Liberal Democracy and Environmentalism

The End of Environmentalism?

Yoram Levy, Marcel Wissenburg

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781134355075
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In recent decades, environmental issues have increasingly been incorporated into liberal democratic thought and political practice. Environmentalism and ecologism have become fashionable, even respectable schools of political thought. This apparently successful integration of environmental movements, issues and ideas in mainstream politics raises the question of whether there is a future for what once was a counter-movement and counter-ideology. Liberal Democracy and Environmentalism provides a reflective assessment of recent developments, social relevance and future of environmental political theory, concluding that although the alleged pacification of environmentalism is more than skin deep, it is not yet quite deep enough. This book will appeal to students and researchers of social science and philosophers with an interest in environmental issues.

1 Introduction

Yoram Levy and Wissenburg Marcel

This book, Liberal Democracy and Environmentalism: The End of Environmentalism?, discusses the relation between environmental political thought on the one hand, and real existing liberal democracy and liberal democratic political thought on the other. Its subject matter is, in other words, quite specific. Yet it is not a book for specialists, or for specialists only. Our aim, as authors and editors, is to offer anyone who might be interested an insight into recent developments in an important area of political life.

Despite short-term fluctuations in public interest, environmental problems are, by their very (physical) nature, bound to stay around for generations to come. They will, by implication, be subjects of intense political debate. For almost five decades now, philosophers and theorists have advocated ways to address these issues in our personal lives, in nature and resource management, in the economy and in politics.

Environmental thought in general, and environmental political thought in particular, often demanded radical and even utopian changes in society and in individual lives and attitudes. It is only recently that environmental political thinkers have, sometimes grudgingly, accepted that environmental interests can or should (also) be accommodated within the framework of modern liberal democracy. The — at first sight — successful integration of environmental movements, issues and ideas in mainstream politics raises the question whether there is a future for what once was a counter-movement and counter-ideology.

The various contributions to this book are all unified by one central question: has environmentalism¹ reached its end? For many readers, this may be a counterintuitive question: environmental issues have increasingly been incorporated into liberal democratic thought and political practice; environmentalism and ecologism have become fashionable, even respectable, schools of political thought. Yet it is precisely this success that incites us to raise this question.

Recent empirical studies suggest a decreasing interest in environmental issues among the European and American publics — with occasional hiccoughs (see e.g. Witherspoon 199; Nas 2000; and van Muijen 2000). At the same time, it appears that the environmental dimension has become a standard part of everyday policy-making in virtually every Western liberal democracy (cf. Rootes 1999), not to mention, in the form of the PPP (people, profit, planet) interpretation of sustainable development, in North-South politics (see also Bernstein 2001). Environmental audits are part of the preparation of every major project, both governmental and in the private sector. Discouraging polluting activities, encouraging environmentally friendly modes of production and consumption, and the reduction of pollutants (greenhouse gases, toxic and nuclear waste, etc.) by financial and other means are all generally accepted policy goals and strategies.

In addition, environmental movements have become more and more institutionalized. Internally, they increasingly become bureaucratic organizations moving away from protest strategies in the direction of negotiation and lobbying. Externally, increased access to, and participation in, the political process has ever more encapsulated them in existing political structures, most often as part of advisory bodies in the policy designing and implementation phases. Occasionally, as NGOs, they also appear as policy-executing parties where new forms of governance have sprung up in which government(s), economic and social actors try to operate as equal partners rather than in a hierarchical relation (cf. I.M. Young 1998). Direct contacts between environmentalists and economic actors (without state participation or interference) have increased, changed form, and are bearing fruit in the form of an increased environmental awareness within firms, increased openness to public scrutiny, gentlemen's agreements and branch-wide environmental covenants (Eden 1996).

From a discursive point of view, the main problem with the environment was that of creating a context for communication on, definition of, goal setting for, and solution of environmental problems (cf. Barry and Wissenburg 2001). This would help to transform environmental issues from intrinsically controversial, normative political issues into technical, policy issues (cf. Lieshout's (1995) and Schmitt's (1987) conceptions of the political). It may seem then that this problem has been solved, and even that the pacification of the environmental issue implies the pacification of the environmental movement itself, as one of the great New Social Movements of the 1960s—1970s. If all that mattered was to create room for co-operation, then the war for the environment has been won. The issue is rapidly moving off the political agenda, out of the public arena, into the backrooms and corridors where engineers and civil servants dwell, from whence hardly any rumours of skirmish reach the greater public.²

Finally, an important part of the literature in recent years focused on repositioning green political theory in the context of liberal democracy (e.g. G. Smith 2003; Barry 1999a, 1999b; Dobson 1998, 1999; Hayward 1998). Attempts at a reflective assessment of these and like developments can be found in Sustaining Liberal Democracy (2001, edited by John Barry and Marcel Wissenburg, based on a 1996 ECPR workshop), in Ingolfur Blühdorn's Post-Ecologist Politics (2000b) and in Political Theory and the Environment: a Reassessment (edited by Mathew Humphrey, a special issue of Environmental Politics, 2001). This book, Liberal Democracy and Environmentalism: The End of Environmentalism?, takes the debate one step further: assuming the repositioning operation was successful, what is left for environmentalists to hope for?

In sum then, there are good grounds for believing that green concerns are being addressed in, and have been successfully incorporated into, everyday politics and political thought. In other words, there seems to be no reason why environmentalism as an independent school of thought should continue to exist. This book, based on papers presented in the ECPRJoint Sessions workshop ‘The End of Environmentalism?’ in Turin, Italy (2002), explores whether this suspicion is correct: has liberal democracy successfully adopted or even absorbed the green agenda? But there is a twist to this story. Two twists, even.

First of all, Liberal Democracy and Environmentalism focuses on the alleged pacification of environmentalism from the perspective of political theory. It is only here, the contributors believe, that the question just raised can be answered. The question whether environmentalism has come to its end is not dealt with in empirical terms — the contributors do not discuss questions such as whether, or to what degree, the pacification of environmental movements in terms of their institutionalization and bureaucratization in this or that country or region has succeeded, nor whether environmental law and policy-making are successful in securing sustainability. These are questions dealt with adequately and at length in professional journals such as Environmental Politics and Environment and Planning (Series A, B, C, and D).

Empirical questions about the end of environmentalism are perfectly valid, not to mention appropriate. There is a long series of reasons to suspect that issues once raised by environmentalists have not yet been, or can never be, moved from the political sphere of fundamental, normative controversy into the sphere of policy-making, given the structure and legitimate modi operandi of liberal democratic institutions. Some of these reasons are purely scientific: one may doubt whether specific environmental policies are successful in technical terms, that is, in ensuring (global) sustainability. This, however, would not disprove the hypothesis of a successful adoption of the green agenda — it merely sheds doubt on the success of specific policies. Other reasons are of an empirical social scientific nature: can we really observe that environmental movements have been pacified? The radicalization of the animal rights movement and the increased public appeal of post-decisional civil disobedience suggest otherwise. Then again, environmental protest may be inspired by irrational ideas or incomplete information.

Research on empirical questions like these could lead to the conclusion that, for instance, given a certain environmental problem definition, certain environmental policies are great failures or great successes; or that, within a given political institutional context, a certain political strategy succeeded or failed to achieve certain environmental goals; or that, given certain environmental goals, certain political institutions are (in)effective. And yet the empirical approach cannot answer the central question of this book.

The hypothesis that environmentalism is at an end can only be proved or disproved by establishing whether environmentalists still have a reason to be environmentalists. Beyond and underpinning any empirical concern with the ‘greening’ of political practice lies the deeper question whether environmental political theory's ideas are (still) valid. The focus in this book then is on whether liberal democracy's normative foundations can absorb and have absorbed the most fundamental green ideals, whether its institutions can incorporate (and have incorporated) them, and if either one is not the case, on determining where the causes lie (in liberal democracy or in green thought) and whether these flaws are contingent or a matter of principle. The ‘fundamental green ideas’ (or ‘basic green concerns’) to which we refer include at least the following: radical democratization, representation of future generations and non-human stakeholders and interests in political decision-making, de-objectification of the natural environment (from ‘resources’ to ‘ecology’) and an abandonment of anthropocentric ethics. Marius de Geus, John Barry and Dorothee Horstkötter elaborate these ideas further elsewhere in this book.

Environmentalism is traditionally not only concerned with the capability of existing political arrangements and institutions to successfully address the environmental challenge. It also entails or suggests a different conception of the good society. In addition to solving environmental problems, environmentalism is also, maybe even primarily, concerned with an analysis of the nature of such problems. In addition to a concern with acting effectively within a given political institutional context, environmentalism is also engaged in redefining and reshaping that context. And in addition to its concern with institutional design, environmentalism is also engaged in specifying and defining the environmental goals those institutions should promote, goals like the preservation of a self-sustaining nature or natural biodiversity. In other words, prior to its instrumental dimension environmentalism has a normative and moral dimension determining the way in which the whole environmental issue makes sense to us — if at all. It is with regard to this dimension that we ask whether environmentalism has come to an end. The empirical approach cannot answer this question, since, by its very nature, it treats the normative and moral dimension as a given.

This book, then, discusses the political theoretical grounds for believing or rejecting the hypothesis of the end of environmentalism. But as announced, there is a second twist to our story. Even in environmentalist political theory there seems to be a consensus on the absorption of environmentalism in mainstream liberal democratic thought — even there it seems that the end is nigh. But what end is nigh, and how nigh exactly? Endism, a very popular doctrine these days, exists in many forms, and to answer our basic question, we must be sure we know about which type of end we are talking — for even in a strictly normative and moral sense can ‘the end of environmentalism’ mean many different things.

There are, first of all, teleological and historicist views, according to which the end of environmentalism refers to some final point of either absolute perfection or completion, where, in the normative political sense, environmentalism ceases to exist. According to the teleological world view our relation with the world is about restoring or maintaining a natural state of harmony (one could call this metaphysical naturalism). Hence the end of environmentalism would refer to this harmonious end-state and to the conception of human society it entails. From the historicist perspective, where environmentalism is viewed as an ideology or as (a part of) a tradition, the end of environmentalism can be thought of, for example, in terms of the idea of the end of history, or in terms of the Hegelian sequence of thesis, antithesis and synthesis.

The end of environmentalism can however also be conceived of from what is sometimes referred to as the humanist world view, according to which being in the world is about achieving the goals we set ourselves, given our conceptions of the world. Here the word ‘end’ means a goal rather than a final point. In that sense the end of environmentalism can simply refer to a certain environmental goal or set of goals that we want to achieve, like sustainability, naturalness, natural beauty etc. (we call this position substantive environmentalism). Here we can distinguish between the view of environmental goals as social constructions (idealism) or as more or less given interests and values in terms of which human—nature relations make sense to us (a moderate form of realism). Alternatively, the word ‘end’ can refer to a conception of political society that makes the achievement of such environmental goals possible. Obviously this ‘endism’ is the main focus of humanist versions of environmentalism. At that level we can also distinguish between procedural and outcome-oriented conceptions of political society, between democratic and non-democratic conceptions, but mainly between different conceptions of democracy.

The chapters in this book cover four dimensions of the ‘endism’ debate. Part I asks which conception of endism is appropriate (teleology, historicism, humanism)? Given a certain position on the former point, Part II deals with the question whether we should conceive of the end of environmentalism as procedural or substantive, democratic or non-democratic, or as a certain type of democracy. Part III asks what environmentalism has achieved relative to this or that end. Finally, Part IV addresses ways in which any remaining theoretical gaps on the way to a particular ‘end of environmentalism’ can be closed.

Each of these themes is addressed with one of three specific areas of green thought in mind: (a) epistemological concepts, (b) normative principles aimed at translating concepts into practice, and (c) concrete policy norms derived from those principles and concepts. Thanks to their diverse backgrounds, the authors are often able to extensively use empirical illustrations drawn from a wide range of nations.

Each of the contributors to this book analyses the end of environmentalism hypothesis from one of these perspectives. In doing so, the reader will also be informed about the current state of affairs in environmental political theory in general. Even that, however, is only part of what environmentalism is all about — environmental political thought cannot be understood but within its overall context. Hence we open, in Chapter 2, with Gayil Talshir's discussion of the chequered past and uncertain future of environmentalism as a school of thought on the ‘Good Green Life’. Talshir maintains that environmentalism had a crucial role in facilitating some of the major challenges to political studies that emerged since the 1960s, though it was only one component in a cluster of social phenomena that co-influenced the political sphere in the same direction. This instrumental role indeed changed the face of political research, ideology and theory, yet it is not clear whether the subject matter of environmentalism stands to benefit from this in the longer run.

In Part I different concep...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Notes on contributors
• Series editor's preface
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The role of environmentalism: from The Silent Spring to The Silent Revolution
• PART I The faces of endism
• PART II Democracy and environmentalism
• PART III The good and green society
• PART IV Perspectives and possibilities
• Bibliography
• Index