Capacity-building or social construction? Explaining Sweden’s shift towards ecological modernisation

Abstract

How can the change from ‘traditional environmental policy’ towards ‘ecological modernisation’, visible in many countries, be explained? After establishing the elements of ‘ecological modernisation’ found in recent literature, this article first assesses whether the recent and massive environmental policy changes in Sweden fit these characteristics. In the next step, two models of environmental policy change (Jänicke’s ‘environmental capacity-building’ and Hajer’s ‘argumentative approach’) are applied to the Swedish case in order to evaluate their explanatory power. Neither of the models seems to provide a fully adequate explanation of the Swedish shift towards ecological modernisation. Jänicke’s model directs our attention to structural and institutional factors that establish the context, but it does not provide links between actors and contexts that account for the dynamics and specific direction of change. Hajer puts the focus on dynamics of change, but is less explicit on the importance of the structural positions and power resources of actors engaging in the process of change. The challenge, then, is to find ways of combining structural-institutional models of environmental capacity-building and social constructivist discourse analysis into a more satisfactorily and fully covering theory of environmental policy change.