Limits to Managing the Environment - Implementing Environmental and Resource Management - page 209

Part III - Limits to Managing the Environment 1
Ingmar Lippert
Augsburg University, Chair of Sociology, Augsburg, Germany
Part III investigates some of the limits and contradictions of management of the
environment and its resources, through detailed discussions of key dimensions of
applied environmental management. This part introduces studies of 1) resource
management (rivers as well as recycling), 2) specific techniques drawn on in
corporate and public environmental management (suggestion schemes, and
respectively, visualisation techniques), and finally, 3) policy discourses (Clean
Development Mechanism). The studies presented here are linked by a common
thread which recognises that the historicity of environmental management as a
social practice requires us to scrutinise its specificity as a practical, social, cultural
as well as political achievement. The ascension of science and modernity gave rise
to a qualitative change in cultural conceptualisations of the human-nature
relationship: nature became an object to be 'managed' by so-called experts. By
now, however, environmental management has come under critique in that what it
proposes as solutions may simultaneously comprise the causes of environmental
problems. First, the means used by environmental management can be identified
as instances of modernism, industrialism as well as capitalism. Second, scholars
of environmental problems criticise the 'instruments' of environmental
'management' for reproducing the problems, rather than solving them. To
examine how environmental problems ought to be approached a critical stance is
now seen as essential. Necessarily then, do issues of ideology, epistemology and
theory crop up.
Thus, Chapter 18 examines the knowledge drawn on by environmental
managers within Corporate Energy Management. This provides a perspective
which makes the practices of actors in environmental management an object of
study. Chapter 19, on River Management, continues on this line of critique by
establishing the interactions between a managed environmental resource, a river,
and various people in its context as apt for investigation. The author urges us to
reconsider the concept of 'management' itself.
Chapter 20, on Visualising Nuclear Landscapes, provides insight into the
minute details of a ubiquitous technique, image production, and its effects. By
teasing apart simulations and manipulations, the author foregrounds how
phenomenological approaches help to conceptualise the reality of environmental
management.
1 For the chapters, presented in this part, we gratefully acknowledge the grant by the
UmweltEuro by Brandenburg University of Technology.