Dialogue on Democracy and the Environment from the Approaches Procedural and Substantial Democracy

The article exposes the debate that involves two types of democracy - the substantial or social and the formal or political- and the debates on deliberative democracy, in order to seek solutions to the problem of how - to confront the environmental crisis - including the subject of sovereignty future generations and the biotic community without action and word. To do so, Habermas proposed of popular sovereignty and guidance to the procedure, provides important information so that it can assume the presence of such diffuse subjects rights and interests. The debate allows to realize the enormous difficulties that this task involves considering obstacles to democracy represented by the current environmental crises. The obstacle arises from the contrast between  the citizen’s incompetence of citizen facing ever more complex problems and teaching technical solutions accessible only to specialists. Given that environmental problems involve the difficult balance between maintaining a healthy environment and economic / industrial development made possible by advances in science and technology, the compatibility between democratic participation and a tendency to the solution of environmental problems precisely because of its complexity, it is increasingly decided by a technocracy, is a debate that needs to be faced.