There has been critique of democracy, saying it relies too much on the supposedly naive belief that citizens will push for greener decisions, when they in reality are not at all compelled to do so. Shearman and Smith criticizes democracy, saying it is intertwined with capitalism and that it promotes individual and selfish behaviour while failing to protect the common resources of the world. They question if protection of one political philosophy or another is important when the most concerning issue is the preservation of the human species and as China and Russia continues to assert themselves internationally, ideas of what is desirable and not whenit comes to governance and values of a country are blurred. When the environmental threat intensifies, even the West might agree that any form of order is preferable to disorder, and thus put democracy on hold while handling more pressing issues.
In the six African cases used for this thesis there were many different aspects which played in regarding the way autocracies and democracies handled their policy-making and project implementation, including levels of economic growth, conflict and ambition. However, broadly speaking, the performance was quite similar between all the cases and differed only to a minor extent in some areas, meaning the type of government did not affect the performance extensively. In general, the autocratic countries did, in line with the theory, perform better than expected and actually had an extensive focus on climate change. However, unsurprisingly, they lacked in public participation, but seeing as they did not perform considerably worse than the countries with bigger participation perhaps it is not as important as it has been proclaimed to be. Although, it is worth remembering that despite perhaps being environmentally preferable, autocracies are not preferable from a human rights perspective.
Re: Climate Change Thread
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