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The environmental state and the glass ceiling of transformation
ABSTRACT
What are the capacities of the state to facilitate a comprehensive sustainability transition? It is argued that structural barriers akin to an invisible âglass ceilingâ are inhibiting any such transformation. First, the structure of state imperatives does not allow for the addition of an independent sustainability imperative without major contradictions. Second, the imperative of legitimation is identified as a crucial component of the glass ceiling. A distinction is introduced between âlifeworldâ and âsystemâ sustainability, showing that the environmental state has created an environmentally sustainable lifeworld, which continues to be predicated on a fundamentally unsustainable reproductive system. While this âdecouplingâ of lifeworld from system sustainability has alleviated legitimation pressure from the state, a transition to systemic sustainability will require deep changes in the lifeworld. This constitutes a renewed challenge for state legitimation. Some speculations regarding possible futures of the environmental state conclude the article.
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Introduction
In the first half century of its existence, the environmental state has pursued a rather selective agenda: in the domestic realm, many of its activities and measures have been impressively effective, resulting in the maintenance or improvement of environmental quality in several advanced industrialised countries â notably in Western Europe â despite enormous increases of economic activity. On the systemic level of the global biosphere, however, environmental states around the world have not reduced but massively increased the negative impact of their production and consumption activities (Steffen et al. 2015, Fritz and Koch 2016). That way, citizens of many environmental states have come to enjoy both, a relatively safe, healthy and clean environment as well as a lifestyle of high consumption, mobility and material abundance that proves to be spectacularly unsustainable. Thus, the state seems to have fulfilled a double function of protecting many of its citizens from direct environmental harm and of protecting their material standard of living (with numerous problems of environmental inequality and injustice still remaining); but it has failed so far to alleviate those environmental burdens that are dispersed in time and space and whose negative effects are mediated through several ecosystemic feedback loops (Raymond 2004). The prime example of that category of burden is the emission of greenhouse gases, which usually do not harm anyone at the source directly, but whose negative effects return to the emitter (and everyone else) with long delays in the form of potentially catastrophic climate change. Other (and systemically related) examples include the rapid loss of biodiversity, the acidification of the oceans and the derailment of the global cycles of nitrogen and phosphorus (Rockström et al. 2009).
However, it is these global and systemic environmental consequences of human activity that pose the greatest challenge to humanity today and that may become a matter of survival for our species (Hamilton 2010). It becomes ever more apparent that meeting this challenge will require substantial societal transformations that go deeper than the securing of environmental quality in wealthy societies or the relative decoupling of environmental impact from economic growth. Instead, a near complete elimination of fossil carbon from human activity and a massive reduction of overall environmental throughput are required. Consequently, states today are charged with the task of facilitating what is variously called a low-carbon transition, sustainability transition or socio-ecological transformation of society (Foxon 2011, Geels 2011, Haberl et al. 2011). The important question to ask is thus whether they have the capacity and ability to initiate and steer transformations of that kind or if their transformative capacities are structurally constrained to a certain type of environmental reform that is unlikely to bring about deep socio-ecological change. Put differently, what are the chances of the real existing environmental state to develop into a fully-fledged âsustainableâ or âgreenâ state that makes the socioecological transformation of society one of its core imperatives and that has the means, capacity and legitimacy to carry out this role? Does the green state logically follow from the environmental state in terms of a gradual intensification or expansion of its eco-political agenda, or is there a more fundamental barrier between the two, a categorical difference that rules out that sort of developmental logic? Finally, has the environmental state so far perhaps even helped to entrench and sustain a type of society that is fundamentally unsustainable? What, then, would be the prospect of a purposive socioecological transformation to occur?
I aim to show that the further transformation of the environmental state is indeed curtailed by an invisible yet effective structural barrier that I call the âglass ceiling of transformationâ. I use the âglass ceilingâ metaphor outside of its original context, where it denotes a set of âbarriers to the advancement of minorities and women within corporate hierarchiesâ (U.S. Glass Ceiling Commission 1995). Like in the original context, the metaphor here refers to a type of barrier that is invisible, unacknowledged and without legitimation. Whereas the original usage of the term connotes the structural consequences of gendered or racialized forms of power, however, the glass ceiling of socio-ecological transformation, I contend, has its origin at the level of the very structures of the modern state itself, which emerged in tandem with and as the institutional vessel of the fossil energy system.
The glass ceiling I aim to describe here is not absolute in terms of numbers such as tons of greenhouse gas emissions or species lost. Rather, it imposes a certain trajectory of change and inhibits other forms of change that might be necessary for structural transformation to happen. The glass ceiling should thus be understood as a system boundary that may be shifted within certain dynamic parameters but not transgressed without first changing the underlying structure and identity of the system itself. I explore the glass ceiling of transformation in three steps. In the next section, I rebut the widespread assumption in the literature on the environmental state that a further greening of the state were possible through the emergence of a âsustainability imperativeâ. In section three, I develop the argument that the glass ceiling is associated with problems of state legitimation leading to a systemic separation of âlifeworldâ from âsystemâ sustainability. Section four substantiates the concept of the glass ceiling in more empirical-historical terms, while the concluding section speculates about ways to overcome the glass ceiling of transformation.
The impossibility of a âsustainability imperativeâ
In past decades, environmental management and conservation policy have entered the core of state activity in advanced industrial democracies. Environmental management today âis recognised as a fundamental part of what a civilized state should doâ (Meadowcroft 2012, p. 67). This recent transformation of the modern state is interpreted as the emergence of the âenvironmental stateâ (Mol and Buttel 2002, Duit et al. 2016), which Duit et al. (2016, p. 5â6) define as âa state that possesses a significant set of institutions and practices dedicated to the management of the environment and societal-environmental interactionsâ, like environmental ministries and agencies, framework environmental laws and dedicated budgets.
Scholars tend to draw a distinction between the empirically existing âenvironmental stateâ and what they variously call the âgreen stateâ, âeco stateâ or âsustainability stateâ (Eckersley 2004, Meadowcroft 2005, Heinrichs and Laws 2014). While the former describes an immanent response of the state to environmental pressures within its territory, the green state is a normative-prescriptive concept exploring the possibility of a state that actively facilitates a societal transition toward strong and comprehensive ecological sustainability, including the possibility of granting precedence to ecological sustainability over economic growth. Crucially, the green state âmust be concerned explicitly with keeping patterns of consumption and production within ecological limitsâ (Meadowcroft 2005, p. 5, original emphasis), and thus with realigning its entire socioeconomic activity with some absolute material boundaries. While the environmental state has been focusing on greening the âsupply sideâ of capitalism by seeking âmore environmentally efficient ways of expanding outputâ, the green state would need to tackle the âdemand sideâ to reduce the flows of energy and matter that are being processed and consumed (Barry and Eckersley 2005, p. 262). This would most probably involve interfering with deeply engrained notions of consumer sovereignty, choice, lifestyles and identities, and constitute âa challenge that no state or society has adequately even begun to addressâ (Barry and Eckersley 2005, p. 262).
It may come as a surprise, then, that much of the scholarship on the environmental state deems possible the gradual transformation of the environmental state into a more comprehensively green state or eco-state, which would make a socioecological transformation of society one of its core functions (Meadowcroft 2012; e.g. Dryzek et al. 2003). The green state, these authors seem to suggest, could evolve out of the environmental state: âIf the maxim of the first phase of the environmental state was âclean up pollution and protect the environmentâ, and that of the second phase has been âpromote sustainable developmentâ, then the new motto needs to be something like âtransform societal practices to respect ecological limitsââ (Meadowcroft 2012, p. 77). Scholars adhering to this evolutionary model of the green state tend to base their argument on the concept of âstate imperativesâ, which they derive from historical institutionalism (Skocpol 1979, Tilly 2009), and from post-Marxist state theory (e.g. Offe 1984). Dryzek et al. define state imperatives âas the functions that governmental structures have to carry out to ensure their own longevity and stability (2002, p. 662â663)â. Historical institutionalists have identified three imperatives that characterized the early modern, absolutist state: to keep internal order, to defend against external threats and to raise the resources to finance these first two tasks (2002, p. 662). Since then, the modern state underwent two major transformations, each of which was associated with the addition of another imperative.
First, with the rise of the bourgeoisie and its growing economic base, the imperative of economic growth (or accumulation) emerged and transformed the absolutist into the liberal capitalist state. The second transformation came in reaction to the struggles of an organised working class, which threatened to undermine the stability of the state. Thus, the liberal capitalist state was forced to democratise and to provide social welfare âto cushion the working class again...
