Successful solutions to pressing social ills tend to consist of innovative combinations of a limited set of alternative ways of perceiving and resolving the issues. These contending policy perspectives justify, represent and stem from four different ways of organizing social relations: hierarchy, individualism, egalitarianism and fatalism. Each of these perspectives: (1) distils certain elements of experience and wisdom that are missed by the others;(2) provides a clear expression of the way in which a signifi cant portion of the populace feels we should live with one another and with nature; and (3) needs all of the others in order to be sustainable. ' Clumsy solutions ' -policies that creatively combine all opposing perspectives on what the problems are and how they should be resolved -are therefore called for. We illustrate these claims for the issue of global warming.Most climatologists agree that by burning fossil fuels and engaging in other forms of consumption and production we are increasing the amount of greenhouse gases that fl oat around in the atmosphere. These gases, in trapping some of the sun ' s heat, warm the earth and enable life. The trouble is,
In this article, we argue that the Cultural Theory pioneered by Mary Douglas can help resolve two pressing issues in the study and practice of public deliberation. The first of these issues concerns how best to structure deliberative processes (or "minipublics") that have increasingly been implemented around the world. We use Cultural Theory's analysis of social relations to derive a hypothesis concerning the ideal design of minipublics, and outline research strategies to test the hypothesis. The second issue pertains to scaling out minipublics. We describe John Dryzek's and Simon Niemeyer's influential proposal for deploying discourses to make public deliberation more representative, and discuss the limits of their proposal. Furthermore, we show how Cultural Theory's analysis of people's cultural biases (i.e., collectively shared perceptions, beliefs and norms) may help overcome these limits and how the design of minipublics can generate trust in and legitimacy of public deliberation.
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