from citizens who personally experience the externalities in state developmentalism.
Without additional formal checks and balances on informal politics in the bioregional
state, it is argued, the process of this expansion of informal corruption creates
informally guided state developmentalism. This will always be an ecological
tyranny which is self-destructive of a state's own ecology, the health of its
people, and the health of its own economy.
Presently we are trapped within these unecological democracies that are underwriting and protecting this process of politically sponsored ecological degradation. How do we instead explain to others that the state has an Ecological Contract with its people, or they can overthrow it? The French Prime Minister mentioned last year publicly something to the effect, and French elites generally demurred. How do we instead of facilitating informal corruption of our formal democracy, facilitate a democratic politics as a seamless form of ecological feedback? Fourth, this is done by understanding that a people's self-interest is geographically specific and protective of a particular geography, as mentioned above. Citizen feedback is always in and from particular geographic spaces and human-environmental contexts.
To create the additional checks and balances for an ecologically sound developmentalism is merely to latch onto and facilitate an already-existing affirmative feedback from watersheds/bioregions that is ignored though waiting to be formally organized. This is done by aligning political feedback as closely as possible to a direct feedback from particular geographically specific areas into the state. As discussed in the early 20th century by Frederick Jackson Turner and others though overlooked in democratic political theory, there is a history of an innate geographic specificity to the political pressures of "sections," as he called the phenomenon. He researched this for decades and found that environmental-social "sections" were the underlying rationale that explained much of the United States' political movements and patterns of political alliances and protests. Using similar terms in the bioregional state, particular geographies are catchments basis for human, ecological, and economic risk. Geographies have an influence on people's citizenship pressures through their durable and lifelong concerns of avoiding expansions of ill health, ecological destruction, and economic immiseration in their particular geographies. Political feedback against expanding risk is therefore rather geographically specific and shared by particular areas. Instead of party based, or ideologically based exclusively, it is shared by all within particular areas with all these various areas within an overarching abstract state.
All of us socially and ecologically
share our experiences of human health, ecological, and economic externalities
based upon the watersheds in which we live. Typically, we mobilize accordingly.
The state's Ecological Contract requires it to facilitate the civil and environmental
pressure against informal corruption in the state that expands externalities
upon peoples, ecologies, and economies. However, in unsustainable states our
feedback is registered into the state in "out of phase" ways that
keeps this geographically specific expression from registering directly against
any informally managed state developmentalism. On the other hand, in the frameworks
of the bioregional state that support the Ecological Contract, this direct geographic
citizenship pressure is merged with many additional checks and balances that
remove many existing informal party conflicts of interests when in power.
Historically, original Enlightenment
democratic theory along with Rousseau's Social Contract overlooked in its formal
institutional design this later essence of democracy: competitive informal factions
and parties. The formal institutions we have been raised within were designed
without informal parties in mind. Some issues that had yet to be historically
raised should be raised presently in terms of prescriptive adaptations to make
a sustainable state politics. The famous critique of informal power by Robert
Michaels was that instead of parties being representative institutions, parties
are innately self-serving entities that desire to keep others out of power and
desire to strangle debate and perpetuate themselves more than they want to facilitate
democracy. However, Michaels left out of his analysis how formal institutional
contexts have influence the informal dynamics of such parties, considering Duverger's
and Sartori's work for instance. So the question becomes in facilitating sustainability
and the state's Ecological Contract with its people, how to change this formal
context, to assure that informal parties in the state compete for the full electorate
(instead of compete for the partial electorate, agreeing to exclude the rest)
and have incentives to do so, and can be punished by other parties when they
decide to fail to be as representative as possible. A whole different series
of checks and balances on informal power and how it biases the formal state
is required. This huge oversight about the gatekeeping power of informal parties
in politics has led in practice to very clientelistic, selective, and exclusive
corrupt informal politics that has created social and environmental degradation
from the foundation of this "formal democracy" in the 18th-19th centuries.
To summarize, the bioregional state
is built from this political theory of the origins of unsustainability as caused
by informal corruptions in practice in the formal state. Capable of being solved,
these informal corruptions are due to the original design oversights of failing
to institutionalize required formal checks and balances in three additional
areas: one, assuring a competitive marketplace of ideas in informal party politics
before elections instead of informal gatekeeping on debate and divide and conquer
politics funded by the same corporations; two, assuring formal state frameworks
provide a context after elections for checking or balancing informal parties'
desire while they are the governmental incumbents to exclude other parties;
and three, assuring geographic expression of citizenship risk instead of informal
parties creating pocket boroughs.
In the past 20 years, European sociologist
Ulrich Beck has noted our whole political outlook has moved into a 'risk society'
framework. He describes a nexus of politics that has moved from merely fighting
for a distribution of material goods, into one more and more fighting to get
rid of 'environmental bads.' I believe I am the first to take these ideas and
apply them to formal institutional democratic theory by asking, what kinds of
additions to democracy would be required to facilitate an ecologically sound
democracy, in order to let democracy as a process get rid of these 'environmental
bads' through facilitating an ecologically sound democratic politics.
In conclusion, I believe I have described something worthy of consideration
for debate on sustainability strategies because it addresses both a novel idea
and has a prescriptive intent even to the level of offering ideas for slow strategic
implementation. I believe this will be a gauntlet for the next millennium that
will define the existing issues of formal democratic political theory as innately
flawed and politically illegitimate without addressing the three main issues
raised in the bioregional state: how to establish checks and balances on the
informal gatekeeping organizational contexts of parties, how to create a competitive
marketplace of ideas in the party context, and how to align the state with the
innately geographic specific issues of citizenship expression. A formal green
political framework innately comes about once there are checks and balances
in operation which change the incentive contexts of informal power to be more
fluid, competitive, and representative.
back to the list of bioregional letters
contact:
mrkdwhit@wallet.com
mwhitake@ssc.wisc.edu
Work
toward sustainability:
bioregional voting districts
that reflect your experience of health and environmental risk