New Thesis Title

I believe I have finally settled on a final title for my thesis.

Here is the new version___

Reshuffling democracy:
Exploring deliberative environmental governance in Costa Rica’s electric sector

And here is the old version it replaces___

Rediscovering Democracy:
Deliberating environmental insecurities in the Costa Rican power sector

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Now, for my thinking about the change.

Change 1: Taking out Rediscovering / Replacing it with Reshuffling.

Granted, it's a weirder word, but it's a lot less pretentious. Mostly, I think it more accurately describes what this thesis intends to do in a number of ways:

BAREJEMELO?. This thesis addresses reflexive citizenship (drawing on the ideas of Ulrich Beck and Anthony Giddens) and deliberation (an emerging theme in environmental politics), as resources for nurturing environmental governance. A common Costa Rican colloquialism, between to people in conversation trying to understand each other, is "barajeme eso?", which means "come again"? or, can you restate what you're saying in a way that helps me better understand it?.... Thus, reshuffling entails an effort to make one's ideas (in this case about democracy) more accessible to the understanding of others. Similarly, the work of this thesis seeks to make the views about democracy held by some stakeholders more accessible for reflection by others with different views.

THE BIGGER PICTURE, THE WHOLE DECK. The central methodological resource of this thesis is the Q-Deck, a set of cards containign statements that are representative of the "Concourse" -- the domain of everything people might think about a topic. The process of completing a Q-Deck, while in some ways was just an intermediate step of this thesis, was a major intellectual production effort and a huge innovative leap of resourcefulness and creativity for the context of the research community (the University for Peace Department of Environment, Peace and Security) where this method was used. The shuffling aspect also relates to what the elaboration of this deck represents... taking all the cards (all the ideas), bringing them together, and integrating them into a new gestalt that is open for the analysis and the reconfiguration (through sorting) of each participant in the research.

THE REDISTRIBUTION OF POWER. Finally, the ultimate goal of the thesis is to foster the thinking about a model of governance where choice, responsibility and power are redistributed, into a reconfigured structure of civil society/State/private sector relations. In this sense, reshuffling democracy as a governance practice involves a redistributive action, like shuffling and dealing does with a deck of cards. Everything is brought back together and rearranged so as to meet everyone's needs more equitably.

In all these senses, the thesis is proposing a way of approaching democracy that attempt a different view of how the "different pieces of the elephant" in each stakeholder's vantage point fit together, and that can contribute to integrate the particular claims to legitimacy and justice that each side holds.

However, it is not really "rediscovering democracy" for anyone, since it is not seeking a higher claim to truth over the views of democracy that people already have, but instead it is just trying to "play" at combining them in new ways.

Change 2: Taking out Deliberating environmental insecurities / Replacing it with Exploring deliberative environmental governance

It's not really about vulnerabilities or securitization. The focus on the thesis is not on environmetnal insecurities (neither in the sense of identifying vulnerabilities nor in the sense of analyzing the securitizing discourse). The focus of the thesis is how the crisis of legitimation has collapsed environmental governance, how underlying views of democracy are keeping people entrenched in the polarization, and how discussing democracy can help overcome the stalemate. While environmental security undoubtedly deteriorates under conditions of a deadlock in environmental governance, that is not what this thesis is seeking to demonstrate.

But it IS about a "reframed" concept of governance. Deliberative Environmental Governance synthesizes a new approach to environmental governance... It synthesizes the willingness to be participatory, accountable, solution oriented and geared towards generating public judgment (which unlike public opinion, means that “people have struggled with the issue, thought about it in their own terms, and formed a judgment they are willing to stand by”. (O’Donnell, 1993, “Judgment defined and tested” paragraph 1). It is a synthesis that is not substantially in the existing literature (although some work on deliberative environmental policy is).

And it is an exploratory work. While this needs to be stressed a lot more in my writing, this thesis is a completely exploratory work... It isn't the definitive research on deliberative democracy and the environment simply because it is the first work done about it in this part of the world. So while I cannot expect to accomplish a specific outcome of deliberation, halfway through my research I'm loaded with charts of new territory I've explored.

So there, in a lot of words, is the explanation for the choice of my first words to describe my thesis... the title.