Discourse Of Ecological Modernization Research Articles

Too hot to handle: Depoliticisation and the discourse of ecological modernisation in fire management debates

The management of fire within landscapes is a topic of increasing contestation. This is particularly the case in relation to the practice of ‘prescribed burning’, which aims to exercise a form of control of wild fires through the application of science-based techniques that putatively reconcile the conservation of biodiversity with the protection of human life and property in particular places. The belief in possibilities to solve environmental problems by scientific approaches and in outcomes that do not involve harm or vulnerabilities is an element of a trend called “Ecological Modernisation” (EM). Various studies have shown how discourses of EM have come to dominate the ways in which many contemporary environmental problems are approached. We argue that highlighting the presentation of such discourses as neutral and non-politicised precludes a critical examination of the ways in which the knowledge claims upon which they rest can be seen to reinforce only particular sets of constructions of the relationship between humans and the natural world. Through an analysis of knowledge claims made in relation to recurring topics such as the use of fire by Indigenous Australians and the adaptation of species to fire, we illustrate that behind the discourse of ecological modernisation sit deeply engrained variations in terms of where people locate vulnerability in relation to the pressing problem of wildfire and fire management. We argue that the depoliticisation of the topic sustains specific types of relationships between people and nature while delegitimising others and obscures the fundamentally different notions about relationships between humans and non-human nature upon which the debate ultimately pivots.

Changing climate discourse and politics in India. Climate change as challenge and opportunity for diplomacy and development

This article contributes to the study of changing climate discourse and policy in emerging powers through a case study of climate discourse in India since 2007. Based on interviews with key actors in Indian climate politics and textual analysis, three general climate discourses – the Third World, Win–Win and Radical Green discourses – are identified. The discourses are characterised by different constructions of India’s identity, interests, climate change exposure and climate policy orientation. At the most general level, the article finds that there has been a general discursive shift from the Third World discourse to the Win–Win discourse, and that the latter discourse is in broad agreement with the dominant international climate change discourse of ecological modernisation and thus supports an alignment between Indian and international climate politics. We also find, however, that India’s domestic climate politics is marked by co-existence and tensions between the three climate discourses, producing a complex and at times contentious discursive politics over climate change, identity and development. The case study presented in this article moreover demonstrates how national interests are socially constructed and how changes in policy reflect changes in the dominant discourse.

Bioeconomy – an emerging meta-discourse affecting forest discourses?

The term bioeconomy and closely related notions like bio-based economy or knowledge-based bioeconomy (KBBE) are increasingly used by scientists and politicians in the last years. It does therefore have the potential of becoming an influential global discourse. Its role is however so far unclear. The general assumption that guides this paper is that discourses, resulting ideas and arguments are generally said to have performative power. They shape actors' views, influence their behaviour, impact on their beliefs and interests and can cause institutional change in a given society. Thus, the aim of this paper is twofold: first, it aims to analyse whether the ideas used in a bioeconomy discourse differs from those in other global meta-discourses of the last decades affecting forest discourses, such as the ecological modernization discourse or the sustainable development discourse. Second, this paper aims to analyse whether and how the bioeconomy discourse has started (or not) to reshape or overshadow the “classical” forest discourses, such as sustainable forest management, forest biodiversity or forest and climate change.

Critical Omissions and New Directions for Sustainable Tourism: A Situated Macro–Micro Approach

This paper traces the history and evolution of sustainable tourism and identifies some critical issues and omissions in this and related approaches such as responsible tourism, ecotourism and pro-poor tourism. The academic, institutional and practical intersections of sustainable tourism and responsible tourism are examined. It reveals that important theoretical and practical considerations around well-being, inclusion, and sustainability have been omitted. A critical look at ecotourism reveals additional concerns, such as a cornucopia of guidelines and principles, without clear ethical justifications to support them. At the same time, academics in this domain have been slow to consider the modernist and neoliberal influences shaping ecotourism and sustainable tourism development, such as through the discourse of ecological modernization. We identify some key omissions, such as the missing ‘body’ in sustainable tourism discourse, lack of critical analysis of postcolonial and dependency issues, and propose re-situating ‘sustainable tourism’ within a micro–macro, local-global systems approach informed by a clear framework of justice and ethics.

Ecology and Collaboration

Ecology and Collaboration

Explaining Ups and Downs in the Public’s Environmental Concern in Sweden

In this article, the authors search for explanations to ups and downs in the Swedish public’s environmental concern since the 1980s. In line with previous research, this study examines the effects of economic cycles and media coverage. In addition, the authors hypothesize that the economy will affect environmental concern less over time because of the entry of ecological modernization into elite discourse. Using time series regression analysis and a unique data set, we study Swedish public opinion during more than 20 years. Economic cycles affect the public’s environmental concern but to a diminishing degree. Public environmental concern is also affected by the amount of media coverage. In accordance with earlier observations, it is concluded that both the economy and media content have an independent effect on public environmental concern. However, the previously observed conflict between economic cycles and public environmental concern is weakened, potentially because of the elite group embracement of an ecological modernization discourse.

Changing the Climate: Ecoliberalism, Green New Dealism, and the Struggle over Green Jobs in Canada

Labor-environmentalism has been a strategic response of Canadian unions to the dual manufacturing and climate-change crisis. Important ideological work led organized labor in Canada to endorse the Kyoto Protocol. But the deepening manufacturing crisis of the 2000s tested the resolve of unions to challenge the “jobs-versus-the-environment” dichotomy and to support stringent greenhouse gas emissions reductions. I explain contrasting responses of the Canadian Auto Workers and the United Steelworkers. I critique the dominant discourse of ecological modernization championed by the state-capital alliance for being neoliberal, and evaluate the degree to which this is challenged by the USW’s call for a Green New Deal.

The Recession, Environmental Policy and Ecological Modernization – What's New about the Green New Deal?

This paper discusses the impact of the Great Recession on environmental policy. We argue that the recession has a specific environmental policy dimension by challenging underlying assumptions of the dominant model of environmental policy – ecological modernization (EM). Due to its Schumpeterian connotations, the concept of EM is more vocal on the connection between the economic crisis and environmental policy than most alternative approaches. When a ‘Green New Deal’ became a core element of fiscal stimuli packages, it was widely based on an EM discourse. However, actual ‘green’ stimulus policies have proved more problematic, as is shown for energy-related and car-related measures in the USA, the United Kingdom and Germany. On reflection, while boosting environmental efficiency investments, the ‘Green New Deal’ has so far failed to address underlying vulnerabilities of the EM model.

Discourses of Nature Conservation and Heritage Management in the Past, Present and Future: Discussing Heritage and Sustainable Development from Swedish Experiences

The relationship between heritage management and nature conservation in Sweden has changed over time, from an earlier division between the two sectors – with nature conservation attached to the growing movement of environmental politics – towards more integrated ways of working under the umbrella of sustainable development. As forests have been associated with nature, the earlier divide has been more evident with forested areas than agricultural areas, a view that has contributed to the marginalization of such landscapes and their inhabitants. With the more integrated policy, heritage management is drawn into the societal discourse of ecological modernization, where environmental and sustainability issues have become new business ideas and sources of further economic growth. From an ecological modernization perspective, nature and cultural heritage are today (touristic) commodities, enforcing the power of the urban world over the rural world and thus risk contributing to further marginalization of the inhabitants. However, heritage sites appear to function as boundary objects in local communities, and may thus function as meeting places and sources of enhancement of community pride. Therefore, we argue for community participation and public communication within the heritage sector, especially concerning marginalized, forested landscapes in order to contribute to an increased knowledge and understanding of the local heritage and history, thus opening the way for creative local processes.

The role of the Asia Pacific Partnership in discursive contestation of the international climate regime

After withdrawing from the Kyoto Protocol, the US Bush Administration and the Australian Howard Government pursued an international climate change policy focussed on voluntary international agreements outside the UN climate negotiations. This strategy included the formation of several climate agreements directed at technology development, including the 2005 Asia Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate (APP). The APP provides a model for international climate change policy directed at voluntary national greenhouse gas intensity targets, technology development through sectoral public–private partnerships and technology diffusion through trade. This article situates the APP within these US and Australian inspired climate agreements formed outside the UN negotiations. Backstrand and Lovbrand’s (in M. Pettenger (ed.) The social construction of climate change: power knowledge norms discourses, 2007) discourse analysis in relation to the international climate negotiations is used to explore differences between the APP and UN climate treaties. We find the APP embodies a discourse of what we call ‘deregulatory ecological modernisation’ that promotes limited public funding to ease informational failures in markets for cleaner technologies and management practices. The deregulatory ecological modernisation discourse is a deeply intensive market liberal approach to international climate change policy, which contests binding emission reduction targets and the development of a global carbon market. The USA, Australia, Japan and Canada represented a core group of countries that used the APP to promote the deregulatory ecological modernisation discourse and thereby contest any deepening of developed nations' emission reduction targets for the post-2012 period. However, with changes of leadership and new parties in power in the USA and Australia, it appears that the deregulatory ecological modernisation discourse has lost ground compared to a reengagement with discourses supportive of developed country emission reduction targets and equity-based adaptation and technology transfer assistance for developing nations.

Promethean Elites Encounter Precautionary Publics

Issues concerning technological risk have increasingly become the subject of deliberative exercises involving participation of ordinary citizens. The most popular topic for deliberation has been genetically modified (GM) foods. Despite the varied circumstances of their establishment, deliberative “minipublics” almost always produce recommendations that reflect a worldview more “precautionary” than the “Promethean” outlook more common among governing elites. There are good structural reasons for this difference. Its existence raises the question of why elites sponsor mini-publics and if policy is little affected by the results of deliberations, questions the possibility of deliberative legitimation of public policy. We make this argument by looking at mini-publics (where possible, a common consensus conference design) on GM foods in France, the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Australia, and Switzerland. Deliberative legitimation becomes plausible if elites can attenuate their Promethean outlook. This is possible if ecological modernization discourse pervades their politics; Denmark provides an illustration.

The New Zealand Resource Management Act: an exercise in delivering sustainable development through an ecological modernisation agenda

The 1991 New Zealand Resource Management Act established an effects-based planning system intended to safeguard the biophysical resource base. The act and its subsequent practical implementation are deconstructed using an ecological modernisation framework. This demonstrates that many of the key policy instruments of the act can be accommodated within an ecological modernisation discourse. However, elements of discursive democracy introduced by the legislation have subsequently been impaired by technocorporatist legal formalism. This has prompted considerable debate about the perceived high process and compliance costs and the restricted public scrutiny of effects-based compliance in the new planning system. The reduced emphasis on socioeconomic effects within land-use development plans has impeded the promotion of sustainable spatial development strategies, frustrating attempts to deliver the ‘superindustrial ecological switchover’ sought by proponents of ecological modernisation. Recent legislation to e...

Sustainability Entrepreneurs, Ecopreneurs and the Development of a Sustainable Economy

This paper focuses on investigating the role that sustainability entrepreneurship may have in engendering a shift in the practices and operations of contemporary capitalism. Sustainability entrepreneurs are increasingly seen as being in the vanguard of a shift to a new form of capitalist development that can help to address fears over global warming, climate change and their associated negative environmental impacts. Such developments can be set within a wider popular and academic discourse of ecological modernisation, at the heart of which is a relatively optimistic view of the potential for technological change to lead to solutions for environmental problems. This paper focuses on a subset of sustainable entrepreneurs termed ‘ecopreneurs’ who seek to combine business practice with sustainable development and so transform their business sectors. The paper suggests that work on sustainable entrepreneurship could be substantially improved by an engagement with the literature on transition management in science and technology studies and makes some suggestions as to how such a research agenda could be advanced.

Planting Trees to Mitigate Climate Change: Contested Discourses of Ecological Modernization, Green Governmentality and Civic Environmentalism

Forest plantations or so-called carbon sinks have played a critical role in the climate change negotiations and constitute a central element in the scheme to limit atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations set out by the Kyoto Protocol. This paper examines dominant discursive framings of forest plantation projects in the climate regime. A central proposition is that these projects represent a microcosm of competing and overlapping discourses that are mirrored in debates of global environmental governance. While the win-win discourse of ecological modernization has legitimized the inclusion of sink projects in the Kyoto Protocol, a green governmentality discourse has provided the scientific rationale necessary to turn tropical tree-plantation projects operational on the emerging carbon market. A critical civic environmentalism discourse has contested forest sink projects depicting them as unjust and environmentally unsound strategies to mitigate climate change. The article examines the articulation and institutionalization of these discourses in the climate negotiation process as well as the wider implications for environmental governance.

Multiple disconnections: environmental justice and Urban water in Canada and South Africa

This paper examines the ways in which environmental justice (EJ)—in its myriad forms—has developed as a concrete and material challenge to the dominant (neo‐liberal) discourse of ecological modernisation. The concept of ‘environmental justice’ is problematised and the fast conceptual transfer beyond the borders of the US, where it originated. The shift in the concept of environmental justice is explored in two urban environments in Toronto, Canada, and Hermanus, South Africa, with a specific emphasis on urban water policies and politics and their relation to concerns of environmental justice. The term ‘environmental justice’ in the context of urban environments must be defined within this context for each site under study; the paper argues against a universalising use of the term. In localising the term ‘environmental justice’, it is not proposed that its use be restricted to a specific site, but that its use is embedded in a multiscalar urban world specific to a particular site. It is argued specifically that what is and is not environmentally just cannot be discussed merely from the point of view of localised differentials in the exposure to environmental costs or benefits. Instead, the articulated scales of justice are explored in and among the case study cities. It is argued that in reality, injustice perceptions and justice demands are constructed through relative, scale‐sensitive political and discursive processes.

All Dressed Up with Nowhere to Go: The Discourse of Ecological Modernization in Alberta, Canada*

Nous passons en revue la politique intégrée de gestion des ressources de l'Alberta pour mettre en lumière la compétence du gouvernement provincial pour refaçonner de manière discursive la relation entre un développement des ressources naturelles et une protection de l'environnement pour conserver sa légitimité tout en évitant une restructuration institutionnelle. Cette étude montre que la « modernisation écologique » consiste en deux volets indépendents qui ne conduisent pas nécessairement au même résultat final. Alors que des cas de réforme écologique peuvent exister, la « modernisation ecologique » decrit aussi un discours dominant qui peut faire dévier la critique en étant suffisamment ambigu pour que des écarts entre une politique énoncée et une mise en application soient difficiles à tracer.We review Alberta's integrated resource management policy to highlight the provincial government's ability to discursively reframe the relationship between natural resource development and environmental protection to maintain legitimacy while avoiding institutional restructuring. This study indicates that Ecological Modernization consists of two independent features that do not necessarily lead to the same end point. While instances of ecological reform may exist, Ecological Modernization also describes a dominant discourse that can deflect criticism, while at the same time is sufficiently ambiguous that gaps between stated policy and implementation are difficult to trace.

Climate Policy as Accumulation Strategy: The Failure of COP6 and Emerging Trends in Climate Politics

This article challenges conventional accounts of the collapse of the climate change negotiations in The Hague in November 2000. Such accounts are usually based on assumptions about the dynamics of international environmental politics, in particular the assumption that individual state interests and collective global interests always collide. It argues that the recent emergence of an ecological modernization discourse concerning global warming raises serious questions about the validity of this assumption. The article then describes the contours of the emerging ecological modernization discourse, and discusses its implications for global climate politics.

"A kiss here and a kiss there": conflict and collaboration in environmental partnerships.

Multistakeholder collaboration in the environmental realm has been increasing steadily over the past decade. This trend is responding to several stimuli, including dissatisfaction with current regulatory regimes, a liberal economic climate emphasizing global competitiveness and short-term returns, and the growing roles of the business and nongovernmental organization sectors in the environmental policy arena. This paper grows out of ethnographic research conducted between 1994 and 1998 with four environmental partnerships in Europe and the United States. The research found all of these partnerships to be marked by practices of conflict minimization and diffusion. Drawing upon illustrative data from one of these case studies, a European Union level initiative aimed at enabling sustainable development in Europe, the paper asks why this was the case, especially given the diverse political and economic interests at stake and the history of contentious relations between the sectors in other venues. Employing a theoretical perspective highlighting the sociohistoric factors involved in these processes, the paper suggests that this proclivity toward nonconfrontational behavior stems in part from two sources: a prominent cultural model that conceptualizes the partnership process as fundamentally nonconflictual in nature, and the promotion of the discourse of ecological modernization over other competing discourses. The paper explores some of the implications of this finding and concludes that environmental partnerships characterized by such nonconfrontational practices risk inadvertently encouraging the delegitimization of conflictual approaches to environmental action and engendering a retreat from radical thinking and innovative environmental solutions.

Ecological Modernization And The Limits Of Environmental Accounting?

In the marketplace of ideas the discourse of ecological modernization— with its emphasis on win‐win solutions, the need for universal regulation and appeals to science—has been popular of late. Environmental accounting (EA) literatures have not been immune to the attractions of ecological modernization ideas. The strategic positioning of EA research within the discourse of ecological modernization has undoubtedly provided EA with much needed visibility and legitimacy within the academic community, and has likely encouraged corporations to ‘support’ (both in financial and ideological terms) the work of EA. Yet this discourse may ultimately be limiting. In this critical commentary we propose that the ‘ideological effect’ of ecological modernization is such that the intersection of ecological and social realms is ignored and issues of social justice are effectively erased, despite this discourse’s ‘radical’ or ‘critical’ aspirations. In other words, ecological modernization is a discourse of the status quo. Overall, EA’s harmonization with this discourse has the (un)intended effect of convincing us that the system is working, that ‘progress is being made.’ This distracts us from asking difficult questions regarding the role of environmental accounting in perpetuating unequal and exploitative social relations.