From Democracy Digest.

…….at fighting climate change?

Asian environmentalists as well as self-serving autocrats make the argument that a crisis as severe (if man-made) as rising temperatures can be mitigated only by the firm smack of authoritarian rule. Democracies huff and puff and, prey to vested interests and voters’ distaste for hard choices, ultimately shirk the task. The Economist notes, but:

Authoritarian environmentalism…..may excel at producing policies but be no better than democratic environmentalism at producing good outcomes—and probably worse. Policy driven by bureaucratic and technocratic elites, with almost no input, monitoring or modification from those who make up civil society, has real drawbacks: think of the provincial governments in China that lie about their coal-use figures and of the supposedly clean, China-backed hydropower projects on South-East Asia’s giant rivers that are wreaking havoc with fish and water flows.

For Putin’s Russia, democracy is not a value per se, rather identity is the real value worth fighting for, argues analyst Anna Mahjar-Barducci. The former Kremlin advisor Sergey Karaganov believes that authoritarian regimes command “an advantage over modern democracies,” since they are better at consolidating resources and promoting a consistent long-term policy, she writes for the Middle East Media Research Institute (HT: FDD).

See full story here.