Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
7 Greening the networked economy
1. Environment in a global economy
Ever since the emergence of the environmental crisis in industrialised
countries, companies and producers have been blamed for both their
significant contribution to environmental deterioration and for their
limited efforts and responsibilities in decreasing and preventing envi-
ronmental disturbances. But with the literature in the 1990s on eco-
logical modernisation, on governance, on partnerships, on corporate
social responsibility and the like, it has become commonplace to say
that environmental protection is no longer the privileged domain of
formal state policies and politics, and that increasingly private mar-
ket actors become involved in environmental protection. 1 Although
private producers and multinational companies are still major contrib-
utors to environmental problems, they can no longer be considered
just passive environmental actors that move only when forced to do
so by states and civil society. Companies and the private sector have
developed their own agenda, approaches and organisational modes
to engage - more or less successfully, more or less actively - in the
environmental arena.
With the information revolution and globalisation the context in
which and the way how companies operate has transformed consider-
ably, as the wide literature on, among others, post-Fordism, the net-
worked economy and the consumerist turn has illustrated. In this chap-
ter, I especially will explore how these new conditions and structures of
the networked economy have dramatically influenced the involvement
and practices of market actors in environmental governance. How do
1
There is still a debate regarding to what extent and how successfully private
actors have emerged on the stage of environmental reform (e.g., the debates
between neo-Marxist and political economy-inspired schools of thought, on
the one hand, and various versions of ecological modernisation, on the other;
cf. Mol and Sonnenfeld, 2000 ; Mol and Buttel, 2002 ).
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