ARTICLES Habitat Conservation Plans and the Promise of Deliberative Democracy

Recent reforms in U.S. environmental policy have been directed away from tradi tional command and control regulation or scientific management and toward col laboration and democratic participation in decisionmaking. Evaluating these changes requires attention not only to their effects on environmental protection, but also to the normative aims behind such democratization. This article examines a procedure that allows for collaboratively produced exceptions to the Endangered Species Act, paying particular attention to the normative and democratic dimensions of those experiments. Paradoxically, the effort to increase participation in policy processes has, in some cases, actually decreased opportunities for meaningful citi zen input in the regulatory process, to the detriment of both environmental protec tion and democratic objectives. Environmental policy in the United States at the turn of the twenty-first century is undergoing profound change. The direction of that transformation is away from cen tralized command and control regulation of pollution and the scientific management of public lands and their natural resources, and toward greater reliance on input from local stakeholders rather than just from ostensibly apolitical, scientifically trained government officials. The democratization of environmental policy consists of a shift toward more decentralized and collaborative stakeholder participatory processes and greater transparency and dissemination of environmental informa tion. Although the impetus for such change can partly be understood as a reactio