Social theories of environmental reform - Environmental Reform in the Information Age - page 73

flows' rather than seeing them only or primarily as part of the 'space
of place', questions and analyses of environmental governance and
reform move beyond a defensive position of only 'blaming' intrusions
and infringements of global networks and flows on the environment
of local places. The 'space of flows' then becomes a relevant analyti-
cal category for protecting and articulating nature and environment,
opening up sets of new scapes, networks, nodes and strategies for envi-
ronmental reform.
Double hybridisation
Although the ecological modernisation school of thought already
paved the way for less conventional interpretations of the role of polit-
ical, economic and civil society actors in environmental reform, this
is further radicalised in the environmental sociology of flows. Follow-
ing the (global) governance literature, the state becomes increasingly
replaced by a proliferation of governance arrangements that create
new forms, institutions and networks for governing actors' behaviour.
This transition from government to governance is based on the under-
standing that the political is not limited to the traditional concept of
the state, in the sense of a delineated institution. Transformations of
the state, new alliances between the state and other actors, new state-
market configurations, and the state as only one of the many elements
of global networks form all new foci of theoretical attention in the
governance literature.
In understanding environmental reform from such a new perspec-
tive (or social theory) conventional conceptual and theoretical cate-
gories and boundaries are challenged. The classical distinctions among
state, market and civil society actors and institutions are increasingly
mixed up or blurred in dealing with environmental flows. For instance,
when transnational corporations (TNCs) with a proactive environmen-
tal strategy are working in a 'low-governance-arena' (e.g., sub-Saharan
Africa), they sometimes come to act as government-like agents, regulat-
ing flows from a broader perspective than just an economic perspective.
We then can see market actors behaving like states. But it happens also
the other way around: states buying and selling 'sinks' on international
markets, competing for 'green product flows' and rationalizing their
green-energy politics from a liberalisation and privatisation point of
view. Finally, the sharp divisions between markets and states with their
system-rationalities, on the one hand, and civil society with its broader