Sustainability and Energy Politics

Ecological Modernisation and Corporate Social Responsibility

Giorel Curran

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781349573561, 9781137352323
• eBook ISBN: 9781137352330
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Business Ethics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The author explores the fraught politics of energy transitions in an age of climate change. She does so through an ecological modernisation and corporate social responsibility lens which she contends shapes and underpins sustainability today. Case studies cover climate policy, unconventional gas and renewable energy.

Part I

Theorising Contemporary Sustainability

1

Sustainability Today: From Fringe to Mainstream

Introduction

The green movement is one of the world’s most successful social movements. Over a relatively short period, it has succeeded in raising worldwide awareness about the impacts of unchecked development on both nature and humanity. The early days of a seemingly alarmist green fringe warning of impending ecological crisis has been replaced, five decades on, with many people alert to such crisis. Indeed, the growing recognition of environmental problems has seen many former adversaries of environmentalism, including the corporate sector, now embracing it. Many are heartened by this turn of events. Others are more circumspect. ‘Success’, after all, is a highly fluid term, and many argue that the success the green movement now enjoys has been won at much cost – to both the environment and the movement’s social change capacity as a whole. Few would nonetheless disagree that the environment movement has launched a convincing case for a planet in peril that many social actors, including business and governments, have to lesser or greater degrees now heeded. The penetration of the term ‘sustainability’ into the contemporary global vernacular is testament to this.

But what exactly does sustainability – this shorthand term for sustainable development (SD) – mean today? As noted in the introductory chapter, the book contends that the sustainability agenda is today underpinned by two main discourses that fundamentally shape it: ecological modernisation (EM) and corporate social responsibility (CSR). While SD provides the animating principles of environmental renewal, it is EM and CSR that shape its operational core. Chapter 2 and 3 are devoted to disentangling these two discourses, while this first chapter explores the overarching frame of SD. The chapter begins by charting the rise of environmental concern, particularly as expressed through the early green movement. It observes that the movement is not monolithic, instead incorporating a diverse range of actors and positions. An exploration of this diversity is important not only in its own right, but also because it continues to condition the character and standing of sustainability today. The chapter then considers the emergence of the idea of SD itself, tracing it from its formal entrance onto the world stage in the 1980s to its evolution and maturity in the international fora organised under its name. We next examine business’ more direct engagement with SD through the arrival of corporate environmentalism. In pulling these different sections and strands together, the chapter concludes by considering the subsequent ‘mainstreaming’ of environmentalism and its articulation as sustainability.

The environment movement

While ecological concerns have a relatively long historical pedigree – from 19th century green romanticism, early wilderness preservation, to Kropotkin’s scientific ecology – the green movement emerged in earnest as a global social movement in the 1960s. Standing alongside a raft of new social movements, the green movement came to represent the growing social anxiety about the pace, form and effects of rapid development. But the green movement went further than raising awareness of environmental problems – as important as this was. It was also successful in having environmental issues placed on the political agendas of governments across the globe. This is evident in the quite frenetic environmental policy activity that has come to characterise many of these political agendas over the past few decades – although the quality of this activity remains contentious. Nonetheless, over a relatively short period of time there has been a noticeable proliferation of not only environmental consciousness, but also a range of institutional measures designed to address it. Most governments – especially in the advanced industrial economies – now have well-established environmental management regimes. They are also increasingly cognisant that many of their constituents cast their votes on the strength of a government’s environmental record. It is largely because of the green movement’s success in highlighting the darker currents of modernity, both ecological and social, that Castells (2004: 72) labels it ‘the most comprehensive, influential movement of our times’ and Buttel (2003: 99) accords it ‘master global social movement’ status.

The green movement does not take a singular approach to environmentalism, however. From the start, the movement was split into various ideological divisions and strands. These kinds of divisions are not confined to the green movement of course, with most movements containing a range of political views and strategies that align along some kind of ideological spectrum. The green movement is no different. It has always accommodated its reformist and radical wings, which, in its earlier days, were generally referred to as mainstream environmentalism and radical ecology. It was not long, however, before the radical ecology wing, which was particularly influential during the movement’s early years, was superseded by its more reformist arm. This reformist wing, as we observe below and in the following two chapters, would go on to claim its more influential role through the ambit of EM and CSR.

The earlier divisions between the mainstream and radical arms of the green movement were also conceptualised as distinctions between environmentalism and ecologism (Dobson, 2000). While both promoted environmental conservation and protection, their proposals for achieving such goals, and their understanding of the causes of unsustainability, were very different. A main difference between them centred on the kind of social change required to arrest environmental decline. Mainstream environmentalism sought a reformist path, relying in large part on technological innovation and institutional renewal to do so. It eschewed the sweeping transformation of social values, institutions and industrial practices demanded by its more radical counterpart. Understood this way, mainstream environmentalism adopted ‘a managerial approach to the environment within the context of present political and economic practices’ (Dobson, 2000: 13). Ecologism instead viewed the environmental crisis as a crisis of values, one whose remedy required radical and extensive social change. Yet, despite these distinctions, the fact remains that what both ‘sides’ advocated at the time was largely novel and hence comparatively radical.

The publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962 is generally considered pivotal to the launch of the green movement. Carson’s major contribution was to highlight the close connection between the degradation of the natural world and the degradation of the human one. Her focus on the toxic effects of the pesticide DDT raised widespread awareness of the effects, for both people and the environment, of humanity’s interference with nature in the name of untrammelled development. Over the next few years, other influential publications – The Population Bomb (Ehrlich, 1968), ‘The Tragedy of the Commons’ (Hardin, 1968), The Closing Circle (Commoner, 1971), The Limits to Growth (Meadows et al., 1972) and Blueprint for Survival (Goldsmith et al., 1972) – focused on quite stark doomsday scenarios that portended degrees of societal collapse.

These latter books helped stamp this early phase of the green movement as alarmist, survivalist and authoritarian (see Dryzek, 2005). Many new environmentalists, both mainstream and radical, were decidedly uncomfortable with such views. The impetus was thus to develop an alternative analysis and an alternative worldview. For a time, particularly in the 1970s and early 1980s, the views promoted by radical ecologists captured the social imagination, particularly in their analysis of the link between environmental and social degradation. For many of these radical ecologists, the values that underpinned the capitalist enterprise – such as possessive individualism, materialism, inequality, hierarchy and spiritual impoverishment – were key to environmental ruin. For others, anthropocentrism – humanity’s lauded dominion over nature – explained such ruin; while still others identified androcentrism, or dominant masculinist values, as culprit.

In her book Radical Ecology Carolyn Merchant (1992: 1) identifies radical ecology’s political and intellectual underpinnings. She claims that, fundamentally, radical ecology stems from:

a sense of crisis in the industrialised world. It acts on a new perception that the domination of nature entails the domination of human beings along lines of race, class, and gender ... It [hence] seeks a new ethic of the nurture of nature and the nurture of people.

Merchant’s description highlights radical ecology’s core elements: the starting point of a world in both moral and ecological crisis; the identification of domination as complicit in this crisis; the necessity of a new social ecology ethic; and, implicitly, a central role for visionary and spiritually oriented politics. Arguably, radical ecology’s most distinctive feature is its ‘social ecology’: that is, the intimate interrelationship it connotes between humanity and nature. This focus on social ecology distinguishes it most directly from both mainstream environmentalism and the traditional ideological spectrum as a whole (see Carter, 1999).

Timothy O’Riordan (1976) contributes his own distinction between mainstream environmentalism and radical ecology (which he refers to as ‘ecocentrism’). Like Merchant before him, O’Riordan highlights ecocentrism’s requirement for a fundamental change in values as the key driver of environmental renewal: indeed, ecocentrism ‘provides a natural morality – a set of rules ... based upon the limits and obligations imposed by natural systems ... [to] influence the compass of “progress”’ (1976: 10). But, in pre-empting EM’s technological focus, it is perhaps his notion of ‘technocentrism’ that is most interesting. For O’Riordan mainstream environmentalism subscribes to a form of environmental technocentrism which – in the belief that humanity is able to contain and overcome all challenges presented by nature – privileges technocratic and production-side ‘fixes’ over more holistic solutions (1976: 11).

Other radical ecologists claimed to have gone beyond ideology; or, at least, to have bridged the political spectrum by being ‘neither left nor right but green’ (see Spretnak and Capra, 1984). This claim seems to have overlooked the marked and intense ‘internal spectrum of debate’ within the radical ecology arm itself (Eckersley, 1992: 8). In reality, radical ecology’s political wings mirrored much of the traditional political spectrum, even as it sought to green it. This was particularly so for radical ecology’s eco-socialist, eco-Marxist, eco-feminist and eco-anarchist wings. Each of these neologisms started from a traditional leftist position, especially around core norms of inclusion, distribution and justice. Importantly, however, they each adapted their selected ideology’s core principles into a greened ideological matrix which accommodated nature. Only deep ecology stood out as differently constituted, particularly in its non-anthropocentric stance and biocentric leanings.

Radical ecology wings

The key differences between the different radical wings of the green movement centre on two overarching and interconnected themes. First, there is the question of philosophy; of how the humanity/nature relationship should be conceptualised. Second, there is the issue of political and social change strategy; of how to get from an unsustainable here to a sustainable there. Certainly, one of the earliest ideological debates within these developing environmental discourses was between anthropocentrism and biocentrism, especially as encapsulated in the distinctive new school of deep ecology. By introducing the topography of environmental ethics, deep ecology represented a novel development that was both idiosyncratic and bold.

On the first question, therefore, deep ecology adopts one of the most distinctive and most radical positions. Its goal is no less than to fundamentally transform the relationship between humanity and nature, stressing humanity’s intimate interconnection with, rather than separation from, nature. It takes this relationship a significant step further, however, by seeking to ‘equalise’ it. It rejects anthropocentrism – the value that places human beings at the pinnacle of a hierarchy that confers them dominion over nature – and replaces it with the notion of ‘biocentrism’ or ‘biological egalitarianism’. Biocentrism attributes intrinsic rather than instrumental value to nature, and assigns equal value to human and non-human entities alike (Spretnak and Capra, 1984; Naess, 1973; Eckersley, 1992). To this degree, it seeks to implement Aldo Leopold’s (1968) insight that human beings are simply ordinary members of the natural world, not ‘lord and master’ over it. For deep ecologists, only through ‘deep’ consciousness change, and a new morality that extends such value to nature, can ecological, and hence social crisis, be averted.

Eco-socialists, eco-anarchists and some eco-feminists fundamentally disagree. They reject a radical biocentrism, subscribing instead to a form of ecocentrism that seeks to harmonise, not equalise, the humanity-nature relationship. They find biocentrism a largely misguided position and concept. Eco-socialists and eco-anarchists have been especially strident in their criticism. Eco-socialism in particular defends a humanist politics, claiming that to be human-centred is not the same as being human-chauvinist. Furthermore, it identifies not anthropocentrism but capitalism as the core driver of environmental ruin. Eco-socialists believe that ‘consciousness change’, while important, only goes so far in transforming the world. To the plethora of injustices capitalism creates, eco-socialists now add the degradation of nature and the class-based maldistribution of this degradation to society’s most vulnerable (see Pepper, 1993). But while eco-socialists and deep ecologists argued their cases forcefully, it was the protracted argument between deep ecology and eco-anarchism (particularly in Bookchin’s [1980, 1988] social ecology variant) that was the most bitter.

The tension between the different radical ecology wings is also explained by the second theme: the various social and political change strategies they proffer, which in turn resonate their diverse ideological roots. A shared criticism of deep ecology’s social change strategy is that it has none; that it is in essence apolitical. Deep ecology’s radical roots are considered more philosophical than political. Earth First! – made up of anarchical deep ecologists – stands out from the pack here, especially in their embrace of a direct action anarchical politics. Most deep ecologists, however, take an ambivalent position on capitalism’s contribution to environmental degradation. It is often for their refusal to directly condemn capitalism, or at least some of its more visceral elements, that other radicals condemn them.

As we have seen, each of the wings’ preferred social change strategies are linked to the ideological traditions from which they spring, even as some meld quite different views together to create distinctive positions. For example, eco-feminism incorporates strands that draw from eco-socialism, deep ecology and eco-anarchism. Eco-feminism’s most distinctive position, however, lies in the link it highlights between patriarchy and environmental degradation. It argues that there is a direct link between the domination of women and the domination of nature, explaining this link through its conception of a ‘logic of domination’ that renders both women and nature as ‘other’ in a hierarchy of values that places men at the very top:

Since the exploitation of nature is bound to social processes that oppress people, and since the logic of these systems of domination is modelled on the logic of male domination, neither nature nor women will be liberated without an explicit confrontation with these structures of male domination. (Young, 1983: 175)

It is for this reason that many eco-feminists consider ecologism an important feminist issue.

Eco-feminists are split, however, on the role that anthropocentric values play in such domination, and on the best strategies for overcoming the domination of both women and nature. While acknowledging links between the exploitation of women and nature, social eco-feminists, whose ideological alignment is socialist or social democratic, incorporate social, political and economic factors more directly in their analysis of domination. They reject what they see as the biological reductionism of cultural eco-feminism and remain uncomfortable with an uncircumscribed biocentrism. Nor do they subscribe to a patriarchal reductionism. Instead, they view ‘the threads of gender as interwoven with those of class, race and species’ (Plumwood, 1992: 10). But what they all agree on is the vacuity of liberal feminism. Not only does liberal feminism perceive the issue of domination very narrowly, but it also conceives of ‘liberation’ and ‘empowerment’ in masculinist terms. Liberal feminists seek, in short, to admit women to a bankrupt system rather than to change it. As one eco-feminist asks, ‘[w]hat is the point of partaking equally in a system that is killing us all?’ (King, 1990: 106).

As would be expected, eco-anarchism takes a very specific anti-statist stance. Bookchin’s social ecology locates the exploitation of nature in the same logic of domination that fuels a hierarchical society. He believes that the propensity to dominate nature arises from the same propensity that drives human domination: ‘the very concept of dominating nature stems from the domination of human by human, indeed, of women by men, of the young by their elders, of one ethnic group by another, of society by the state, of the individual by bureaucracy, as well as of one economic class by another’ (Bookchin, 1980: 76). Capitalism may be a key driver of social and environmental ruin, but for social ecologists so too is hierarchy. And since the state is the acme of hierarchy it cannot be called upon to assist the environmental renewal effort. For eco-anarchists, it is hierarchy more so than capitalism that explains why in so-called ‘socialist systems’ such as the former USSR, environmental degradation also prevailed.

These radical ecology debates have now largely subsided, or are contained to the ‘fringes’ of the green movement. But radical ecology’s influence on environmentalism is not entirely spent. Most environmentalists today incorporate at least some of its ideas and values, even as a mainstream environmentalism prevails. As perhaps one of the most recent examples, the Earth Jurisprudence Movement in 2015 unashamedly incorporates deep ecology values into its environmentalist script:

Earth Jurisprudence or Earth law recognises Earth as the p...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• Part I  Theorising Contemporary Sustainability
• Part II  Practising Contemporary Sustainability
• Bibliography
• Index