In recent years scholars of the capabilities approach (CA) have turned their attention to two important questions: (1) how to integrate the environment into the conceptual framework of the CA, and (2) which political structures are consistent with the CA. I argue that their work is flawed to the extent that they do not address the issue of public deliberation directly, and that this neglect leaves them at a loss to articulate a conception of politics which aims to realize the normative ideal of active and capable democratic citizens. To remedy this, I develop an account of the necessary conditions for good democratic deliberation from Martha Nussbaum's political justification for the CA.

This account emphasizes the need for a rich, cognitively diverse information environment, observance of deliberative norms of mutual respect, sympathetic listening, and a shared concern for the common good (as opposed to individual or group interest), and adequate opportunities for citizens to develop the capacities associated with democratic deliberation and citizenship. With regard to environmental policy-making, I argue that the reliance on the ecosystem services approach (ES) by CA theorists is problematic since it cannot incorporate the multiple "ways of knowing" about ecosystems present in the ecological sciences, and cannot draw upon sufficient empirical data to make policy recommendations. In light of this, I advocate for a deliberative policy-making process, one which brings experts and lay citizens into dialogue with each other.

This raises the question: how are lay citizens to judge competing expert claims? I argue that citizens can use the criteria of "fidelity to representation" as a guide in assessing the quality of the discourses in which these claims are embedded, since they lack the expertise to judge particular expert claims regarding climate change, the effects of pollution, and so on. With regard to political institutions, I argue that CA theorists should pay more attention to electoral institutions based on proportional representation (PR) and deliberative mini-publics, as an analysis of the scholarly literature on these institutions suggests that they facilitate the conditions for deliberation and judgment I derived from Nussbaum's account of the CA.