(Why) are environmental values under-expressed in politics? And why (deliberative) democracy is the solution

Listen to this Stockholm Seminar held by Simon Niemeyer, professor and co-founder of the Centre for Deliberative Democracy and Global Governance at the University of Canberra, on 3 December 2026.

The seminar follows a career spent seeking to understand how environmental values translate into political choices —across continents and through disciplines. Close observation of how we consider the environment among other considerations and decide on actions that will affect it — in both deliberative and non-deliberative settings reveals that very few would actively choose to degrade it. That their choices may not reflect this stance is not a problem of knowledge or capability. The research exposes a much loftier problem — a mismatch between how we have evolved to reason as humans in social groups and the construction of liberal democracy primarily as the act of voting by individuals. Exploring this problem has required a new approach to understanding and observing “deliberative reason”. When deliberative reason is applied to the analysis of group deliberation, the mechanisms impacting the expression of environmental values become clear. And the results have implications for understanding how we can improve both environmental outcomes and democratic quality.

About the speaker

Simon Niemeyer is Professor and co-founder of the Centre for Deliberative Democracy and Global Governance at the University of Canberra. His research in the field of deliberative democracy seeks to understand and measure the substantive qualities of deliberation and the conditions required for their attainment — involving design, observation and analysis of over 25 deliberative minipublics. This work informs the design of deliberative institutions at small and large scale. Insights from this research has contributed to the development of several pathbreaking concepts in deliberative democracy, such as metaconsensus, discursive representation, scaling up deliberation, and the theory and measurement of deliberative reason. Much of his work has focussed on the relationship between democracy and environmental quality, alongside a broad range of topics, including technological development, medical ethics, energy futures, immigration, and democratic reform. Niemeyer completed his PhD (Social and Political Theory) at the Australian National University in 2002, which followed undergraduate studies in ecology, economics, and environmental policy (Griffith University).

About Stockholm Seminar

The Stockholm Seminars cover a broad range of sustainability science perspectives with a focus on the dynamics and stewardship of social-ecological systems. The seminars are usually held at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and organised by the Beijer Institute of Ecological Economics, the Anthropocene Laboratory, and the Global Economic Dynamics and the Biosphere programme, all three at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, together with Albaeco, Future Earth and Stockholm Resilience Centre. Since its start in 2000 more than 100 of the world’s leading scientists and experts have taken part in this seminar series, including Nobel Laureates.