Politics of Urban Runoff: Building Relations through Active Citizenship - Politics of Urban Runoff: Nature, Technology, and the Sustainable City - page 182

is not a contest between interests but an inquiry into solving problems
through education, debate, and participation. 104
Of course, reorienting environmental governance toward deliberative
models requires time and energy. The purported advantage of rational
politics is its effi ciency in problem solving; the counterargument of de-
liberative democracy advocates is that this effi ciency comes at a cost.
Rational politics may be effective at addressing point sources (e.g., an in-
dustrial smokestack), but it often fails to address more systemic problems
of nonpoint source pollution such as urban runoff and climate change.
With problems that pose imminent danger, it may be necessary to cur-
tail deliberative activities if a viable strategy of action cannot be devised
in a reasonable period of time. But for most environmental issues, civic
political actors argue that it is more democracy rather than less that will
ultimately lead to more effective solutions to human/nature confl icts.
Another signifi cant challenge to civic politics is that it calls for new
modes of expertise, presenting a direct challenge to the top-down, techno-
managerial forms of environmental governance. Proponents of delibera-
tive democracy and civic environmentalism advocate for drawing on the
local knowledge of nonexperts to complement formal expertise in en-
vironmental problem-solving activities. 105 Formal expertise is not to be
abandoned but rather integrated in new modes of deliberation in which
expert knowledge informs rather than dominates environmental problem
solving. Professional and technical experts such as landscape architects,
ecologists, and urban planners are used as consulting resources for rework-
ing human/nonhuman relations and can provide a palette of options and
scenarios for how urban nature relations could potentially evolve in space
and over time. Further, their expertise can be used to facilitate and medi-
ate deliberations among stakeholders about different confi gurations of
human/nonhuman relations, interpreting complex issues to inform rather
than dominate these activities. 106
The insight of formal experts is supplemented by the specialized or
expert citizen who contributes to deliberative and problem-solving ac-
tivities through localized understandings and insights into their specifi c
social and material surroundings. 107 Deliberative democratic practices thus
offer a way to bridge the gap between expert and citizen by engaging
ordinary people and experts in the collective project of addressing envi-
ronmental and social problems. 108 The inclusion of nonexperts follows on
Dewey's famous axiom, “The man who wears the shoe knows best that it
pinches and where it pinches, even if the expert shoemaker is the best judge
of how the trouble is to be remedied.” 109 At the same time, citizenship