Representing People, Representing Nature, Representing the World

Abstract

At the heart of a series of debates about the environment are problems of representation. There are problems at the general level about those who are without adequate representation in the political and economic choices concerning the environments in which they will live. Some are unrepresented or underrepresented for contingent reasons ö given a different political and economic order they could be represented: many marginalised communities, sections of the working class, peasants, many groups of women, some ethnic minorities. For others there are problems about the very possibility of representation: future generations and nonhuman beings pose particular problems of representing those who cannot speak and have in that sense no possibility of voice or presence in processes of environmental decisionmaking. The absence of such representation raises major problems concerning the ethical and political legitimacy of decisions made in the absence of their voice. At the same time it raises problems also for forms of environmental action and advocacy that are legitimised by appeal to the claim that protagonists are speaking and acting on behalf of those who are without voice. Alongside these general issues there are more particular problems of representation posed by different institutional structures and arrangements employed in environmental decisionmaking. Central to the case against the use of market and surrogate market prices as a basis of environmental choice are failures of representation. They leave the poor underrepresented: because willingness to pay is income dependent, the use of raw willingness to pay measures will give greater weight to the preferences of the richö``the poor sell cheap'' (Guha and Martinez-Alier, 1997). The interests of nonhumans and future generations cannot be directly represented at all through willingness to pay and they are indirectly represented at best precariously through the preferences of current consumers (O'Neill, 1993, chapter 4). Deliberative institutions are often put forward as a response to these failings. Against the economic picture of democracy as a surrogate market procedure for aggregating and effectively meeting the given preferences of individuals, the

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