Social theories of environmental reform - Environmental Reform in the Information Age - page 64

and on a growing involvement of economic and market institutions
in articulating environmental considerations via monetary values and
prices, demand, products and services and the like.
A third theme in ecological modernisation relates to the changing
role, position and performance of the 'environmental' state (often
referred to as political modernisation in Europe [cf. J anicke, 1993 ;
Tatenhove et al., 2000 ], or regulatory reinvention in the United States
[cf. Eisner, 2004 ]). This theme evolved in the mid-1990s in environmen-
tal governance studies. The traditional central role of the nation-state in
environmental reform is shifting, leading to new governance arrange-
ments and new political spaces. First, there is a trend towards more
decentralised, flexible and consensual styles of national governance, at
the expense of top-down hierarchical command-and-control regulation
(a trend often referred to as political modernisation; cf. J anicke, 1993 ).
Second, there is a larger involvement of nonstate actors and 'nonpolit-
ical' arrangements in environmental governance, taking over conven-
tional tasks of the nation-state and conventional politics (e.g., privati-
sation, public-private partnerships (Glasbergen et al., 2007 ), conflict
resolution by business-environmental NGO coalitions without state
interference and the emergence of subpolitics 5 ). Finally, supranational
and global environmental institutions and governance arrangements to
some extent undermine the conventional role of the sovereign nation-
state or national arrangements in environmental policy and politics.
As I will outline later in this chapter, this a more than just a matter
of scale; it is, rather, a fundamental change in environmental reform
dynamics, in need for a different environmental sociology and political
sciences.
Fourth, the modification of the position, role and ideology of social
movements (vis- a-vis the 1970s and 1980s) in the process of ecolog-
ical transformation emerges as a theme in ecological modernisation.
Instead of positioning themselves on the periphery or even outside the
central decision-making institutions on the basis of demodernisation
ideologies and limited economic and political power, environmental

5

As Beck explains, “sub-politics is distinguished from 'politics,' first in that
agents outside the political or corporatist system are allowed to appear on the
stage of social design [. . .], and second, in that not only social and collective
agents but individuals as well compete with the latter and each other for the
emerging shaping power of the political” (Beck, 1994 : 22).