Participative democracy and local environmental issues

Résumé En

The present paper deals with the management of environmental quality at the level of a city. More precisely, we propose two different contractualisms among citizens that allow them to reduce the polluting emissions caused by their consumption of both a private and a collective good. In the first contractualism, the mayor proposes to citizens to establish neighbourhood committees. They have the responsibility of defining the total amount of polluting emission by private and public transportation means in their neighbourhood. It comes out that the mediation of the neighbourhood committees brings out a lower total pollution than in the case where each individual citizen acts on his own interest. However the emission level brought out by the neighbourhood committees is not Pareto-optimal. On the other hand, extending the first coalitional game by a supplementary stage focused on bargaining between the neighbourhood committees, allows us to define a participative democracy procedure. This two-stage procedure brings about a Pareto-optimal pollution level. © 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.