№ 6 - 2006
Yefremenko D.V.
Democracy and Ecological Risk Communication as Problems of Environmental Politics

It is such categories as “risk” and “democracy” that are discussed in the article from the stance of environmental politics studies. The origin of environmental politics is connected with inversions of ecological risks to political risks. Although the ideas of ecological risks being politically inverted – as, allegedly, apt to radically change the content of democracy or, on the contrary, to give rise to some form of ecological dictatorship, – have been left, as the author demonstrates, in the past, yet scientific community does really play a key role in ecological risk communication, i.e. in the process actualizing important aspects of theory of democracy. And thus the environmental politics studies overpass the boundaries of subdiscplinarity. Against this background, to the author’s mind, it is not so much reasonable to “emancipate” a theory of environmental politics, as to initiate discussion of relevant issues within a broader context of political studies.