Social theories of environmental reform - Environmental Reform in the Information Age - page 66

reform perspectives cannot but meet (fierce) debate. The debates
and criticism on ecological modernisation have been summarised and
reviewed in a number of publications. 7 Here I want to categorise these
various critiques and debates in three ways.
First, several objections have been raised during the short history
of ecological modernisation, which have been incorporated in more
recent versions of the theory. Although these objections against eco-
logical modernisation made sense in referring to the first period of
ecological modernisation studies (cf. Sonnenfeld and Mol, 2002 ), dur-
ing the third generation of ecological modernisation approaches they
are no longer adequate. This is valid, for instance, regarding criticism
on technological determinism in ecological modernisation, on the pro-
ductivist orientation and the neglect on the consumer, on the lack of
power in ecological modernisation studies and on its Eurocentricity.
Not withstanding the increased incorporation of these critiques in the
majority (but not all) of ecological modernisation studies at the turn
of the millennium, several scholars continued repeating them up until
recently (e.g., Carolan [ 2004 ]onthe productivist orientation; Murphy
and Bendell [ 1997 ] 8 on technological determinism; Gibbs [ 2004 ]on
missing power relations).
Second, there are a number of critiques on ecological modernisa-
tion perspectives that find their origin in radically different paradigms
and approaches. Neo-Marxist criticism by Schnaiberg and colleagues
( 2002 ; Pellow et al., 2000 ) emphasises consistently the fundamental

7

For evaluations and critiques on the idea of ecological modernisation as the
common denominator of environmental reform processes starting to emerge in
the 1990s, see, for instance, Hannigan ( 1995 ), Christoff ( 1996 ), Blowers ( 1997 ),
Dryzek ( 1997 ), Gouldson and Murphy ( 1997 ), Leroy and van Tatenhove
( 2000 ), Bl uhdorn ( 2000 ), Buttel ( 2000 ), Mol and Spaargaren ( 2000 ; 2002 ),
Pellow et al. ( 2000 ), Pepper ( 1999 ), Schnaiberg et al. ( 2002 ) and Gibbs ( 2004 ).

8

Murphy and Bendell ( 1997 : 63), for instance, summarise ecological
modernisation or ecomodernism as:
the perspective that treats the environment as another technological problem
to be overcome in the pursuit of progress. To the ecomodernist, pollution is
an economic opportunity for prevention and clean-up technologies and
certainly not an indication of fundamental problems with the current
economic system.
This summary and implicit criticism would have been adequate in the late
1980s, but this is no longer the case at the turn of the millennium when most
ecological modernisation studies incorporated effectively such criticism in their
writings.