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citizens, and powerful change agents. The main debate seems to be on how struc-
tures and systems relate to capable actors in environmental reforms, to what extent
are knowledgeable and capable citizen-consumers essential in ecological modernisa-
tion (can reform not take place behind the back of citizen-consumers?), and is a
citizen-consumer orientation not blaming the wrong polluter?
The second challenge for EM perspective relates to globalisation. It has become
common knowledge that globalisation is not just an additional layer that needs to
be included in our analyses to understand environmental deterioration or reform.
In contrast, globalisation processes are fundamentally challenging our notions,
concepts and models of social change, and that is not different for ecological mod-
ernisation than for any other fi eld. While EM scholars have worked with and upon
globalisation, the question whether the fundamental changes brought about by
globalisation can be incorporated into ecological modernisation ideas, and if so
how, remains yet unanswered. Of course, geography as a discipline is especially
equipped to contribute to this relation between EM and globalisation, among
others, through its central focus on space. Beck's work on second modernity, world
risk society and cosmopolitanism; Urry's sociology of network and fl ows; Held's
elaborations on cosmopolitan democracy; and Anheier's studies of global civil
society are framings that I see as useful building stones for assess how environmental
reform models should be interpreted in the global age and to what extent we
could still label them EM. Our recent volume on
Governing Environmental Flows
(Spaargaren 2006) is no more than a fi rst attempt to redefi ne EM in a era of
globalisation.
Related to globalisation, and following the work of Latour, Callon, the sociology
of science and technology, and debates on the materiality of the social, new debates
on the relation between the physical objects and social relations can be expected.
EM studies have traditionally taken a rather realist perspective on materiality, and
have entered into critical debate with strong social constructivists and developed a
sceptical attitude towards lifting the borders between the social and the material.
With a general turn in the social sciences to complexity theory, hybridity, and materi-
ality one can expect new debates emerging or the relation between the social and the
material, and new concepts being developed that cope with that, such as actants. It is
also here that geography, with its social and physical sub-disciplines, can be expected
to make a contribution to these new horizons of ecological modernisation.
Finally, the information revolution and the emergence of the knowledge society
has been poorly understood and studied in the environmental social sciences, includ-
ing the EM literature. With the growing importance of information fl ows, the
Internet, transparency and accountability, and monitoring capacity the horizons of
environmental reform are changing. New lines of inquiry in the informationalisation
of environmental reform - whether that is in civil society activism, multinational
corporations or the transnational state system - will be on the future agenda,
together with critical inquiries into the digital divide, the validation of information
fl ows, and the new power relations of media conglomerates.
One of the often-asked questions is, whether these new debates and trajectories
can and should be considered still as part of the EM project, or rather as a diver-
gence from it, towards new conceptualisations. The answer depends very much on
where one wants to put the core of EM ideas. Is it within the fundamental ideas of
an ecological rationality being developed, introduced and institutionalised in social
practices and institutional developments, as the Wageningen School of EM has
