Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
reform. Producers, customers, consumers, credit institutions, insurance companies,
utility sectors, and business associations, to name but a few, increasingly turn into
social carriers of ecological restructuring, innovation and reform (in addition to,
and not so much instead of, state agencies and new social movements; cf. Mol,
1995; Mol and Spaargaren, 2000). This goes together with a focus on changing
state-market relations in environmental reform, 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. Exemplary
empirical studies are those of Michael Skou Andersen (1994) on green taxes in
Europe, those on specifi c categories of industries (e.g., Revell, 2007, on SMEs) and
those by environmental or ecological economists, for instance in the journal
Ecologi-
cal Economics
. Studies in the tradition of the 'environmental Kuznets curve', and
the fi erce debates around that concept, can be interpreted as empirical cases on this
theme. But also various (non-economic) empirical studies on the role of shareholders
in green investments, the emergence of green accounting and company environmen-
tal reporting, and the role of insurance companies during the Kyoto protocol nego-
tiations are typical studies that resonate ecological modernisation ideas on the
growing importance of economics and markets in environmental reform.
A third theme in ecological modernisation relates to the changing role, position
and performance of the 'environmental' state (often referred to as political mod-
ernisation in Europe [cf. Jänicke, 1993; Tatenhove et al., 2000], or regulatory rein-
vention in the US [cf. Eisner, 2004]). The traditional central role of the nation-state
in environmental reform is shifting, leading to new governance arrangements and
new political spaces. First, there is a trend towards more decentralised, fl exible and
consensual styles of national governance, at the expense of top-down hierarchical
command-and-control regulation. Second, there is a larger involvement of non-state
actors and non-state arrangements in environmental governance, taking over con-
ventional tasks of the nation-state and conventional politics (e.g., privatisation,
public-private partnerships, confl ict resolution by business-environmental NGO
coalitions without state interference, and the emergence of subpolitics). Finally,
supra-national 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. Under this theme one
fi nds especially contributions by political scientists and geographers, among others
in the journals
Environmental Politics
,
Geoforum
,
Environment and Planning C
and
Journal of Environmental Policy and Planning
. Typical studies are, for instance,
Hills (2005) on Hong Kong, Jänicke and Weidner (1997) with a comparative study
on national environmental policies, and Jokinen (2000) on the EU. While ecological
and political modernisation perspectives have arguably been very timely in investi-
gating shifts in environmental governance, by now the same themes can be found
is a very diverse and voluminous body of literature on environmental governance
and environmental partnerships.
Fourth, the modifi cation of the position, role and ideology of social movements
(vis-à-vis the 1970s and 1980s) in the process of ecological 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
de-modernisation ideologies and limited economic and political power, environ-
mental movements seem increasingly involved in decision-making processes within
the political and, to a lesser extent, economic arenas. Legitimacy, accountability,
