The New Environmentalism?

Civil Society and Corruption in the Enlarged EU

Davide Torsello

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317022831
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Antropologia

Drawing on rich ethnographic work in both Eastern and Western Europe, The New Environmentalism? presents a range of case studies to explore the impact of corruption in EU-funded structural development projects. With detailed analyses of the forms and contexts of environmentalism, the book reveals the manner in which corruption is generated by the planning and implementation procedures of the projects, demonstrating in each case that environmental movements emerge as by-products of these processes, using corruption as part of a discourse employed in support of their action against political (regional and state) institutions, as well as to communicate their goals to local citizens. Shedding light on the ways in which revelations about corruption are adopted as a means to fostering civic participation in environmental movements and influencing institutional trust, this book contributes to our understanding of the loss of legitimacy and trust in local and global political institutions. Comparative in approach, The New Environmentalism? provides new insights into the emergence of strong civic movements at local and trans-local levels, in resistance to citizens' sense of increasing alienation from political participation and decision making. As such, it will be of interest to anthropologists, sociologists and political scientists concerned with questions of legitimacy, corruption and activism.

1 Environmentalism

DOI: 10.4324/9781315555171-2

There is little agreement over when the term environmentalism was first used in social science. The difficulty in tracing a common root of environmental thought, at least in Western European intellectual history, is due to the basic dualism inherent in the notion of environmentalism. Environmentalism signifies on the one hand the complex and variegated body of ideas and ideologies about the environment. These have been represented, through time, in an array of shifting positions that examine the relationship of man with ecological resources. On the other hand, environmentalism also refers to those social movements which have evolved, in the course of history, with the common goal of condemning environmental damage and hence making political claims centred upon the protection of nature and its resources. These movements are in essence political and hence support not only a generalized view of mankind living in harmony with nature, but also a number of strategies that seek to enhance civil participation in decision-making and planning processes in the use of environmental resources.

This dual character means that the history of the way environmentalism is dealt with in the social sciences is complex and is characterized by a number of factors. First, the key contributions of each of the disciplines have focused on different aspects of both the human use of the environment and the social movements set up around environmental discourses and ideologies. Economics, sociology, geography, political science and anthropology have opened up multiple fields of investigations, but their research methodologies do not necessarily coincide with or complement one another. For instance, the contribution made by environmental economics, by far the largest among the social science disciplines, is not always followed up or found to be helpful in the sociological and anthropological approaches that are more interested in qualitative and ground level analyses. Conversely, anthropology has developed a number of approaches which, departing from the study of non-western societies, have in the long run enriched political science and even economic approaches to the notion, for instance, of ‘indigenous knowledge’ (see Brush 1993; Sillitoe 1998; Lauer and Aswani 2009). Secondly, the language of environmentalism is highly fragmented and often inconsistent between the disciplines. This is due to the different intellectual and theoretical traditions, on the one hand, and to the research methodologies on the other. In this context, anthropological and sociological approaches have tended to overlap in some particular fields, namely the study of environmentalist movements and the use of cultural theory to investigate how humans use ecological resources (Douglas and Wildavsky 1983; Milton 1996).

Thirdly, the study of environmental movements has been the object of diversified theoretical approaches in the various disciplines. There is generally a common starting point from which these approaches develop: the origin of movements envisioning a greater participation of the general public in the protection of the environment. How these movements develop common views and strategies and manage to raise awareness is dealt with differently. Again, theoretical differences between the social science disciplines become manifest in their approaches to the study of political strategies, of the nature of the movements themselves and their contextualization in wider ideas of modernization, post-modernity or risk-society, in their use of local knowledge and culturally constructed ideas of ecology.

I believe that what renders the study of this second aspect of environmentalism a complex interdisciplinary project is the tension between the universalism and relativism of this notion. One thing is to identify movements arising from a universal call to safeguard nature as patterns of civil society, or civic movements coming from below. Another thing, however, is to investigate how these movements make use of the environmental discourse to interact with larger institutions (from the state to the market, corporations and transnational organizations), to gain power through this interaction, or simply to legitimize their own standpoint at a public level. This final aspect, which has been, in my view, somewhat overlooked by the social sciences, is the main thrust of this book. One possible reason for this is that the nature of environmentalism in conditions of global change is such that it makes it difficult to thoroughly investigate the power structures and constellations that emerge in the negotiation between social movements and larger institutions.

Milton (1996) argues that environmentalism is best understood as a trans-cultural discourse, which, because of its ‘particular understanding of the planet as “one”’, has consolidated its ideas as a global phenomenon (1996: 171). On the other hand, Mol recognizes that ‘quite diverse – and interdependent- social mechanisms connect globalization to environmental disruption and reform, of which the net effect will vary and change depending on place, time and the type of environmental problem’ (Mol 2000: 142). Thus, the view that environmentalism, as a social movement, is influenced by global conditions, bringing about either common or locally diversified strategies of protest or political action seem to point to two different interpretations. However, I will argue that these two positions are not mutually exclusive if one pays attention not only to the global conditions in which these movements originate, but also to the local ways in which they make use of these conditions to attain power and legitimacy. In other words, by shifting attention from the founding of environmentalist movements and their typologies to the discourses and the power strategies they use when interacting with larger institutions, it is possible to conciliate the basic dichotomy between the global and local nature of environmentalism.

Therefore, the main argument of this book is that environmentalism, intended as social movements arising both to promote the protection of the environment and to politicize the citizens’ claims to this protection, has become a project of political interaction which makes use of local and global resources to achieve legitimacy. The common element of the environmental movements introduced in the case studies is that they are all to be found in conditions of transnational institutional change, namely they are products of the fluxes of EU policies in the enlarged European Community. As such, these movements have to deal with global concerns, because political planning does not take place any longer within the boundaries of the single states. What has proved to be the main challenge of the environmental projects is that they have to cope with increasingly conflicting realms of political action, from local up to EU level. This has produced a number of languages, semantics and coping strategies that are not easily analysed on the basis of the traditional state-civil society partitioning. These movements move both within and outside the state, they take advantage of or are undermined by their existences in conditions of globalization, they adopt strategies which at times privilege the local arena of environmentalist action, at times transcend it. This is where corruption comes into play. Corruption is used, along with and instead of ecological discourses, to give meaning to illegal or semi-legal practices which cannot always be located in time and space in the way ‘old’ environmentalist movements used to be. Corruption is a powerful discourse, which is deeply embedded, in the ground-level social realities where these movements are set up and where they operate. However, corruption is about practices and ideas that are conceived beyond the local, regional, state arenas. Corruption allegations, in the view presented by this book, are used to create breakthroughs among these arenas that can be used strategically (although not always successfully) to allow the real political nature of new environmentalism to find its place in ideas, ideologies and practices. New environmentalism is one concrete solution to the paradox brought about by the global dimension of its political engagement and the local nature of its movements.

The development of environmentalist theory

The first part of environmentalist theory is concerned with the study of the relationship between mankind and nature in terms of subsistence, production and technological progress. As indicated above, this relationship has been studied in different manners by the social sciences, and it is beyond the scope of this volume to produce a comprehensive review of this literature (see Mehta and Ouellet 1995; Barrow 2006). I will here mainly refer to some common points and terminologies used to describe the different theoretical positions.

O’Riordan (1981), in one of the earliest works on environmentalism, introduces the difference between the eco-centric and the techno-centric model. The eco-centric model develops from the assumption that a natural order prevails in the man-nature relationship, and that all things should move according to a natural law. In this perspective, human actions should seek a constant balance with the environment, seeking not to alter the delicate ecological equilibrium. The techno-centric model, instead, looks at the deliberately interventional quality of the human-ecological relationship. The environment is the subject of man's utilitarian quest for progress, well-being and technical development. Human needs and priorities follow an underlying, constant rationality, in their quest for efficiency and for control over technical means and progress. In other words, in this second model the human being does not seek compromise or equilibrium with the environment as a final goal, but he pools from it resources for the public good. According to O’Riordan these two schools of thought stemmed respectively from the romantic transcendentalist thinkers and from positivistic approaches to the role of science and technology in ecological terms (1981: 5–6). Within each model a number of different approaches developed historically focusing on different moral standpoints towards the environment. Among them the main distinction lies between the so-called bio-ethical and self-reliance approaches.

The bio-ethical approach, which constituted the underpinning rhetoric of the early environmental movements in the 1970s, sought to protect the integrity of the natural ecosystem as a biotic right. Human beings, in this perspective, should take a definite ethical standpoint vis-à-vis nature, even by developing a body of legal regulations of biotic rights. Seen in this light, environmental politics is part of a different sphere, one in which negotiation or bargaining is a difficult endeavour, due to the intransigent character of activists and environmentalists. One of the notions related to this approach is that of ‘limit’, seen as nonnegotiable barriers which set the ecological boundaries defining human action (O’Riordan 1996: 7).

The self-reliance approach takes an overtly political standing towards the devastating effects of industrialization and mass capitalism. Its aim is to propose local models of environmental protection (or responsibility) in which human safety and progress can be achieved through regional, small-scale patterns of economic development where agriculture and small enterprises play major roles. In this approach democratic participation in environmental movements is potentially sought at neighbourhood and ‘community’ levels, and values such as communal sense of belonging where the sharing of meaning attributed to ecology is emphasized.

Both approaches, however, have a common pessimistic view of human interaction with the natural environment. Man acts ‘violently’ in his attempt to fulfil his goals and satisfy his needs; hence participation in ecological movements has intrinsic political goals. On the other hand, so-called techno-centric models depart from a comparatively optimistic standpoint, in which growing technological and economic specialization and amelioration bring about (almost ‘naturally’) a better control of ecological resources. This position is constructed upon the strategic use of two notions: objectivity and specialization. Objectivity refers to the allegedly unchallengeable role of (exact) science which is committed and determined to advocate a proper balance in the use of environmental resources. O’Riordan (1996) and others (Pepper 1996; Nelissen et al. 1997; Smith 1999) reflect critically on this notion which may be instrumentally manipulated to justify environmental mismanagement and misconduct. The idea of specialization is also an integral and pristine part of the technocratic model; its implications, however, are not only ethical, but also more concretely economic and political. Growing specialization and sophistication in the management of environmental resources has called for the consolidation of a class of specialized, technical personnel. Over the last few decades, these specialists have become professional elites to which policy makers and planners have to turn to in order to comply with the national and transnational procedures of environmental law. The EU legislation is, for instance, very strict on these issues: each of its structural projects undertaken in any country applying for EU funds has to follow the procedures dictated by the EIA (Environmental Assessment Impact, see below in the case studies). Hence, specialists and specialized firms producing these assessments are often in a position to actually dictate the rules of the game, both with local governments and even at a national level of economic planning. It goes without saying that these specialists may become liable to corruption practices, or they may be directly involved in those interest groups and personalities who benefit from the projects.

The basic distinction between the eco-centric and techno-centric models is presented by other scholars through different terminologies. Norton (1991) introduces the distinction between ‘conservationists’ and ‘preservationists’: the former refers to the idea of protecting nature for human use; the latter recognizes a moral obligation towards nature, which needs to be protected from human use. Cotgrove (1976) has made a distinction between those environmentalists who propose policies which do not challenge the dominant economic value system (conservative) and those who propose alternative value systems in which the environment is in the forefront (radical). Dobson (1990) has further stressed the standpoint of environmentalists, distinguishing between ‘environmentalism’, as a more conservative mode, and ‘ecologism’ as its radical counterpart. In his view, environmentalism assumes the existence of a centre, an ecosystem with which individuals interact. Ecologism, conversely, tends not to recognize one single centre because the individual is not seen as being in a relationship of direct control over the ecosystem; he is inserted in a wider ecological environment on which he depends for his own subsistence.

The complexity of these theorizations has led some authors to criticize the gap between the theories and practices of environmentalism (Lowe and Rüdig 1986; Bell 2004). The general theoretical understanding of the man-nature relationship is an important feature of the social science tradition of environmentalist research; however, taken alone, it does not clarify why, at certain points in time and in some particular places, social movements with an environmentalist agenda assume more or less clear political positions. Before looking at this perspective I think it is necessary to shed some further light onto the development of environmentalist theories in the last two decades in the social sciences and in particular on the role of anthropology in those debates.

Environmentalism in the social sciences

Among the social scientific disciplines, economics has by far produced the most complex and variegated body of theorization. Environmental economics has exerted a strong influence in debates on the use of ecological resources for two main reasons. One, as Milton underlined, is because economists have been the only social scientists to which governments and policy makers have listened with regards to environmental issues (Milton 1996: 71). The second point is that over the last two decades, the environment has steadily surged to occupy a top position among the most profitable sectors of economic investment. This has led some authors to suggest that nature has been enlisted as the third most productive force in the world after capital and labour (Buttel 2000a: 30).¹ Thus, in an evolving and growing world market of environmental industries it is easily understood how environmental economics plays a leading role in the social sciences.

¹ According to a 2007 estimate, the global environmental business was in that year worth 758 billion USD, of which roughly 600 billion USD generated by the US, Western Europe and Japan. In Western Europe and in Japan this ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Environmentalism
• 2 Civil Society: Ambiguities and Opportunities
• 3 The Ethnographic Study of Corruption
• 4 Case One: The Motorway Transport Project in Považská Bystrica, Slovakia
• 5 Case Two: Road Transport Development in the Czech Republic – The Brno-Vienna Highway
• 6 Case Three: Railway Transport Project in North-Western Italy – The TAV
• 7 Case Four: The Budapest M0 Ring-Road
• 8 Case Five: Illegal Waste Export to Central Eastern Europe
• Conclusions: Inside the Green Commando
• Bibliography
• Index