Managing Green Value Conflicts in Public Policy Processes

This chapter introduces the research problem by arguing that public policy processes are increasingly pervaded by value conflicts that need to be managed somehow by public officials. It is argued that Weberian bureaucratic principles and rationalistic methods tend to dominate, which evokes the following critical question: why not ethical reasoning? The purpose is to develop green public ethics as a pragmatic normative approach that can guide environmental value conflict management through open ethical reasoning and ethical activism, and to elaborate how this ethical pragmatism can be adopted and institutionalized in policy processes. The content of the book is also summarized.