Climate Change and the Crisis of Capitalism

A Chance to Reclaim, Self, Society and Nature

Mark Pelling, David Manuel-Navarrete, Michael Redclift

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9781136507670
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Globalisation
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Are established economic, social and political practices capable of dealing with the combined crises of climate change and the global economic system? Will falling back on the wisdoms that contributed to the crisis help us to find ways forward or simply reconfigure risk in another guise? This volume argues that the combination of global environmental change and global economic restructuring require a re-thinking of the priorities, processes and underlying values that shape contemporary development aspirations and policy.

This volume brings together leading scholars to address these questions from several disciplinary perspectives: environmental sociology, human geography, international development, systems thinking, political sciences, philosophy, economics and policy/management science. The book is divided into four sections that examine contemporary development discourses and practices. It bridges geographical and disciplinary divides and includes chapters on innovative governance that confront unsustainable economic and environmental relations in both developing and developed contexts. It emphasises the ways in which dominant development paths have necessarily forced a separation of individuals from nature, but also from society and even from 'self'. These three levels of alienation each form a thread that runs through the book. There are different levels and opportunities for a transition towards resilience, raising questions surrounding identity, governance and ecological management. This places resilience at the heart of the contemporary crisis of capitalism, and speaks to the relationship between the increasingly global forms of economic development and the difficulties in framing solutions to the environmental problems that carbon-based development brings in its wake.. Existing social science can help in not only identifying the challenges but also potential pathways for making change locally and in wider political, economic and cultural systems, but it must do so by identifying transitions out of carbon dependency and the kind of political challenges they imply for reflexive individuals and alternative community approaches to human security and wellbeing.

Climate Change and the Crisis of Capitalism contains contributions from leading scholars to produce a rich and cohesive set of arguments, from a range of theoretical and empirical viewpoints. It analyses the problem of resilience under existing circumstances, but also goes beyond this to seek ways in which resilience can provide a better pathway and template for a more sustainable future. This volume will be of interest to both undergraduate and postgraduate students studying Human Geography, Environmental Policy, and Politics.

1 Climate Change and the Crisis of Capitalism

Mark Pelling, David Manuel-Navarrete and Michael Redclift

Introduction

Are established economic, social and political practices capable of dealing with the combined contemporary crises of climate change and intensifying economic inequality and global economic disruption? Will falling back on those wisdoms that have prefigured individual crises help identify ways forward, or simply reconfigure risk so that it may reappear in another guise in the future? This volume argues that the combination of global environmental change and the global economic downturn provides an opportunity for critical thinking and policy formulation by highlighting the co-dependence of socio-political and ecological processes. Crisis in this understanding signifies a point of instability in predominant structures, a precursor to impending threat, but importantly also an opportunity for the consideration and emergence of alternatives. Our starting point is a concern for global environmental change, which remains in the foreground of analysis, but we argue cannot be understood without engaging also with the drivers and consequences of current economic rounds of restructuring.

A critical research agenda on crisis and risk management is called for, one that can approach risk management through development agendas, not as a stand-alone policy archipelago (Hewitt, 1983). Some progress has been made in examining the interdependencies of environmental risk and human development. Beck (1992, 2008) famously describes the rise of risk as a driving force for decision-making in Western consciousness and beyond as the Risk Society. One defining quality of risk society is the disassociation of risk and everyday life as hazards become harder to detect without scientific techniques and so more difficult to connect with existing popular and political movements and agendas for change or resistance (Beck et al., 1994). Global environmental change and climate change in particular are certainly examples of this with the scale as well as temporal dimensions of both making them invisible to daily life yet simultaneously, and increasingly formative of it and configured by it.

This is a challenge of alienation and separation. In effect, there is an existential gap between what can be done to confront economic and environmental challenges (and there is much that could be done), and what culture and power determine is reasonable and proper for society to do. Some have likened to addiction society’s failure to acknowledge, let alone act as individuals or collectively, to address the combined economic and environmental crisis (Eckersley, 2007). This may be a pertinent metaphor but an over-simplistic one as well. The current crisis is so embedded in everyday behaviour justified by co-produced values and reinforced through habit that the very constructions of identity and notions of self – the signifiers of success, happiness, status, to say nothing of norms of social responsibility – have become part of the problem. This is demonstrably so in affluent societies displaying excess consumption but also in poorer societies where the direction of aspiration is clear.

In responding to this challenge, one that transcends the usual disciplinary boundaries of politics, economics, sociology or psychology, we present an agenda that questions contemporary power relations and opens up the normative underpinnings of dominant and alternative modes of accumulation and social reproduction. This responds to a gap in predominant social science work on global environmental change which has, thus far, tended to focus on the detail of problem-solving or on mechanisms for changing individual attitudes and behaviour. This approach is in danger of missing the bigger picture – of describing capacities for incremental reform rather than processes through which alternative histories have and may unfold. A second trend in established thinking has been to present defensive visions of responding to change – be this in terms of resilience or adaptation – that seek perversely to protect the status quo. These conceptual contradictions are underlain by limitations in existing analytical models that are inadequate, for example, in being unable to fully (or in some cases to even partially) capture power, competing visions and viewpoints, and inner worlds of emotion in analysing crisis and our relationships to it.

This book asks how far the continued application of terms like resilience can improve our conceptualisation and empirical observation of socio-political structures and agency during crises – when such crises are themselves embedded in ongoing unsustainable and unjust development trajectories. Ultimately, we are interested in the prospects for new conceptualisations in framing transformation and alternative approaches to policy and political action, which promote ecological integrity, and procedural and distributional equity as part of living with and beyond crisis.

This volume brings together 14 contributors, each a well-known expert and presenting a specific viewpoint on our common challenge. This range of viewpoints is necessary, as this introductory chapter argues, not only because the current crisis is multifaceted but also because it is part of the evolving history of multiple strands in human and environmental sciences. Getting to grips with the nature of crisis and thinking through responses that can enhance social justice and environmental security therefore requires a multidisciplinary envisioning.

In addition to describing the character and drivers for the current expression of the continuing ecological-economic crisis we aim to explore the scope for pathways that can offer escape routes from ever more perpetual rounds of crisis and response. This includes analysis of existing policy frameworks and political decision-making at levels from the international to the individual, including examples of bottom-up, self-liberation. In all cases we find culture and identity are as important as economy and politics as resources and motors for change (and also of course as barriers to change). An approach that can examine the co-evolution of capitalism from multiple standpoints is also an essential first step in recognising the equally varied and dynamic qualities of any potential responses that can confront the internal contradictions of capitalism (its drive for creative destruction), question core assumptions (growth) and identify alternatives in everyday life as well as those open to political and economic policy or market forces (from liberating social movements to ecological modernisation and the ‘new green deal’). To achieve this, the book integrates perspectives from many viewpoints: development studies, socio-ecological systems theory, political theory, international relations, risk management and environmental sociology. Following this introductory chapter the book is organised into four parts. Part I reviews the conceptual and policy constraints imposed by dominant interpretations of sustainable development and resilience. Part II examines the potential of already existing alternatives that challenge established hierarchies in the power-knowledge nexus through localised and everyday actions. Parts III and IV deploy organisational, economic and political theory to explore the potential of macroeconomic and political alternatives and scope for a new politics of climate change.

Within this chapter we frame the subsequent sections by first revisiting the social construction of global environmental change and then presenting three elements that make up a broad meta-framework within which to position the more detailed following chapters. The framework is derived from co-evolutionary theory, discourses of austerity and fear, and a revision of socio-ecological agency and alienation.

What is Global Environmental Change?

Global environmental change is but one facet of capitalism’s current crisis; a crisis we would do well to examine in its broader manifestation to help reveal the cause-and-symptom positionality of social and environmental change. Beforehand it is worth noting that contemporary capitalism is not alone in having co-produced social and environmental degradation to the point of crisis. In the twentieth century, state socialism as practised under the Soviet Union shared with Western capitalism a modernist agenda driven by industrialisation that equally well alienated nature and citizens from development, allowing ecological exploitation and social control in the name of national economic growth (Bowers, 1993). Evidence of the role of human-induced crises in agricultural societies has also shown the tendency for humanity to exploit natural assets to the point of (self)destruction. In pre-modern civilisations, such as the classic Maya of Central America, increasing rates of natural resource consumption fuelled by demographic growth and internal cultural tensions, and at times compounded by dangerous periods in natural cycles (e.g. in precipitation), catalysed collapse (Sharer, 2006). Although separated by ideology, geography and history, these systems crises demonstrate the co-dependence of natural and social life, with crisis arising in large part from a failure of institutions to adequately arbitrate relationships both within society and between society and nature. While there may be little novelty in the advent of socio-ecological tensions as a component of systems crisis, its contemporary expression is unprecedented in the scale and the complexity of its dynamics, providing significant challenges for any efforts at reform or more fundamental change.

What then are the other expressions of global capitalism’s current crisis? These are well known but seldom placed alongside global environmental change. They include growing economic inequality between and within nations, the global economic downturn, and public disengagement and marginalisation from the political process. These are facets of crisis that feed into one another so that symptom and response become cause over time.

Inequality expresses itself in many ways – through access to basic services, income and consumption. Privatisation of core public services such as water provision, energy production and increasingly health care and education have provided new financial investments but these are not equally distributed, either in society or geographically. Economic globalisation has not been equal and continues to distort economic relations, with more powerful states protecting the interests of national economic lobbies. At the same time, the movable quality of investment capital has contributed to a transfer of power from states to capital as states compete with varying success for international capital investment (Dicken, 2007).

The financial sector crisis that triggered the current global economic downturn had its roots in responses to previous cycles of crisis and growth (Harvey, 2010). A driving belief in the need for the global economy to grow annually by 3 per cent produces a constant need for new areas of investment and return. A focus on stock capital including speculation over property value overheated by debt is but the most recent example. Previous crises have been offset by investment opportunities in technological innovation (computing and the internet) and reconstruction following conflict. Now, with public fiscal debt burdens causing cuts in public sector service provision and public sector wage and pension settlements, economic downturn is compounding inequality further.

One might suppose that inequality and economic uncertainty would galvanise popular political movements worldwide. This has rarely been the case. An exception was Spanish popular protest in spring 2011. A response to deep public sector retrenchment proposals in a context of high youth unemployment, and perhaps inspired by the Arab spring uprisings in North Africa, these protests succeeded in politicising a generation of otherwise alienated Spanish youth. More generally, however, political disengagement continues to be the rising norm in democratic, Western societies (Chatterjee, 2007). This is explained variously as a result of the complexity of evidence-based policy (e.g. climate change), the rise of celebrity over policy in popular media, or the shift to middle-ground politics where there is little beyond managerial style to separate political parties. Although some (e.g., Giddens) see the drift to the middle ground as an advantage in offering hope for cross-party consensus in responding to climate change (Giddens, 2009). In part the democratic deficit in Western states and elsewhere is indicative of the public’s recognition of the movement of power from government to intergovernmental organisations and transnational private capital. This was seen most recently in the failure of US regulators to properly review deepwater-drilling safety procedures in BP’s Gulf of Mexico operations. The reluctance of government to regulate an increasingly technically complex industry and one located at the core of the state–capital nexus has distinct echoes of the failures of regulation lying in part behind the global banking collapse of 2008/2009. Elsewhere, repressive political regimes continue to maintain tight control over political dissent, for example, in China, Myanmar and Thailand. These models of authoritarian state capitalism are more direct and forceful but no less alienating than their Western market capitalism counterparts. There is scope for learning from organised resistance in both political variants.

Global environmental change itself is a function of consumption and demography mediated by local development choices and technological innovation. This includes changes taking place at the global scale (e.g. in atmospheric conditions and ocean chemistry and loss of biodiversity) and local changes (e.g. soil loss and deforestation) that in aggregate amount to global impacts. As a basic site for the investment of wealth and its continued accumulation as well as a reservoir of ecosystem services for human health, natural assets and systems have been vastly transformed by capital (Smith, 2010). Many locally degraded systems have already crossed thresholds into collapse with the compound impact of global environmental change increasing uncertainty and risk (MEA, 2005); risk that comes from slow-changing long-term stresses as well as more frequent or unexpected extreme shocks.

These four faces of capitalism’s crisis have tended to be separated in policy and academic analysis. This makes some sense – each element is complicated – but this approach makes it hard to identify the interaction and potentially reinforcing qualities of systems elements. One outcome of this reductive approach has arguably been to fall upon apparent solutions to one aspect of crisis that simply generates the foundations for a new crisis elsewhere. Like a bucket full of holes, efforts to address one expression of crisis – to plug one hole – may serve only to increase pressure elsewhere. Unlike the laws of physics, human decision-making is not value neutral; in fact, short-term and partial remedies to manifest crisis dominate because they best serve established value priorities, including the expressed values of poorer and more marginalised populations (who from positions of exposure and vulnerability are often least able and willing to face the uncertainties implicit in radical change or even incremental reform) as well as those of dominant interests. The trap of falling back on established wisdoms to confront new expressions of crisis is seductive in these sociopolitical contexts, and in the short-term responds to the pressures of risk aversion. Ultimately though, this strategy, while providing serial, short-term stability, runs the risk of reproducing or even strengthening those wider systemic features that are the root causes of compound crises until thresholds are breached, forcing potentially catastrophic systemic change (Pelling, 2010). To follow Naomi Klein (2007), this is a strategy for accelerating the status quo – one that generates risk in the first place.

From Co-evolution to Co-revolution?

The simultaneous co-production and interdependence of social, economic, political, technological and environmental aspects of history was recognised by Norgaard (1994) in his thesis on co-evolution. Here he developed co-evolution to help explain the messiness of history and in particular the failed promise of linear social progress. Co-evolution uses the metaphoric language of evolutionary biology to describe the interaction of social and socio-ecological systems elements. Norgaard’s particular interest is in using this frame to explain the relative success (longevity and influence) or failure of individual development pathways that emerge out of or in response to systems elements interaction. Our current addiction to fossil fuels is presented as a co-evolutionary dead-end (Norgaard, 1995). In this reading of history, the apparent liberation from nature and time provided by carbon-intensive agricultural and transport technologies is a distortion. False liberation from nature becomes a cause of future crises as it transforms over time into alienation.

Norgaard’s (1994) thesis includes knowledge and values alongside technology, social organisation and the natural environment as categories, sites and drivers for adaptation. He also successfully moves from a materialist (adaptation can be described through technical changes (e.g. in engineering or farming practices)) to a relational and constructivist epistemology, where adaptation includes changes in identity and well-being as well as humanity’s relation with the non-human (Pelling, 2010). The abstract nature of co-evolution makes for difficult translation into an empirical research framework. While co-evolution has been successful at the level of metaphor to frame accounts of adaptive behaviour within complex systems (Pelling, 2003) and economic-ecological systems interaction at the global scale (Schneider and Londer, 1984), it has more limited applicability as a tool for local analysis. One useful line of analysis is the relationship between intention (policies) and emergence (self-organised activity) in policy sectors, the latter in large part accounting for observed divergence from policy during implementation (Sotarauta and Srinivas, 2006), and so revealing tensions between the actions and values of competing adaptive strategies or other behaviour.

In his analysis of contempora...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Contributors
• 1 Climate Change and the Crisis of Capitalism
• Part 1 Problem framing
• Part 2 Resilience and the power–knowledge interface
• Part 3 Beyond Capitalism Critical Theory and De-Growth
• Part 4 The New Politics of Climate Change
• Part 5 Conclusion
• Index