The Politics of Green Transformations

Ian Scoones, Melissa Leach, Peter Newell, Ian Scoones, Melissa Leach, Peter Newell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317601111
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Sustainable Development
• Index: Economics

Multiple 'green transformations' are required if humanity is to live sustainably on planet Earth. Recalling past transformations, this book examines what makes the current challenge different, and especially urgent. It examines how green transformations must take place in the context of the particular moments of capitalist development, and in relation to particular alliances. The role of the state is emphasised, both in terms of the type of incentives required to make green transformations politically feasible and the way states must take a developmental role in financing innovation and technology for green transformations. The book also highlights the role of citizens, as innovators, entrepreneurs, green consumers and members of social movements. Green transformations must be both 'top-down', involving elite alliances between states and business, but also 'bottom up', pushed by grassroots innovators and entrepreneurs, and part of wider mobilisations among civil society. The chapters in the book draw on international examples to emphasise how contexts matter in shaping pathways to sustainability

Written by experts in the field, this book will be of great interest to researchers and students in environmental studies, international relations, political science, development studies, geography and anthropology, as well as policymakers and practitioners concerned with sustainability.

1 The Politics Of Green Transformations

Ian Scoones, Peter Newell and Melissa Leach

DOI: 10.4324/9781315747378-1

The green transformation imperative – and its politics

Talk of transformation is back in vogue. This time the call is for a green transformation,¹ but what would one look like and who will bring it into being? While such a discussion implies a key role for technology and markets, it is also deeply political. What makes it political, and which and whose politics will shape the sorts of transformations that are desirable and possible?

A confluence of financial and ecological crises, in particular, have once again raised issues about the ecological, social and economic sustainability of the global economy, and the extent to which we have the sorts of political institutions able to contain crises and steer positive and progressive change. This has prompted calls for a new green industrial revolution, transitions to a low-carbon economy, or for more radical restructuring for degrowth or the pursuit of prosperity without growth (cf. OECD, 2011; Jackson, 2011).

While calls for radical transformations are often made but mostly ignored, this one has captured attention at the highest levels, whether through the launching of the Sustainable Development Goals, heightened mobilization around a ‘make-or-break’ climate agreement for Paris 2015, or renewed calls for a World Environment Organisation at the time of the Rio+20 summit in 2012. Emphasis is often placed on the need for massive public and private investment in new technological revolutions (Stern and Rydge, 2012) or on greening capitalism through pricing nature (Costanza et al., 2014). What is often missing, however, is attention to the politics that are inevitably implied by disruptive change of this nature: questions of institutional change and policy, as well as more profound shifts in political power. This is the starting point for this book.

Why politics? What is it that makes green transformations political? The chapters in this book provide a number of answers. Questions surrounding what counts as green, what is to be transformed, who is to do the transforming, and whether transformation, as opposed to more incremental change, is required are all deeply political. For many, the green transformation is like no other we have witnessed so far. While history has witnessed numerous waves of disruptive economic and social change, brought about by technology, war and shifts of cultural values – from the Industrial Revolution, to the end of slavery to the rise of feminism – none has been primarily driven by the goal of rendering the economy and existing model of development more sustainable. That is not to say that key shifts have not had positive environmental consequences. Think of the effect of the 1970s oil crisis on rising investments in renewable energy and energy efficiency, or the argument that the ecological unsustainability of previous civilizations have been key factors in their demise (Ponting, 2007). In most cases, however, the principal drivers and goals were not the pursuit of a ‘green’ transformation.

The political nature of the green transformation is heightened because speed of change is seen as essential. There is a sense of urgency that pervades current debates about sustainability amid talk of tipping points, thresholds and planetary boundaries (Rockström et al., 2009; Lenton, 2013). Furthermore, the threats of the Anthropocene era have prompted calls for truly global responses (Crutzen and Steffen, 2003; Steffen et al., 2007) that must take place in today’s thoroughly multi-polar world. The governance challenges of redirecting so many types of human activity across so many levels are staggering and quite possibly unprecedented, prompting calls to strengthen ‘earth system governance’ (Biermann, 2007; Biermann et al., 2012a) and the social science of transformation (Leggewie and Messner, 2012a; Brown et al., 2013).

The aim of the book is to engage with these debates, from a variety of different perspectives and settings, and lay out some of the core challenges, trade-offs and directions for a new politics of green transformation. Intellectually, getting a handle on these challenges requires a fusion of insights from disciplines such as anthropology, development studies, ecology, economics, geography, history, international relations, political science, science and technology studies and sociology, among others. We cover a range of sectors and issues from energy, food, natural resources, transport, urban infrastructure and finance in a diversity of settings from Denmark to China.

This interdisciplinary and multisited approach allows us to conceive of more multidimensional understandings of politics. These include political economy and political ecology (with an accent on material and structural forms of power and their implications for questions of access and justice), to institutional politics (focusing on national and global organizational forms) to discursive expressions of power (through knowledge and values). The aim, collectively, is to offer a deeper and more rounded understanding of and engagement with the politics of green transformations, beyond a more narrow focus on institutions and policy, or the perspectives of mainstream political science.

Our emphasis on transformations also moves beyond, while engaging with, the substantial body of literature on sociotechnical transitions that cover some aspects of these debates. Indeed, our focus on politics and broader questions of structural change suggests ‘transformation’ rather than ‘transition’, as the key term (Stirling, this book; see also Brand, 2012b). Within the ‘transitions’ literature there has been a recent move to address questions of power and politics more explicitly (e.g. Geels, 2014), suggesting a move from a narrow sociotechnical understanding of transitions to one more aligned with a wider debate about transformative change. Yet the conceptualizations of power and politics, and their relationship with questions of knowledge and social justice, require further elaboration. Our focus on transformations assists this. Transformations are inevitably multiple and contested, as pathways interconnect and compete (Leach et al., 2010). Politics and power are important to how pathways are shaped, which pathways win out and why, and who benefits from them.

By prefacing the transformations with the word ‘green’ our intention is to focus on the environmental dimensions of change, but these almost inevitably raise questions of social as well as environmental justice. The constitution of ‘green’ transformations varies depending on the setting in which they are occurring. In many, perhaps especially developing country contexts, there is unlikely to be any green transformations if questions of social justice are not part of the debate. This is captured in calls for a ‘just transition’ (Swilling and Annecke, 2012; Newell and Mulvaney, 2013), which requires attention to both distribution and direction as part of any assessment (STEPS, 2010).

Respecting differences of context and perspective, the book does not follow a single definition of ‘green transformations’. Instead, there is a variety of approaches, ranging from those focusing on environment (e.g. Schmitz, this book, for whom ‘green transformation is the process of structural change which brings the economy within the planetary boundaries’) to those focusing also on social justice and distribution, either as intrinsic to the definition (e.g. Stirling, this book) or in talking of ‘green and just transformations’ (e.g. Leach, this book). In contrast with definitions focusing on the need to respect environmental limits, others link ‘greening’ intimately with the multiple dimensions of sustainability – social and economic as well as environmental. A common normative view unites the chapters: all authors share a concern both for environment, and for people’s inclusion and well-being. Yet differences lie in conceptualization and analytical implications, with implications too for which dimensions of politics are highlighted.

We understand ‘greening’, therefore, as a process rather than a measurable end-state. Just as it is impossible to conceive of the end-point of the unfolding low-carbon transition, so previous transformations did not start out with clear blueprints and plans that were then rolled out. Rather, they were the product of competition and interaction between a number of pathways, supported by diverse social actors with highly uneven political power.

In this book, the notion of ‘green’ is therefore not just reduced to ‘green’ technology or business, but to more radical shifts to sustainable practices. There are, of course, various shades of green implied by weaker and stronger versions of sustainability (Spratt, this book), and throughout the book, we are interested in how different versions of green are represented in politics – in other words, asking ‘what does green mean?’ and ‘whose green counts?’ (Leach, this book). Politics are often about reconciling tensions between different versions of ‘green’, and here links with social justice and equity concerns are vital.

Contests over pathways are thus not just about end-points, or the role of technology, markets or the state, but also about the knowledge underpinning them. In this sense, the science that is invoked to legitimate calls for green transformations is also a site of political contestation. It does not provide neutral value-free guidance as to what is to be done and by whom (Millstone, this book), even though it may be represented as doing just that. Dig a little deeper and we find the assumptions embodied in understandings of complex processes of (global) environmental change to be subject to scrutiny and dissent. There is a politics around knowledge production in debates about green transformations, turning both on what we think we know (consensus and uncertainties) and on who knows it (whose knowledge counts). We must ask which scientists or other stakeholders, which forms of expertise, from the official to the informal, which disciplines and which regions have most voice in the construction of knowledge about the predicaments that underpin calls for green transformations. Put another way, a ‘reflexive turn’ is needed that treats the governance of expertise about global environmental and green issues as a matter of political contestation (Beck et al., 2014). Who sets the terms of debate about green transformations is crucial because organized knowledge, explicitly or implicitly, demarcates ways forward. Such knowledge in turn suggests who can use which resources in order to live within environmental limits and planetary boundaries, and gives an indication of which causal processes should be addressed. The impacts of these decisions affect everyone, but perhaps most those whose livelihoods are tied up with day-to-day interactions with ecologies and natural resources: the majority of the world’s poor.

We are therefore concerned in this book with a very material politics, but also a politics of knowledge. These are deeply intertwined. While drawing attention to the sometimes problematic ways in which knowledge gets produced might play into the hands of sceptics and distract from the hard politics that must address the political–economic structures that are leading us towards planetary disaster, there are dangers too associated with an uncritical embrace of dominant knowledge production for green transformations. Instead, we argue that so-called soft and hard politics are deeply connected. Knowledge politics matter because they are so closely entwined with material political economy (Leach, this book), and making them explicit can lead to more open, robust and grounded knowledge for green transformations (Stirling, this book).

At the same time, discourses of catastrophe and imminent ecological collapse raise unsettling questions about the ability of democratic institutions to deliver fast and effective solutions, or whether the scale and urgency of ecological crises warrants some suspension of normal democratic procedures. There are undoubtedly trade-offs around the efficiency of decision-making and inclusion, and around negotiation versus coercion, but this book cautions against deriving political action from ‘ecological imperatives’ without attention to the principles of democracy (Stirling, this book). Similarly, others have highlighted the dangers of ‘post-political’ discourses (Swyngedouw, 2010) around environmental threats such as climate change that restrict the contours of legitimate political debate precisely on grounds of the need to suspend social conflict. Instead, clear urgencies and imperatives may call for a ‘slow race’ – making haste slowly – in a way that is respectful of inclusion, deliberation, democracy and justice (Leach and Scoones, 2006).

What is to be transformed and how?

There is widespread acknowledgement of the multiple environmental stresses the world faces – from climate change, air and water pollution, and biodiversity loss to land use change, for example. There is growing consensus that these will prove deeply damaging to human well-being and futures unless they are addressed. There is a robust debate, but a lesser consensus, about the drivers that exacerbate them – including overconsumption, urban expansion, population pressures, unequal economic relations and globalization. But how these are to be tackled remains much disputed, and a clear vision of what green transformations are required, for what and for whom remains elusive.

This is, of course, due to political contention. There is intense competition around framings of how to read and react to the observed trends: what diagnoses they allegedly provide of the origins of the crisis and the sources of the remedies. There is much at stake in the construction of what drives unsustainability (who is to blame for what) and of what forces can be aligned to rebalance socionatures. Whether wholesale transformations, as opposed to more discrete sociotechnical transitions, are required, and what it is that is to be transformed, has major implications for actors and interests – which are supported and which challenged. Whether transformations should be technology-led, marketized, state-led or citizen-led has huge implications for the processes, institutions and instruments deployed. Should the entry point be individual behaviour change, pricing of environmental externalities and ecosystem services, state restructuring and support for ‘green’ industrial sectors, or green technological innovation? All have different implications for who should be involved on what terms and who wins ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• Preface and acknowledgements
• List of acronyms and abbreviations
• 1 The politics of green transformations
• 2 What is green? Transformation imperatives and knowledge politics
• 3 Invoking ‘science’ in debates about green transformations: a help or a hindrance?
• 4 Emancipating transformations: from controlling ‘the transition’ to culturing plural radical progress
• 5 The politics of green transformations in capitalism
• 6 The political dynamics of green transformations: feedback effects and institutional context
• 7 Green transformations from below? The politics of grassroots innovation
• 8 Mobilizing for green transformations
• 9 The green entrepreneurial state
• 10 Financing green transformations
• 11 Green transformation: is there a fast track?
• References
• Index