Philippine E-Journals

PHILO-DEMOCRACY: AN ALTERNATIVE RESPONSE TO THE CHALLENGE OF ENVIRONMENTAL GOVERNANCE

Rejene T. Lakibul

 

Abstract:

Bridging academic theory and practice is evidently of transcendental importance, now that societal demands include training responsive citizenry for nation-building.

This remains to be a legitimate challenge in Philosophy and in significant other disciplines even until today. Thus, in order to increase the utility of environmental ethics in addressing pressing environmental governance issues, any attempt has to transcend its orientation towards a more assimilative stance. Public Environmental Philosophy (PEP) is one considerable alternative. Its focus is not just to increase ethical appreciation for sustainable biotic community, but to integrate unorthodox theorizing into policy making so that the end-result is a gradual shift of ethical focus and an expansion of social responsibility from mere input-dependent capability to output-driven actuality. This paper offers an alternative practical method of looking into some challenges posed by environmental governance. The analytical frameworks used are pluralism, democracy, and public management. The strategies to enhance more responsive governance include public environmental philosophy and eco-democracy. A three-pronged policy agenda is hereby suggested. It asserts the integration of ethics of ‘practical efficacy’ into the visioning capability and actuality of the organization, the cultivation of a ‘policy turn’ pragmatism and its assimilation into the organization’s philosophy, and the mainstreaming of environmental  philosophy of the organization through the democratization of its ‘motivational turn’. Although this is just an alternative theorizing, but still it is a considerable one.