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It is probably not overstating the case to say that the field of democratic theory has been
transformed by the development of the concept of deliberative democracy. For many,
deliberation has now become the sine qua non for democratic practice. A deliberative approach
to all of the policy problems facing modern democracies seems, to many, to be the only way to
overcome the failings of interest-group liberalism. But any effort to bring the advantages of
deliberative democracy to the arena of environmental decision making seems destined to
encounter at least one fundamental obstacle. In order to understand this obstacle clearly and to
find a path around it, we must begin with a general understanding of what deliberative
democracy is and where it comes from philosophically.
A broadly acceptable definition of deliberative democracy might be that it requires a
nation’s processes for lawmaking be so designed and maintained that "outcomes will be
continuously apprehensible as products of collective deliberation conducted rationally and fairly
among free and equal individuals" (Michelman, 1997, p. 149). While many elements of this
definition beg definitions of their own, it is evident that deliberative democracy is (at least in
part) an effort to more fully realize the dreams of the Enlightenment. Locke, Condorcet,
Helvetius and many of their contemporaries advanced a philosophy of reason through which
mankind might throw off centuries of superstition and dogma to achieve a reconciliation with
nature and set an upward course of collective progress. This they would do, in part, through
institutions of democratic self-government characterized by a system of individual rights, an
extensive (and expanding) franchise, and a system of universal education. Thus our modern
notions of democracy are as easily recognized as products of the Enlightenment as are the
methods of modern science.
Convention