Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 16
Ecological Modernisation and
Industrial Transformation
Arthur P. J. Mol and Gert Spaargaren
Introduction
The emergence and maturation of the idea of ecological modernisation in the 1980s
should be understood in reaction to the demodernisation ideas of the environmental
movement in the 1970s on the one hand, and the not very successful curative
approaches of environmental state authorities in Europe on the other. In the early
eighties, the environmental movement in northwestern Europe was facing an inter-
nal debate on the effectiveness of its strategy and the adequacy of its ideology. In
Germany the political party The Greens was the platform of a debate between
'realos' (realists) and 'fundis' (fundamentalists), while in The Netherlands the debate
centred on the radicalisation of the anti-nuclear and squatter movement in the early
1980s. At the same time, environmental state authorities in Europe were facing
failures in coping with the environmental crisis, basically because their end-of-pipe,
curative and command-and-control strategies were widely perceived as unsuccessful
in making serious advances in combating the environmental crisis, while at the same
time the political climate turned increasingly towards deregulation and liberalisa-
tion, rather than stronger state involvement. In this context, and with ideas of sus-
tainability rising on the political agendas after the 1987 Brundtland report, ecological
modernisation became increasingly used as the academic equivalent of the more
popular notion of sustainable development (cf. Mol and Spaargaren, 1992).
Historical Development of Ecological Modernisation Ideas
The notion of ecological modernisation (hereafter EM) was fi rst proposed in
Germany by the political scientist and politician Martin Jänicke at the end of the
1970s in the Berlin city parliament. As a social theory, EM developed from the
mid-1980s onwards primarily in a small group of Western European countries, most
notably Germany, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and somewhat later the
Scandinavian countries. It developed especially within the disciplines of sociology,
political sciences and geography, but later found application in other social and
