Social theories of environmental reform - Environmental Reform in the Information Age - page 56

today neo-Marxism is a powerful and far from marginal explanatory
theory in environmental social science research. 2
It is only by the late 1980s, and especially in the 1990s, that atten-
tion in environmental sociology and political sciences started to change
somewhat toward what the sociologist Fred Buttel ( 2003 ) has labelled
the sociology of environmental reform. Strongly driven by empirical
and ideological developments in the European environmental move-
ment, and by the practices and institutional developments in some
'environmental' states, European sociologists began reorienting their
focus towards environmental reforms (only later and sometimes less
strongly to be followed by U.S. and other non-European environmen-
tal social scientists). In this chapter, I will review these social science
contributions to understanding environmental reform, by focusing on
three generations of social theories, and conclude on their 'informa-
tional dimension'. 3 Although these three generations have an histor-
ical dimension in that each has been developed in a specific period
(and geographical space), they are not mutually excluding or full
alternatives. First-generation theories on policy and protest are still
applied and relevant today, be it in a somewhat different mode as
initially developed in the 1970s. In addition, insights from the first-
generation theories have often been included in reform theories of later
generations.
As such, this chapter can be read as the counterpoint to Chapter 2 .
Chapter 2 started from the Information Society and Information Age
literature and related them to perspectives on environmental reform;
this chapter will commence with exploring the sociological and polit-
ical science perspectives on environmental reform and will explore to
what extent these have been combined with information, informa-
tion technologies and information flows. As in Chapter 2 ,wewill

2

Arguably, this currently is more the case in the United States than in European
countries. For a comparison between the developments of U.S. and European
environmental sociology (including the position of neo-Marxism), see Mol
( 2006b ).

3

It goes without saying that such a focus and emphasis on environmental reform
studies/approaches does not disregard other environmental social sciences
traditions (e.g., attitude-behaviour paradigms; political economy views; social
constructivist perspectives; cultural theories) as being irrelevant. Several of these
other perspectives are drawn into our analysis later in this chapter, or will
appear later in this volume. It is basically through the nature of this volume that
environmental reform studies are taken as the main entrance into the literature.