The ultimate case for technocracy?

This book has been about a fundamental transformation in the art of government since the 1980s, which involves an attack on fundamental democratic and bureaucratic principles. Technocracy has always been difficult to disentangle from its main competitors, but the job has become particularly difficult with the new technocratic partnership with democracy against bureaucracy. Perhaps for this reason, technocracy had fallen of the radar for some time, but has now re-emerged as populism has pitted itself with increasing force against technocratic policy and politics. Indeed, as I have argued, it is necessary to rein technocracy back in if we are to curb populism and mount an effective defence of democracy in a wider sense. However, the question remains whether this attempt to solve one problem will not simply exacerbate a bigger and even more fundamental problem affecting politics, the economy, technology and ultimately the future of the human race: faced with the reality of accelerating climate change and global warming, one might reasonably ask whether this is really the time to rein in technocracy. Is what we need not more technocracy in the face of climate change and the impending end of the world as we know it? Would reining technocracy back in not simply leave the field open to climate change denial, interest capture and political opportunism? This is certainly a possible scenario, not entirely unlike the one we are already in, but let me conclude by suggesting that the decisionistic-pragmatic model is still a better option than pure technocracy.

In itself, the scientific evidence on climate change should obviously already have resulted in concerted political action nothing short of global mobilization, and at least beyond the meagre results so far. The scientific evidence on climate change has been steadily increasing and dutifully summarized by the IPCC since 1988. Political action, however, has been limited to ad hoc support for sustainable energy initiatives, at best inadequate and at worst rife with damaging side-effects (think bioethanol and biomass), minor modifications of transportation infrastructure, toying around with emission standards and Green New Deals suggesting, perhaps involuntarily, that we still have the problem under control.