This collective work provides a reflexive reading of environmental democracy as a new method of
governance of the contemporary ecological issues that declining biodiversity climate change
and sustainable development present. The authors examine the links between the environment and
democracy by questioning the status of actors the manner of their involvement the various
ways of mobilising knowledge and the mechanisms of dialogue and decision-making based on study
cases observed in different national contexts (Italy France Ireland Germany the Netherlands
Russia Canada and Brazil). This international approach sheds light on the means of
appropriation of environmental democracy on a local level and its ability to promote universal
characteristics or to standardise the connection to the environment and politics. The
originality of this work comes among other things from its transversality associating texts
with differing theoretical outlooks and methodology in an innovative way. Through this
perspective on-going processes of redefining environmental problems are revealed via the prisms
of risks and uncertainty thus assigning them a new role in aiding decision-making in a
sociology that is in turn critical and committed.
