Ecological Modernisation and Industrial Transformation

Abstract

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).