Environmental Politics

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Ecological modernisation, ecological modernities

Peter Christoff

To cite this article: Peter Christoff (1996) Ecological modernisation, ecological modernities,
Environmental Politics, 5:3, 476-500, DOI: 10.1080/09644019608414283

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09644019608414283

Published online: 08 Nov 2007.

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 Ecological Modernisation, Ecological
Modernities

PETER CHRISTOFF

The concept of ecological modernisation is increasingly being used in

policy analysis to indicate deeply embedded and ecologically self-conscious
forms of cultural transformation. Its meaning varies significantly depending
on author and context. Without further clarification, there is a danger that
the term may serve to legitimise the continuing instrumental domination
and destruction of the environment. The normative dimensions of different
uses of the concept call for greater attention. These may be weak or strong,
and they raise issues relating to the relationship of the term to its ecological
and modernist references.

Ecological modernisation is emerging as a fashionable new term to describe

recent changes in environmental policy and politics.1 Its growing popularity
derives in part from the suggestive power of its combined appeal to notions
of development and modernity, and to ecological critique. Yet competing
definitions blur its usefulness as a concept. Does ecological modernisation
refer to environmentally-sensitive technological change? Does it more
broadly define a style of policy discourse which serves either to foster better
environmental management or to manage dissent and legitimate ongoing
environmental destruction? Does it, instead, denote a new belief system or
systemic change? Indeed, can it encompass all of these understandings? In
this article, I want to examine current uses of the term in relation to the
tensions between modernity and ecology which it evokes, and suggest ways
of diminishing its ambiguity.
It is widely acknowledged that since the late 1980s significant changes
have occurred in the content and style of environmental policy in most
industrialised (particularly OECD) countries. The nature and extent of these
changes vary between nations,2 reflecting their distinctive political,
institutional, and cultural features; the national economic importance of the
sectors and industries targeted by new regulatory regimes and the extent and
Peter Christoff is a research student with the Politics Department at the University of Melbourne,
Victoria, Australia. He is grateful to John Dryzek, Robyn Eckersley, Boris Frankel and Paul
James for comments on an earlier draft. This article draws on a chapter by the author in S.C.
Young and J. van der Straaten, Ecological Modernisation (Routledge, forthcoming).
Environmental Politics, Vol.5, No.3, Autumn 1996, pp.476-500
PUBLISHED BY FRANK CASS. LONDON
ECOLOGICAL MODERNISATION, ECOLOGICAL MODERNITIES 477

intensity of the environmental impact of those industries; the strength of

popular environmental concern and of its political representation; the extent
to which an implementation deficit (the failure to realise environmental
standards and goals) exists and is recognised as a local problem, and the
reasons for this deficit; and regionally distinct perceptions of the key
international and global ecological problems which mobilised public
concern during the 1980s.3
Nevertheless, despite local variations, these environmental policy
changes have several generalisable features. They have aimed to shift
industry beyond reactive 'end-of pipe' approaches towards anticipatory and
precautionary solutions which minimise waste and pollution through
increasingly efficient resource use (including through recycling). Problem
displacement across media (air, water and land) and across space and time
has tended to be challenged by a more integrated regulatory approach - as
much to achieve greater administrative efficiency and to limit regulatory
overload as to address the new environmental problems caused by such
displacement. Prescriptive regulatory approaches and 'technological
forcing' - applied in the 1970s as the sole or predominant strategy for
achieving ongoing improvements in environmental conditions - are more
often accompanied or displaced by co-operative and voluntary arrange-
ments between government and industry: increasingly environment
protection agencies seek to use industry's existing investment patterns and
its capacity and need for technological innovation to facilitate improvement
in environmental outcomes. A range of market-based environmental
instruments have been deployed in response to the perceived exhaustion of
the initial wave of regulatory intervention [Eckersley, 1995]. In all, the new
environmental policy discourse increasingly emphasises the mutually
reinforcing environmental and economic benefits of increased resource
efficiency and waste minimisation.
These developments reflect an evolving international discourse in
response to commonly perceived environmental problems. However, they
also reflect an increasingly sophisticated political response by governments
and industry to popular mobilisation around issues such as nuclear power,
acid rain, biodiversity preservation, ozone depletion and induced climate
change. In other words, the new policy culture and its trends are not always
simply or primarily intended to resolve environmental problems. They are
also shaped by a contest over political control of the environmental agenda
and, separately, over the legitimacy of state regulation (predominantly in the
English-speaking OECD countries). In addition, they have been influenced
by the growing pressures on nation-states generated by intensified
economic globalisation and by changes in the structure and nature of
production towards greater flexibility and international integration.
478 ENVIRONMENTAL POLITICS

The strengthening of linkages between environmental and economic

policies is especially observable in countries such as Germany and the
Netherlands - in turn raising questions about the reasons for their
exceptionally good environmental performance in contrast to countries such
as the United Kingdom and the United States. For instance, in the 1980s and
the early 1990s German environmental policy, under pressure from the
Greens, has moved rapidly to address its failure to meet targets and
standards adopted during the 1970s. The promotion of design criteria
enabling comprehensive re-use of materials has been accompanied by
regulations requiring that 72 per cent of glass and metals and 64 per cent of
paperboard, laminates and plastics be recycled by 1995 [Moors, 1992].
Regulations also encourage use of 'waste energy' for heating and power
generation. The 1983 Large Combustion Plant Ordinance requires the
retrofitting of all major power plants to cut pollutants contributing to acid
rain by 90 per cent by 1995, Laws passed in 1989 ban CFC production and
use by 1995. Germany has also committed itself to a unilateral reduction in
carbon dioxide emissions of between 25 and 30 per cent by the year 2005
and, since 1990, has begun to articulate and implement a package of some
60 measures to enable it to meet this target [Hatch, 1995].
These changes have been supported by considerable government
assistance. Weale [1992] reports that between 1979 and 1985, the German
government subsidy for environmental research and development rose from
$US 144.3 million to $US 236.4 million, or from 2.1 per cent of R&D to 3.1
per cent (the UK equivalent was 0.8 per cent to 1.1 per cent). This
commitment is also institutionally defined: Germany has a separate Federal
Ministry for Research and Technology which spends about 200 million DM
per annum on research and development of environmental technologies
[Angerer, 1992: 181]. Since 1985, the level of German public subsidy for
environmental research has exceeded that of the United States in absolute
terms. Public investment also provides substantial support in the energy
conservation fields, including research into energy conservation devices. As
a result, within a decade German industry has become a global leader in the
development and/or production of solar photo-voltaics, high-efficiency
turbines, hydrogen-powered cars, energy-efficient household appliances,
and recyclable materials and products.
The economic advantages to countries and companies leading the field in
environmental performance improvements have been recognised as
considerable. It is estimated that by the year 2000, Japan will be producing
some $US12 billion worth of waste incinerators, air-pollution equipment and
water treatment devices, and M1TI has proposed aid projects aimed at energy
development in China, Indonesia and Malaysia, as a means of further tying
and strengthening trade connections with these countries [Gross, 1992].
ECOLOGICAL MODERNISATION, ECOLOGICAL MODERNITIES 479

The extent of formal policy integration and of the diffusion of

environmental principles into the practices of state, economy and society is
also of particular interest. Governments in several countries - notably
Australia, Canada, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom - have
developed national plans for sustainable development, meta-policies aimed at
the integration of national environmental and economic activity, and at
encouraging greater environmental awareness in civil society. In this, the
Dutch National Environment Policy Plan (NEPP) has been significantly more
successful than similar attempts elsewhere. This success is partly due to the
highly corporatist nature of Dutch politics and planning, the Dutch state's
acceptance of a significant role in facilitating and directing industrial
development and environmental protection, and also the timing of the Plan's
release in 1989, during a high point of international and national
environmental concern. The NEPP has the explicit goal of achieving
environmental sustainability in the Netherlands within one generation, by
2010, by recasting policies and practices in key economic sectors, including
manufacturing, agriculture and transport, to limit waste production and
environmental pollution [Carley and Christie, 1992; van der Straaten, 1995].
Despite weaknesses both in its targets and ongoing implementation [Wintle
and Reeve, 1994], the Plan nevertheless offers a programmatic approach to
working towards measurable targets against which the public, government
and industry can assess its progress and iteratively adjust the Plan.4
Over the past decade, Germany, the Netherlands, Japan and the
Scandinavian block appear to have achieved above OECD average
improvements across a range of industry-related national environmental
indicators, including water quality and air pollutant emissions [OECD, 1995].
In these countries there is now evidence of a decoupling of GNP growth from
the growth of environmentally harmful effects, indicating increased economic
output with decreased energy and materials consumption per unit of GNP.
However, certain improvements in environmental conditions in the First
World have been gained through displacement of high energy consuming
and/or polluting industries (for example, metal processing and primary
manufacturing) to newly industrialising countries (NICs) and lesser
developed countries (LDCs). Meanwhile, underlying increases in total
material consumption in both industrialising countries and industrialised
countries continue to enhance environmental pressures, suggesting both that
the pace of reform is too slow and the root cause of the implementation deficit
of the 1970s has not been overcome [WRI, 1994].

The Uses of Ecological Modernisation

Positive aspects of these recent changes have been described by academic
480 ENVIRONMENTAL POLITICS

observers as evidence of a process of 'ecological modernisation' (EM),

although their uses of the term vary considerably in scope and meaning.
Specifically, leading exponents of the term in the German and English
literature, such as Janicke, Hajer and Weale, use it in their policy analysis,
sociological analysis or political theoretical discussion in ways which are
occasionally problematic, partly because of a lack of clarity about whether
the term is being used descriptively, analytically or normatively. Following
discussion of these distinctive uses of EM, I want to propose a typology for
ecological modernisation which emphasises the normative dimensions of
the term.

Ecological Modernisation as Technological Adjustment

EM has been used narrowly to describe technological developments with
environmentally beneficial outcomes - such as chlorine-free bleaching of
pulp for paper and more fuel-efficient cars. These are specifically aimed at
reducing emissions at source and fostering greater resource efficiency
[Simonis, 1988; Janicke, 1988; Zimmermann, Hartje and Ryll, 1990;
Janicke, Monch and Binder, 1992).
Janicke, who perhaps first introduced 'ecological modernisation' into
the language of policy analysis (1986/1990), for instance, refers to four
broadly framed 'environmental political' strategies commonly found in
industrial countries [Janicke, 1988]. Two of these strategies are remedial
(compensation and environmental restoration; technical pollution control)
and two preventative or anticipatory (environmentally friendly technical
innovation or 'ecological modernisation'; and structural change). For
Janicke, EM is fundamentally a technical cost-minimisation strategy for
industry and an alternative to labour-saving investment - a form of
'ecological rationalisation' which will lead simultaneously to greater
'ecological and economic efficiency' [1988: 23]. It is primarily seen as a
strategy intended to maintain or improve market competitiveness, in which
the environmental benefits of such technological change are incidental
rather than a core concern for innovation and implementation. In this sense,
such a narrow version of EM does not necessarily reflect any significant and
overwhelming changes in corporate, public or political values in relation to
desired ecological outcomes. Rather, it is an outcome of capital's cost-
minimising responses to new pressures - such as the adoption elsewhere of
post-Fordist 'lean' production methods [Best, 1990; Amin, 1994; Wallace,
1995], resource price movements and scarcities (for example, the oil crises
of the 1970s); changes in consumer taste; and profit squeezes caused by
taxes and regulatory strategies of the state - at a time when automation has
reduced industry's capacity to increase labour's productivity. Innovation
and implementation may be confined to those areas and types of technical
ECOLOGICAL MODERNISATION, ECOLOGICAL MODERNITIES 481

improvements which ensure market competitiveness.5 Consequently, such

technological change may not contribute to lasting environmental
improvements when viewed in the context of national or international
ecological requirements.
For Janicke, moves towards sustainability depend on broader structural
change, the second of his anticipatory strategies, which would lead to
profound shifts in production and consumption patterns. These are not
merely industrial responses to ecological symptoms (for example, resource
shortages) but incorporate precautionary analysis and associated restrictions
on action and lead to constrained qualitative economic growth and a
decrease in absolute resource use, pollution and environmental degradation
[7955: 15-17; 1992]. He sees the current period of multiple crises -
unemployment, and accumulation, environmental and fiscal crises - which
extends into the 1990s as also providing opportunities for the 'creative
destruction* of old patterns and forms. The world market involves not only
competition between enterprises producing new technologies but also
competition between nations with stronger and weaker 'state steering
capacity', a competition favouring those capable of breaking with the
tendency to protect their old 'smoke-stack industries' and able to generate a
framework for consensual transformation. Janicke's more recent empirical
work documents the sites, conditions and (limited) signs of such industrial
transformation [Janicke et al., 1992}.
Janicke and his colleagues fail to identify or address potential political
economic contradictions in this narrow vision of an ecological
modernisation embedded in larger processes of structural transformation. At
what point are the currently developing patterns of unrestricted, globalised
production and trade, and the cultural demands for increasingly specialised
consumption, challenged? How will the corresponding growth in
international markets for new 'lean* technologies and products be restrained
to ensure regional and international ecological stability rather than ongoing
expansion of total resource use and waste output? And, specifically given
Janicke's views [1992] on state failure and the limits of state action, what
institutions will participate in this enhanced process of regulation? What
happens, within this larger scenario, to those countries - the technological
laggards - unable to compete or perform economically and ecologically?
If these new clean technologies and products are truly ecologically
sustainable - leading to a significant absolute decrease in resource use and
to effective environmental preservation - what are their ramifications for
trade, employment, accumulation and wealth distribution within and
between nations, particularly if they are sought according to time frames
which are dictated by urgent ecological demands (for example, the potential
need to cut Greenhouse gas emissions by up to 60 per cent within the next
482 ENVIRONMENTAL POLITICS

three decades)? Certainly, given its narrowly industrial focus, such EM

would not necessarily serve to diminish total resource consumption or lead
to the protection of 'unvalued', non-resource related ecological concerns.

Ecological Modernisation as Policy Discourse

Others, such as Weale [1992; 1993] and Hajer [1995], have employed 'EM'
more broadly to define changes in environmental policy discourse. For
Hajer, the shift toward EM can be observed in at least six 'realms', namely
in environmental policy-making, where anticipatory replace reactive
regulatory formulae; in a new 'pro-active* and critical role for science in
environmental policy-making; at the micro-economic level, in the shift from
the notion that environmental protection increases cost, to the notion that
'pollution prevention pays'; at the macro-economic level, in the
reconceptualisation of nature as a public good and resource rather than a
free good; in the 'legislative discourse in environmental polities', where
changing perceptions of the 'value' of nature mean that the burden of proof
now rests with those accused as polluters rather than the damaged party; and
the reconsideration of participation in policy-making practices, with the
acknowledgement of new actors, 'in particular environmental organisations
and to a lesser extent local residents', and the creation of 'new participatory
practices' for their inclusion in a move to end the 'sharp antagonistic debate
between the state and the environment movement' [Hajer, 1995: 28-9].
Hajer predominantly regards EM as a policy discourse which assumed
prominence around the time of the European Community's Third Action
Plan for the Environment and, more explicitly still, the 1984 OECD
Conference on Environment and Economics. Such EM 'recognises the
structural character of the environmental problematique but none the less
assumes that existing political, economic and social institutions can
internalise care for the environment' [1995: 31]. Hajer sees this discourse
as being largely economistic — framing environmental problems in
monetary terms, portraying environmental protection as a 'positive sum'
game, and following a utilitarian logic. At the core of ecological
modernisation is the idea that pollution prevention pays: it is 'essentially an
efficiency-oriented approach to the environment' [1995: 101]. In other
words, economic growth and the resolution of environmental problems can,
in principle, be reconciled [1995: 25-6].6 'Ecological modernisation uses
the language of business and conceptualises environmental pollution as a
matter of inefficiency while operating within the bounds of cost-
effectiveness and bureaucratic efficiency' [1995: 31].
Hajer is most effective where he suggests that EM is a discursive
strategy useful to governments seeking to manage ecological dissent and to
relegitimise their social regulatory role. It permits a critical distancing from
ECOLOGICAL MODERNISATION, ECOLOGICAL MODERNITIES 483

the interventionist remedies of the 1970s which, as Hajer believes, 'did not
produce satisfactory results', and may serve to legitimate moves to roll back
the state and reduce its regulatory capacities in the environmental domain.
It also enables governments to promote environmental protection as being
economically responsible, thereby resolving the tensions created by
previous perceptions that the state was acting against the logic of capital and
its own interests (of functional dependency on private economic activity).
He suggests that such a strategy explicitly avoids addressing basic social
contradictions that other discourses might have introduced.
Ecological modernisation is basically a modernist and technocratic
approach to the environment that suggests that there is a techno-
institutional fix for present problems. Indeed ecological modernisation
is based on many of the some institutional principles that were already
discussed in the early 1970s: efficiency, technological innovation,
techno-scientific management, procedural integration and co-ordinated
management. It is also obvious that ecological modernisation as
described above does not address the systemic features of capitalism
that make the system inherently wasteful and unmanageable [1995:32].
In other words, EM is not simply a technical answer to the problem of
environmental degradation. It can also be seen as a strategy of political
accommodation of the radical environmentalist critique of the 1970s,
meshing with the deregulatory moves which typify the 1980s, with
distinctive affinities with the neo-liberal ideas that dominated governments
during this time, supporting their concern for structural industrial reform
[1995: 32-3].
Hajer's own views here are unclear. He seems to approve of such
political closure yet leaves open the question of whether or not EM might
be, in the terms of the critics of Brundtland, a rhetorical ploy to take the
wind out of the sails of 'real' environmentalists, one which displaces and
marginalises the radical emancipatory aspects of environmental critique
[1995: 34]. He is even less clear about whether or not EM 'may not in fact
have a more profound meaning as the first step on a bridge that leads to a
new sort of sustainable society'. Hajer mainly sees EM as a counter to the
'anti-modern' sentiments he claims are part of the critical discourse of new
social movements.
It is a policy strategy that is based on a fundamental belief in progress
and the problem-solving capacity of modern techniques and skills of
social engineering. Contrary to the radical environment movement
that put the issue on the agenda in the 1970s, environmental
degradation is no longer an anomaly of modernity. There is a renewed
484 ENVIRONMENTAL POLITICS

belief in the possibility of mastery and control, drawing on modernist

policy instruments such as expert systems and science [1995: 33],
In this sense too, as it seeks to provide a soothing rhetoric promoting
apparent remedial and anticipatory change, such a policy discourse may be
profoundly anti-ecological in its outcomes, its narrow economism serving to
devalue and work against recognition and protection of non-materialistic
views of nature's 'worth'.

Ecological Modernisation as Belief System

Both Hajer and Weale also use the concept in more radical ways.7 For Weale
[1992], ecological modernisation represents a new belief system that
explicitly articulates and organises ideas of ecological emancipation which
may remain confused and contradictory in a less self-conscious discourse.
It is an ideology based around, but extending beyond, the understanding that
environmental protection is a precondition of long-term economic
development. Weale's claims for EM as a belief system are important given
the role of belief systems in organising and legitimising public policy.
Weale also sees EM as being focused on a reconceptualised relationship
between environmental regulation and economic growth. It still includes an
emphasis on achievement of highest possible environmental standards as a
means for developing market advantage through the integration of
anticipatory mechanisms into the production process, recognition of the
actual and anticipated costs of environmental externalities in economic
planning, and the economic importance of strengthening consumer
preferences for clean, green products [1992: Ch.3; 1993: 206-9]. However,
'once the conventional wisdom of the relationship between the environment
and economy is challenged, other elements of the implicit belief system
[which sees them in opposition] might also begin to unravel'. Regulation
may 'no longer seem merely a mechanical matter*. EM thus prefigures
systemic change and may, in its more radical forms, generate a broader
transformation in social relations, one which leads to the ecologisation of
markets and the state.
Under such circumstances, as Weale comments:
the internalisation of externalities becomes a matter of attitude as well
as finance, and a cleavage begins to open up not between business and
environmentalists, but between progressive, environmentally-aware
business on the one hand and short-term profit takers on the other.
Moreover, the behaviour of consumers becomes important, so that the
role of government policy is not simply to respond to the existing
wants and preferences of their citizens, but also to provide support and
ECOLOGICAL MODERNISATION, ECOLOGICAL MODERNITIES 485

encouragement for forms of environmentally aware behaviour and

discouragement for behaviour that threatens or damages the
environment. Once this view has taken root, the line from mechanical
to moral reform has been crossed. The challenge of ecological
modernisation extends therefore beyond the economic point that a
sound environment is a necessary condition for long-term prosperity
and it comes to embrace changes in the relationship between the state,
its citizens and private corporations, as well as in the relationship
between states [Weak, 1992: 31-2].
However, in The New Politics of Pollution, Weale does not develop his
views on the transformations of both civil society and the state necessary to
achieve ecological sustainability. What limits are posed by the state's
dependent relationship to private sector economic activities and how can
these be overcome given the increasing political and economic vulnerability
of individual nation-states to global flows of capital? To what extent would
transformations of civil society and in public spheres, rather than
institutional changes to the state, drive the process of ecologisation?"

Ecological Modernisation - Some Unresolved Issues

It is possible to illuminate problems and issues left unaddressed or
unresolved by the foregoing uses of EM by asking a series of interrelated
questions. In different situations (different policy forums and different
countries), quite different styles of EM may prevail - ones which can be
judged normatively to tend towards either weak or strong outcomes on a
range of issues, such as ecological protection and democratic participation.
In this sense, these questions hint at the limitations of those forms of
ecological modernisation which tend toward the first rather than the second
of what might seem, initially, opposing poles.

EM - Economistic or Ecological?
In each of the uses of EM described above, the environment is reduced to a
series of concerns about resource inputs, waste and pollutant emissions. As
cultural needs and non-anthropocentric values (such as are reflected in the
Western interest in the preservation of wilderness) cannot be reduced to
monetary terms, they tend to be marginalised or excluded from consideration.
This is clearly the case for EM narrowly defined as technical innovation.
But it is equally true of those interpretations of EM which see the state
shaping corporate activity and markets to (re)incorporate environmental
externalities into the costs of production. As has been noted, such versions
of EM may remain consistent with the traditional imperatives of capital.
486 ENVIRONMENTAL POLITICS

Leading industries may welcome uniformly applied environmental

regulatory regimes, as the redefinition of the boundaries of acceptable
economic behaviour may represent a rationalisation of their markets which
makes the rules of production and competition more certain or amenable to
their entry or dominance. But ideologically and practically, such ecological
modernisation may simply put a green gloss on industrial development in
much the same way that the term 'sustainable development' has been co-
opted - to suggest that industrial activity and resource use should be
allowed as long as environmental side-effects are minimised.
Given this dominant emphasis on increasing the environmental efficiency
of industrial development and resource exploitation, such EM remains only
superficially or weakly ecological. Consideration of the integrity of
ecosystems, and the cumulative impacts of industrialisation upon these, is
limited and peripheral. In this sense, the entire literature is somewhat
Eurocentric, deeply marked by the experience of local debates over the
politics of acid rain and other outputs, rather than conflicts over biodiversity
preservation. Although current uses of EM may be well adapted to
describing positive environmental outcomes in certain industrialised First
World countries where a version of ecological sustainability may be created
in the wasteland of a vastly depleted biological world, it may be positively
dangerous if taken prescriptively by those nations where the conservation of
biodiversity is a more fundamental concern or opportunity and/or which
depend on primary resource exploitation to fund their traditional forms of
economic growth, for example as in the case in Australia, Brazil and South
Africa.

EM - National or International?
The uses of EM described earlier also remain narrowly focused on changes
within industrialised nation-states. They are therefore unable to integrate an
understanding of the transformative impact of economic globalisation on
environmental relations. They offer only a diminished recognition of the
increasingly internationalised flows of material resources, manufactured
components and goods, information and waste; of the influence of
multinational corporations on investment, national industrial development
and the regulatory capacities of the nation-state; and of international
deregulatory developments (such as GATT) and environmental treaties (such
as the Montreal Protocol). Paradoxically, each of these facets of globalisation
shapes yet distorts, provokes yet inhibits and undermines the emergence of
strong forms of ecological modernisation at national and regional levels.
Because of their nation-statist focus, these uses of EM - including those
raising broader ideological and systemic concerns - still tend to remain
focussed on localised end-of-cycle issues rather than encompassing the
ECOLOGICAL MODERNISATION, ECOLOGICAL MODERNITIES 487

globally integrated nature of resource extraction and manufacturing in

relation to domestic consumption, overvaluing local achievements and
environmental impacts while Undervaluing geographically distant factors.9
Consider, for instance, the internationally dispersed resources and
environmental impacts associated with producing and running a nation's car
fleet, or with producing and using paper. Or the extent to which heavy
transformative industries such as smelting, ship-building or car
manufacturing have relocated to the NICs. In other words, although
pollution levels and primary consumption of energy and other primary
resources may have fallen in relation to GNP in certain European economies
as these have become increasingly post-industrial, their per capita material
consumption continues to grow - with environmental impacts now
displaced 'overseas'.
Given this presently predominantly nation-statist view of EM,
discussion of the emergent international institutions for environmental
regulation and protection, and of environmental trends, remains under-
developed where it occurs in the EM literature.10 The literature fails to
recognise that, because old forms of industrial activity with their associated
environmental problems are being displaced to developing nations or
regions and the transition to alternative technologies is occurring too slowly
to prevent major global environmental problems (such as climate change),
we may instead be moving towards what Everett [1992] has called the
'breakdown of technological escape routes' as the ecological pressure for
change increases beyond the reasonable capacities for social and industrial
reform.

EM - Hegemonic Progress or Multiple Possibilities?

In different ways, the types of EM described earlier are also presented as
contributing to, or constituting, a unilinear path to ecological modernity.
Consequently they seem to be offering a revival of mainstream development
theory and of notions of uneven development and under-development,
positing EM as the next necessary or even triumphant stage of an
evolutionary process of industrial transformation - a stage dependent upon
the hegemony of Western science, technology and consumer culture and
propagated by leading Western(ised) countries. Such views of ecological
modernisation may be validly subjected to the criticisms which were
levelled against development theory two decades ago.
Theorists who implicitly or explicitly rely upon a simplistic division
between traditional and modern societies ignore the potential for a
multiplicity of paths to ecological sustainability which may rest in the
diversity of non-Western cultures. They seem to suggest that all countries
may undertake the great leap forward over the phase of 'dirty'
488 ENVIRONMENTAL POLITICS

industrialisation into the fully ecologically modern condition. But if

ecologically modernising countries can not quite manage the great leap,
then at least such nations will eventually be able to employ restorative
technologies, salves and panaceas developed elsewhere to undo the
ecological devastation resulting from the stage of aggressive
industrialisation to which developing countries aspire or are now subject. In
other words, when developing countries reach the levels of affluence which
gives them the economic capacity to afford ecological modernisation, they
will be able to turn to consider and repair the path of devastation which has
bought them this luxury. In fact, such views of EM continue to offer a world
divided by renewed or strengthened core-periphery relationships between
industrialised and industrialising countries, with world markets and the
motors of progress dominated by leading industrial state(s).
The problems here are most obvious when we consider the potentially
disastrous local and global ecological (and social) costs of China, India,
Indonesia or Brazil pursuing such a path to ecological modernity, or the
perpetual mendicant status of small nation-states such as the Solomons or
Vanuatu, and also much of the African continent, which would continue to
be trapped in a condition of ongoing cultural and technological dependency.

EM - Technocratic or Democratic?
There are also tensions between what different theorists describe as the
preconditions for systemic or structural ecological modernisation. Some
stress the transformative impact of environmental awareness on civil
society and the public sphere, and on the institutions and practices of
government and industry. They emphasise the ways in which citizenship
and democratic participation in planning may serve to socialise and
ecologise the market and guide and limit industrial production. Others
however favour a less emancipatory technocratic, neo-corporatist version of
EM - one which may prove primarily a rhetorical device seeking to manage
radical dissent and secure the legitimacy of existing policy while delivering
limited, economically acceptable environmental improvements.
For example, Weale [1992], interpreting developments in Germany and
the Netherlands, suggests that the systemic realisation of EM requires a pro-
active, interventionist state supporting a well-developed culture of
environmental policy innovation and offering significant public investment
and subsidies as a means of achieving economic advantage and
environmental outcomes. Such state activity would entail an integrated
regulatory environment and strong structural and process cross-linkages
between different parts of the state and the development of a synoptic and
reflexive use of environmental information in policy formation and
implementation. In addition, this transformation is enhanced by, or indeed
ECOLOGICAL MODERNISATION, ECOLOGICAL MODERNITIES 489

depends upon, increased public participation in political decision making,

including green political pressure through both the environment movement
and parliamentary politics (including green parties); and increased public
influence over industry behaviour through green consumer action and the
activities of environmental pressure groups and organisations.
By contrast, Hajer [7995] and Andersen [1993] seem to believe that a
more technocratic relationship between state and civil society will lead more
effectively to systemic EM. Andersen [1993], who is specifically concerned
to define preconditions for EM through comparative analysis of national
environmental performance, describes a country's capacity for ecological
modernisation as depending upon its 'achieved level of institutional and
technological problem-solving capabilities, which are critical to achieving
effective environmental protection and transformation to more sustainable
structures of production'. He argues, in concert with Janicke and others, that
there is also a close relationship between consensus-seeking policy styles
and high levels of environmental protection in industrialised countries.
Andersen suggests that four basic variables govern the capacity for such
ecological modernisation. First there is economic performance. This is the
capacity of countries to pay for environmental protection - a factor which
appears directly linked to the intensity of environmental pollution.
Secondly, there is consensus ability, which Andersen believes is best
developed in countries with neo-corporatist structures, which are seen as
having consensus-seeking decision-making styles that are more amenable to
dealing with new ideas and interests." Thirdly, there is innovative
capability, which he describes as the capacity of both the state and the
market institutions to remain open to new interests and innovations in the
judicial and political system, the media and the economic system. Fourthly,
there is strategic proficiency - the capacity to institutionalise environmental
policy across sectors. He identifies federal states, which face potential
fragmentation and delay in implementation, and states evidencing strong
compartmentalisation of the bureaucracy - concomitant with weak
environment departments or agencies - as potentially suffering problems in
this area [Andersen, 1993:3\. Andersen suggests that the presence of these
variables or attributes seems to contribute to, or at least correlate with, the
success of 'leading' European countries - such as Germany and the
Scandinavian bloc — in achieving exceptional improvements in environmental
conditions. But how do they apply to the NICs and LDCs? Again, what
relationship between state and civil society and what forms of democratic
participation are required, especially given the international dimensions of
environmental problems, to enable the radical social and economic changes
which ecological sustainability may require?
Insofar as EM focuses on the state and industry in terms which are
490 ENVIRONMENTAL POLITICS

narrowly technocratic and instrumental rather than on social processes in

ways which are broadly integrative, communicative and deliberative, it is
less likely to lead to the sorts of embedded cultural transformation which
could sustain substantial reductions in material consumption levels,
significant and rapid structural transformations in industrialised countries,
and major international redistributions of wealth and technological capacity.
In general, the extent and nature of institutional changes required to enable
the full recognition of a discursive and participatory environmental politics
(and to accommodate the transboundary and intertemporal nature of
environmental risks and impacts) have not yet been explored in the EM
literature.12

From Weak to Strong Ecological Modernisations

Given the range of uses to which the term has been put, can ecological
modernisation be stabilised as a concept? One can differentiate between
sometimes conflicting versions of ecological modernisation. These versions
do not each merely describe some aspect of a more encompassing process
of ecological modernisation but offer quite different real world outcomes.
Some of these uses may be labelled narrow or broad, depending on the
extent to which they are technological or systemic in scope or focus. More
importantly, and reflecting the above discussion, it is possible to emphasise
the normative dimensions of different versions of EM. I would suggest that
different interpretations of what constitutes EM lie along a continuum from
weak (one is tempted to write, false) to strong, according to their likely
efficacy in promoting enduring ecologically sustainable transformations
and outcomes across a range of issues and institutions (Table 1). The
political contest between the environment movement on the one hand and
governments and industry on the other is predominantly over which of these
types of EM should predominate.

TABLE l
TYPES OF ECOLOGICAL MODERNISATION

Weak EM Strong EM
Economists Ecological
Technological (narrow) Institutional/ systemic (broad)
Instrumental Communicative
' Technocratic/neo-corporatist/closed Deliberative democratic/ open
National International
Unitary (hegemonic) Diversifying
ECOLOGICAL MODERNISATION, ECOLOGICAL MODERNITIES 491

It is essential to note that weak and strong features of EM are not always
mutually exclusive binary opposites. Some features of weak or narrow EM
are necessary but not sufficient preconditions for an enduring ecologically
sustainable outcome. Clearly, one does not abandon technological change,
economic instruments or instrumental reason in favour of institutional and
systemic change or communicative rationality. In many cases - although not
all (for instance, technocratic or neo-corporatist versus deliberative and
open democratic systems) - aspects of narrow or weak EM need to be
subsumed into and guided by the normative dimensions of strong EM.

Ecological Modernisation, Ecological Modernities

Finally, what of the tensions and contradictions embedded in the term at the
point where ecological critique challenges the ways in which simple
industrial modernisation defines its relationship to Nature?" Perhaps the
most radical use of ecological modernisation would involve its deployment
against industrial modernisation itself. To understand what this might mean,
it is necessary to unpack the ecological and modernising components of
ecological modernisation and look at their interaction more closely.14
Modernity has broken or swept aside traditional forms of order and
certainty: as Marx put it, 'all that is solid melts into air'. Its dynamism may
be attributed to the separation of time and space into a realm that is detached
from immediate experience; the disembedding of social systems; and the
reflexive ordering and reordering of social relations [Giddens, 1990:
16-17]. By fostering relations with absent others, locationally distant from
any given situation of face-to-face interaction, the process of modernisation
increasingly overlays place (the immediate experience of location) with
space (the abstract experience of location, into which the immediate
experience of location is then fitted). It also replaces local time, based on an
immediate experience of the rhythms of Nature and the requirements of
one's immediate community, with abstract time - now most powerfully
represented by the international acceptance of a standard differentiation of
global time zones. The extreme dynamism of modernity, Giddens argues,
also depends on the establishment of disembedding social institutions, ones
which create or support the creation of abstract social relations and their
associated organisations. The emergence of symbolic tokens (such as
money), and expert systems, represents an essential feature of modernity
and contributes centrally to this process of disembedding, which is then
reflected, for instance, in increasingly global discourses as in science or law.
In addition, 'systems of technical accomplishment or professional
expertise organise large areas of the material and social environments in
which we live today' [Giddens, 1990: 27]. Crucial among these systems are
492 ENVIRONMENTAL POLITICS

those of scientific understanding and technological performance. We live in

and are dependent upon - that is to say, trust in - them for our survival and
legitimate functioning. These abstract expert systems constitute not only
bodies of knowledge, but also lived forms of social relationship. We enter
them whenever we turn on a light switch, fly in an aeroplane, go to the
dentist or answer the telephone: their complexity and functioning are taken
for granted in a socially learned, relatively unquestioned and automatic
way.13 Both types of disembedding mechanism (symbolic tokens and
abstract expert systems) provide guarantees of expectations across time and
space and stretch social systems as a result. They also promote a new
awareness of risk, which is the product of the human-created technological
and social characteristics of modernity. Risk and trust intertwine. Modernity
is also notable for the development of new capacities for the reflexive
appropriation of knowledge, in part born of the capacity to transmit and
review which comes with the development of the book and other forms of
recorded information. All knowledge and beliefs become available for
scrutiny. Certainty is displaced.
These features together contribute to the emergence of the institutional
dimensions of modernity. Giddens identifies four such dimensions, which
are inter-related and interdependent: capital accumulation; industrialism;
surveillance; and military power [1990:59]. Of particular interest in relation
to ecological modernisation are the first three dimensions. Industrialism
seeks the transformation of nature into created or recreated (managed)
environments through processes of standardisation, rationalisation and
reduction. The imperatives of capital accumulation are such that the hunt for
markets and resources encourages the commodification of all aspects of
individual cultures and nature which remain vulnerable. The capacity for
surveillance - in the broadest sense, in terms of the apparatuses of
consolidated administration, monitoring and registering of social and
environmental facts - has a bearing on the development of modern forms of
reflexive environmental management.
The last point to note here is the globalising tendency of modernity. Its
global reach is partly a result of the imperial and colonising tendencies of
capital accumulation. However, as modern technologies of transport,
information-transfer and communication continue actively to redefine
social relations, linking and integrating distant parts of the globe both as
markets for commodities and abstract social networks, the notions of centre
and periphery begin to blur. The flow of individuals, commodities, cultures
and pollution across territorial borders also is leading to a practical
redefinition of one of the other major institutions of modernity, the nation-
state. Modernity brings with it the globalisation of risk by altering the scope,
the type and the range of human-created environmental risks which
ECOLOGICAL MODERNISATION, ECOLOGICAL MODERNITIES 493

individuals now face, and also the globalisation of the perception of these
risks.
How then can we characterise the relationship between 'modernisation'
and 'the ecological'? Modernity is fraught with tensions and generates its
own new contradictions: nowhere is this more evident than in relation to the
environment. The emergent ecological critique of untrammelled industrialism
- sharpened politically in recent years by perceptions of ecological crisis
and of the need for precautionary consideration of the potential
consequences of development - has a paradoxical relationship to the
constitutive features of modernity described above. Itself a product of
simple modernity, ecological critique both depends upon and resists the
modern reorganisation of time and space. It makes radically problematic
and contradictory the industrialising imperative which lies at the heart of
modernisation by redefining the cultural and ecological limits to the
instrumental domination of nature.

Ecologically Re-embedding Space and Time

The birth of nature has been accompanied and shaped by the simultaneous
creation of technological forces which lead to what McKibben [1990] has
called 'the end of Nature' through human interference with previously
autonomous natural systems worldwide (through induced climate change,
the global transport of pollutants, and so on). Driven by the imperatives of
capital accumulation, industrialism - shaped by the alliance of science and
technology - continues to transform nature in ways unimaginable to earlier
generations. It does so deliberately, for instance, by introducing alien plant
and animal species to new continents, by flooding valleys and levelling
mountains, and by creating new relations of physical and economic
dependency between the country and the city and between the First and the
Third Worlds. Colonial conquests have often also led to the unintended
extermination of indigenous plants and animals through destruction of their
native habitat or by introduced predators. Demand for export earnings and
the development of industrialised monocultural agriculture and forestry
have produced a wave of extinction that continues to roll across North and
South America, Australia, Asia and Africa. Yet the ecological transformation
threatened by the combined impacts of induced global warming and bio-
technology is more comprehensive still.
The creation of a secular, scientific understanding of nature - indeed, the
development of ecology as a scientific discipline - and the triumph of
technological domination over natural cycles and ecological processes,
depend upon and arise from the separation of time and space discussed
earlier. The 'discovery' of 'remote' regions and exotic species enabled the
scientific conceptualisation of natural systems, at the same time as it
494 ENVIRONMENTAL POLITICS

involved the commodification of those environments, and the imperial

domination or appropriation, of non-Western knowledge of natural systems
and species.
Yet the 'so-called economy of Nature, the interrelationship of all
organisms' for which Haeckel [7570] coined the term 'ecology' in 1869,
depends on cycles and time scales which are generally alien to those of the
political and economic institutions of industrial society. An ecological
critique that recognises and respects the importance of the cycles upon
which the biological world depends, and which seeks to re-embed our
relationship to nature in a local place and to redefine the relationship in
ecological temporal terms, often stands in opposition to the transcendent,
abstracting features of modernity (and its industrial manifestations) while
still to some extent depending upon its conceptual frameworks. In other
words, such ecological critique tries to undo the stretching of time and
space, as it seeks to limit certain aspects of industrial modernisation in order
to preserve the ecological integrity of natural systems, or to preserve
cultural understandings and institutions, which are locally embedded and
resistant to the resource-utilitarianism of all forms of industrial modernity.16
Let me give several examples of such critique, each relating to primary
resource use. Harvesting temperate forests on an ecologically sustainable
cycle which also respects the needs of dependent species may involve 300
or 400 year rotations and it is probably ecologically out of the question for
complex, fragile rainforest systems. As such time spans may be
commercially unviable, protection of non-resource species involves
fundamentally rethinking how or whether one can use these forests. The
international ban on whaling, based on moral considerations, defies the
industrial/instrumental belief in the potential for whales to be harvested
sustainably. For similar reasons, environmentalists now campaign to
preserve wilderness areas and for animal rights in general. Consider also the
conflicts between the environment movement and industry over the
representations of place versus space, struggles with profound material
consequences for particular rivers, forests and wetlands. One may recognise
a fierce contest over images and counter-images of sites in the diametrically
opposed terms used by developers and environmentalists to represent
contested terrain through the Australian media as either significant places or
exploitable spaces with few specifically valuable attributes - 'the last free
river' versus 'a leech-ridden ditch' for the Franklin River in Tasmania; or
'magnificent Northern wilderness' and 'sacred ground' versus 'clapped-out
buffalo country' for Coronation Hill, a proposed mine site in the Northern
Territory. As Harvey [1993:23] notes, in such cases 'the cultural politics of
places, the political economy of their development, and the accumulation of
a sense of social power in place frequently fuse in indistinguishable ways'.
ECOLOGICAL MODERNISATION, ECOLOGICAL MODERNITIES 495

Each of these examples stresses ways in which a non-economistic

ecological critique is in tension with or begins to break away from industrial
modernity even as it still uses the media, scientific information and political
institutions which are products of late modernity as its tools. In other words,
ecological critique is not (as Hajer would suggest) naively anti-modern,
seeking to dismantle all abstract relations established through
modernisation. Rather, as the product of modernity and something which
continues to depend upon modernity's processes for its development,17 it
aims to discipline and restrain - to put bindings, brakes and shackles [Offe,
1992] - on the over-determining effects of globalised productive systems.
Beck [1992: 23] writes of how the life of a blade of grass in the Bavarian
forest ultimately comes to depend on the making and keeping of
international agreements: ecological critique requires abstract systems and
their institutions, and ecological considerations to coexist through the
prioritisation of the latter.
The strongest or most radically ecological notion of ecological
modernisation will often stand in opposition to industrial modernity's
predominantly instrumental relationship to nature as exploitable resource.
Recognition that over-production - the use of material resources beyond
regional and global ecological capacities - must cease because of the threat
of imminent ecological collapse, does not allow for the self-serving
gradualism of the weak forms of ecological modernisation discussed earlier.

Reflexivity and Risk, Anxiety and Mistrust

Giddens has noted that the forms of reflexivity involved in the continual
generating of systematic self-knowledge do not stabilise the relation
between expert knowledge and knowledge applied in lay actions. This is as
true for scientific and technical systems as for sociology (to which Giddens
was referring), for these systems also remain always at least one step away
from the understanding which would control their impacts and are always
on their way to creating new problems. Increased ecological awareness
encourages recognition of the limits to our scientific comprehension of the
physical world and therefore of the limits to our capacity to know and
technically manipulate them. Our crude understanding of the interplay of
biological systems and global climate is a good case in point.
However industrial modernisation has largely vanquished the traditional
cultural forces which might control the abstract scientific appropriation of
the environment or, more importantly, the impulse to transform nature
(whether through biotechnology or in vitro fertilisation). At the same time,
it has produced a new category of socio-technological failures - such as
Chernobyl and the ozone hole - which is unprecedented in its spatial and
temporal reach, respecting no territorial borders and potentially affecting
496 ENVIRONMENTAL POLITICS

future generations. The global extension of the catastrophic capacity of

industrial modernisation is accompanied by the means to broadcast
information about such disasters to populations which previously trusted
expert systems and now become aware of these new risks, with their
implications at the personal (cancer and death) and global (destruction of
life on earth) levels of existence.
As Giddens, Beck and others point out, the resultant disenchantment
with science and technological change, and the popular appreciation of the
new risks they produce, has led to a transformation of public perceptions of
progress. Optimistic notions of progress, based on uncritical belief in the
benefits of the scientific and industrial appropriation of Nature, have now
collapsed into anxiety and mistrust. Giddens argues that this new phase,
which other theorists call postmodernity, is but an extension of modernity in
process. 'We have not moved beyond modernity but are living precisely
through a phase of its radicalisation', a period in which Progress is 'emptied
out by continuous change' [Giddens, 1990: 51]. However there is good
reason to suggest that this underplays the discontinuities associated with
cultural disenchantment with progress and particularly its handmaidens,
science and technology. This disenchantment constitutes a radical departure
from simple modernity and signals the establishment of a new, more
anxious phase of reflexive modernisation [Beck, Giddens and Lash, 1994].
Those interpretations of ecological modernisation which are still
embedded in notions of industrial progress, albeit more cautious but still
bearing an evolutionary sense of technological adaptation through
reflexivity, do not address the extent of this corrosion of trust in simple
industrial modernity."1 They accept that modernisation has become more
reflexive, but only in the narrow and instrumental sense of improving
environmental efficiency, rather than in the broad and reflective manner of
ecological critique which fundamentally questions the trajectories of
industrial modernity. By contrast, strong ecological modernisation therefore
also points to the potential for developing a range of alternative ecological
modernities, distinguished by their diversity of local cultural and
environmental conditions although still linked through their common
recognition of human and environmental rights and a critical or reflexive
relationship to certain common technologies, institutional forms and
communicative practices which support the realisation of ecological
rationality and values ahead of narrower instrumental forms.
In conclusion, the concept of ecological modernisation has been
deployed in a range of ways - as a description of narrow, technological
reforms, as a term for policy analysis, in reference to a new ideological
constellation and in reference to deeply embedded and ecologically self-
conscious forms of cultural transformation - and bearing quite different
ECOLOGICAL MODERNISATION, ECOLOGICAL MODERNITIES 497

values. As a result, there is a danger that the term may serve to legitimise
the continuing instrumental domination and destruction of the environment,
and the promotion of less democratic forms of government, foregrounding
modernity's industrial and technocratic discourses over its more recent,
resistant and critical ecological components. Consequently there is a need to
identify the normative dimensions of these uses as either weak or strong,
depending on whether or not such ecological modernisation is part of the
problem or part of the solution for the ecological crisis.

NOTES

1. For instance, see Simonis [1988], Janicke et al. [1992], and Zimmermann et al.[1990], Weale
[1992], Hajer [1995] and Andersen [1993].
2. For example, see Vogel [1986, 1990], Vogel and Kun [1987], Knoepful and Weidner [1990],
Vig and Kraft [1990], Yaeger [1991], Weale [1992], Feigenbaum et al [1993] and Wintle and
Reeve [1994].
3. For instance, while transboundary problems such as acid rain and fallout from Chernobyl
shaped environmental politics, policies and institutions in Western Europe, they were of little
consequence in Japan, and irrelevant to 'frontier states' such as Australia, where
preservationist conflicts over the impacts of primary resource extraction - agriculture,
forestry and mining - on relatively pristine environments predominated.
4. The NEPP has already undergone two four-yearly reviews, as required by legislation.
5. Consider the enormous gap between the technical capacities - which have been available for
decades - to produce durable, safe, energy efficient and largely recyclable cars, and the
actuality to date.
6. Hajer's use of the term varies in its elasticity. As he extends his view of 'ecological
modernisation' to the point that it seems all-embracing in its cultural inclusivity, it becomes
hard to see what bounds EM as a discourse - a theoretical-methodological problems common
to Foucauldian approaches to policy analysis. Perhaps it is therefore better to instead regard
ecological modernisation as a meta-discourse or deep cultural tendency. It then becomes
possible to read EM back into the nineteenth century movement for resource conservation
and forward into the growing reflexivity of science and technology. That Hajer might want
to add conservative and neo-liberal opposition to state regulation to his list of the signs of
EM indicates some of the problems with his own ill-defined discursive approach to 'locating'
EM.
7. Towards the end of The Politics of Environmental Discourse, Hajer briefly touches upon an
ideal form of EM which he calls 'reflexive ecological modernisation. This represents a
cultural tendency rather than merely a policy discourse and stands in opposition to 'techno-
corporatist ecological modernisation' in its emphasis on democratic and discursive practices.
8. See Christoff [1996].
9. For instance, see Weale [1992: 78-9].
10. Both Weale and Hajer comment on the role which international forums, such as the OECD,
have played in fostering EM as a policy discourse. For instance, Weale claims 'the main
bodies responsible for developing the ideology of EM were international organisations, who
sought to use the new policy discourse as a way to secure acceptance of common, or at least
harmonised, environmental policies, the closest example being the E C [Weale, 1993: 209].
He also discusses the evolution of new international environmental regimes as but does not
integrate this discussion into his exploration of ecological modernisation [Weale, 1992:
Ch.7].
11. Similarly, Jahn [1993: 30] notes that data seem to indicate that neo-corporatism has a
positive impact on environmental performance and on anti-productionist politics. He
498 ENVIRONMENTAL POLITICS

comments that 'it seems reasonable to argue that the impact of neo-corporatist arrangements
on both dependent variables is dependent upon the influence of new social movements and
associated green and left-libertarian parties on established politics'. However, importantly,
he also notes Offe's observation that the cost of corporatist arrangements is the
marginalisation of non-organised interests, which is antithetical to the democratic principles
of new social movements and of Green politics.
12 Weale [1992 31] and Hajer [1995:280 ff] suggest but do not explore such alternatives.
13. By 'ecological critique', I mean both the emergent scientific understanding of ecological
needs which has evolved out of the biological and physical sciences, and the normative and
non-instrumental (re)valuation of Nature (including its spiritual and aesthetic aspects as these
manifest in concern for preservation of species and ecosystems, wilderness and visual
landscape values). Both are elements increasingly dominant, motivating features of the
environment movement in the late 20th Century.
14. This section draws heavily upon Giddens' elegant long essay. The Consequences of
Modernity.
15. Of course these newer forms of trust in abstract systems may be related to pre-modern forms
of trust in cultural explanatory frameworks (religion, myth and so on.) They coexist with, and
interact in, the process of identity formation with more direct forms which are essential in
face-to-face communities and intimate social relations (as in families).
16. This is not to argue for a return to essentialised and romantic, exclusionary and parochial
notions of 'place', such as have been central to the campaigns of certain environmental
communitarians. While arguing for the need to recognise and preserve the specific place-
bounded nature of ecological relations, it is also important to note the ways in which cultural
notions of identity and place have been irrevocably transformed by modernity as, globally,
face-to-face communities are now infused by the informational attributes and other
requirements of abstract exchange.
17. Its abstract knowledge of nature remains based on research and investigation, on the
international transmission of new scientific information among scientists, environmental
managers and environmentalists, as well as (potentially) upon the recovery and
reauthorisation of aspects of local indigenous knowledge.
18. See Janicke [1988] and Hajer [1995:33].

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