Environmental Politics among Advanced Industrial Democracies

Abstract

Before the mid-1960s, the notion of environmental problems, and hence environmental politics and policy, were virtually nonexistent in public and scholarly debates. This changed abruptly when environmental problems were “discovered” during the second half of the 1960s, and by the beginning of the 1970s most industrialized democracies had issued a first round of policy responses, set up environmental administrations, and started to debate environmental issues in political assemblies and in civic society. In political science, the study of society’s efforts to address environmental problems has run in parallel with the expansion of environmental policymaking and the growing saliency of the environmental issue. A number of key themes have been present in the literature throughout almost the entire period. Among these the tripartite relationship between liberal democracy, economic growth, and environmental degradation has spurred the most controversy. This debate has revolved around the issue of whether environmental problems can be solved within the existing system of market economy and representational liberal democracy, or if the solution inevitably must entail a fundamental reorganization of core decision-making and economic institutions in contemporary society. Some argue that more advanced market economies tend to exhibit signs of ecological modernization in the form of stricter environmental regulation, new cleaner and more efficient production processes, and citizenries with more pro-environmental values. Opponents of this view are in turn arguing that the reduction in environmental pressures and the emergence of new cleaner technologies is really just a displacement of environmental harms to other forms of environmental damage and to other areas of the planet and that the very notion of green growth is just a myth promulgated by capitalist structures. Another long-standing debate concerns the issue of which governance arrangements are best suited for addressing environmental problems. In this debate, the role of stakeholder and citizen participation, deliberative democracy, and other types of participatory and consensus-building policy arrangements have been at the forefront of the research agenda. The central notion here is that environmental policy, if it is to be able to address and change social practices causing environmental harm, must strive to be inclusive, consensus-generating, deliberative, and participatory to overcome collective action problems in which environmental problems are generated. A third research topic concerns how the environmental issue has given rise to new values, attitudes, and behaviors among citizens, new social movements, and new political cleavages and parties. Some scholars argue that the environmental issue represents a new type of political value base that challenges the supremacy of the old left-right dimension of political value orientations among citizens and, by extension, party systems and the structure of civil society.