Coming of age? Environmental Politics at 21

Twenty-one years of Environmental Politics

The first issue of Environmental Politics was published in 1992. In his contribution to that issue, Stephen Young (1992, p. 10), who was, with Michael Waller, the co-editor of the journal, suggested that the ‘starting point for green politics is the Industrial Revolution of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries’. In a similar vein, Robert Goodin (1992, p. 1) pointed out in his contribution to the first issue that ‘green politics are old hat’. However, both Young and Goodin recognised that ‘green politics’ had changed over time. As Goodin (1992, pp. 1–2) expressed it:

Rather than worrying about localised forest fires burning individual bears, environmentalists now tend to worry about the destruction of whole forests and entire ecosystems. Instead of fixating upon individual animals, we now worry about whole species. While still worrying about smoking chimneys blighting the landscape, dirtying people's laundry and lungs, we now worry rather more about the acid rain that they cause destroying downwind lakes and the carbon dioxide that they emit altering the global climate. Rather than disapproving of aerosol cans merely as a source of litter along roadsides, we now worry about the hole that their contents have punched in the ozone layer.

Goodin's account emphasises the ‘scale’ and systemic character of environmental problems. If we conceptualise environmental problems in this way, environmental politics is much more challenging and complex as it attempts to deal with the interactions between environmental, social, political and economic systems at different scales from the local to the global.

Young's (1992, pp. 12–13) schematic account of the work that he could foresee in Environmental Politics identifies a range of theoretical and empirical issues that are still covered by the journal today. However, there are many issues – and many perspectives on those issues – that have been discussed in Environmental Politics in the last 21 years that he could not have foreseen. In that time, the journal has (under its successive editors) sought to live up to its original goals:

Environmental Politics aspires to provide a forum for the discussion of green issues, to blend theory and practice from all continents, to serve as a broad church open to all of the movement's several sects. (Goodin 1992, p. 7)

However, it has also sought to bring the highest standards of scholarship in political and social science as well as in moral, political and social theory to bear on environmental politics. As environmental politics has become ‘normalised’ (for better or worse), Environmental Politics has published work that has significance, in its concepts, theories, methods and conclusions, far beyond the confines of a narrow understanding of environmental politics. At the same time, contributors to Environmental Politics have consistently emphasised the importance of a broad understanding of environmental politics that puts it at the very heart of ‘mainstream’ politics.

In the 21 years since 1992, Environmental Politics has prospered and the editors were keen to recognise that achievement with a Twenty-first Anniversary Special Issue. An obvious approach for an anniversary special issue is a series of reviews of the development (or the state of the art) of the discipline (or its parts). However, the wide scope of Environmental Politics would likely mean that, if we tried to cover everything, we would have enough reviews to fill a whole volume or we would have such wide-ranging reviews that they would be too general to interest readers. So, I suggested, and the journal editors agreed, that we might adopt a different approach.

One innovation that we have seen in the last 21 years – or, more accurately, in the last five to 10 years – is an increased emphasis on quantitative indicators of the ‘quality’ (or the popularity?) of both journals and the articles that they publish. Journal editors find it difficult not to think about impact factors and many authors (especially those in the early stages of their careers seeking promotion) find it difficult not to think about the citations of their papers. There is, of course, much disagreement about what citation data measures – and it is tempting to think that it might be as poor an indicator of academic quality as gross domestic product is of the ‘quality’ of a government or a society. However, I suggested that we might identify some of the papers published in Environmental Politics that were most cited in the 10 years to 2010. From that list, we constructed a shortlist of authors who had published work in Environmental Politics that was not only well-cited but that we considered ‘significant’. The list was refined to include contributions from different branches of the discipline and the people on our list were invited to contribute a new article for the special issue. This approach had two obvious but unfortunate consequences. First, it led to the exclusion of most of the work published before 2000, which tends not to have such high citation scores because of the limited electronic archiving and cross-referencing of older work. Second, it excluded from consideration some excellent work that we might have wanted to include using other criteria.

We suggested that contributors could take one of two approaches in their contribution: a focused review article that would critically reflect on their previous work and provide a ‘state of the art’ review of thinking on the topic of their original paper; or new research connected in some way to their previous work. Some of our contributors have chosen the first option while others have chosen the second. I hope that the outcome is a special issue that reflects the diversity and quality of work in Environmental Politics. In the next section, I introduce each of the contributions to this special issue and briefly place them in the context of the authors' previous work. In the final section, I look forward to the future by identifying two topics I have been encouraged to think about as a result of reading the articles in this special issue.

Environmental politics in 2013

The first three papers demonstrate the diversity of social and political theory published in Environmental Politics. Ingolfur Blühdorn's ‘The governance of unsustainability: ecology and democracy after the post-democratic turn’ adds a new dimension to his previous work on ‘post-ecologist politics’ and the ‘politics of unsustainability’ (Blühdorn 1997, 2000, 2007, 2011). Blühdorn (2013, p. 16-17) adopts what he calls a ‘descriptive-analytical approach’, which studies contemporary environmental politics from a ‘social-theoretical perspective’. The aim of his previous work has been to explain why modern societies have so far failed – and are likely to continue to fail – to adopt radical environmental policies that alter current development pathways. He has argued that contemporary environmental politics is best understood as an attempt to sustain unsustainability, that is, to maintain the practices and lifestyles of a consumer society simultaneously with widespread awareness of the crises of sustainability that we face. He calls this the ‘post-ecologist paradox’ and attributes it to a range of factors, including the de-politicisation of environmentalism through ecological modernisation discourses. However, he emphasises the importance of new ‘ideals of identity, self-determination and self-realisation’, which have emerged since the 1980s, that are ‘inherently anti-egalitarian’, ‘highly complex, flexible and open to internal contradiction’, and based on ‘accelerated consumption’ (Blühdorn 2013, p. 19). For Blühdorn, the environmental concerns suggested by Inglehart's post-materialist value shift in the 1960s have been supplanted by these ‘post-ecologist’ values that have become more and more dominant since the 1980s.

Blühdorn (2013, p. 17) notes that Inglehart's account of post-materialist values was ‘related to the democratisation of post-industrial societies much more directly than their ecologisation’. So, he suggests that post-ecologist values might be accompanied by ‘post-democratic’ values. His account of the post-democratic turn is quite different from the accounts offered by others who have used the same term (e.g. Crouch 2004). For Blühdorn, innovative forms of decentralised, participatory government are not the solution to the problem of disengagement from politics. Instead, they are symptoms of the ‘post-democratic paradox’: on the one hand, popular demands for more radical forms of democracy increase; on the other hand, the ideal of the subject that underpins democratic thinking has become outdated. The contemporary subject is not the autonomous individual of liberal or democratic thought, who accepts the ‘self’-imposed constraints of collective democratic decision-making, but rather the fragmented, fluid, competitive subject who seeks to escape all constraints in the pursuit of new forms of consumption and ever-changing ideals of self-realisation. Blühdorn argues that this makes democracy, as we have previously understood it, impossible. Instead, we have a ‘simulation’ of democracy – i.e. a representation of democracy – that becomes the only form of ‘democracy’ possible in contemporary societies. Blühdorn suggests that his new account of the post-democratic turn sheds new light on the relationship between democracy and ecology and helps us to understand the continuing ‘governance of unsustainability’.

In contrast to Blühdorn, David Schlosberg offers an optimistic account of the increased use and development of the concept of environmental justice. Schlosberg's (1999, 2004, 2007) previous work on environmental justice had two key themes. First, he has highlighted the disjuncture between the understandings of environmental justice in the environmental justice movement and the theorising of environmental justice in the academic literature. Second, he has defended a pluralistic conception of environmental justice, which he has argued better reflects the complex use of the term by activists. In his contribution to this issue, ‘Theorizing environmental justice: the expanding sphere of a discourse’, he reviews recent developments in the environmental justice literature and highlights the continuing expansion and diversity of the concept and its applications. In particular, he considers how work on environmental justice has always challenged conventional boundaries in environmental philosophy and political theory. For example, early work challenged the conventional idea of ‘environment’ and the exclusive focus on distributive questions in theories of social justice, as well as showing the potential of pluralistic conceptions of social justice. More recently, he suggests, there has been an expansion of the use of the idea of environmental justice, horizontally into a broader range of issues, vertically to examine global environmental injustices, and conceptually to the human relationship with the non-human world. Moreover, he highlights the potential significance of two further innovations in recent environmental justice thinking. First, there has been a renewed focus on the relationships among social justice, environmental justice and sustainability, with the recognition that the environment creates the conditions for social justice. Second, this has led to a move from a defensive approach, which aims to protect the interests of vulnerable groups from environmental threats, to a more pro-active approach, which aims to ‘design and implement more just and sustainable practices of everyday life’ (Schlosberg 2013, p. 48).

Schlosberg's work exemplifies a particular kind of normative political theory, which aims to develop a theoretical and principled account of a key moral and political concept – in this case, environmental justice. However, Schlosberg's approach remains relatively unusual among normative political theorists for two reasons. First, he is explicitly concerned to theorise the understandings of environmental justice that he finds in the environmental justice movement. This is not the approach of many political theorists, who are more inclined, following Rawls, to use their own moral intuitions and the moral theories extant in the academic literature as the starting points for developing their own theories (Rawls 1971). This methodological difference partly explains the disjuncture that Schlosberg identified in his previous work between the academic literature and the environmental justice movement. The influence – both methodologically and substantively – of his previous work on the academic literature on environmental justice means that he can now say that this disjuncture has disappeared. The second respect in which Schlosberg's approach differs from that of many political theorists is that he emphasises the importance of mutual engagement between activists and academics. The academic study of environmental justice should not be conducted in isolation but rather in partnership with the environmental justice movement. On this model, the engaged theorist and the reflective activist should work together – and may sometimes be the same person. This contrasts sharply with the ‘rigorous distinction between eco-political campaigning and socio-political analysis’ advocated by Blühdorn – although, both might accept that there is a place for both engaged normative political theory and explanatory social theory even if they did not agree on Blühdorn's pessimistic diagnosis of the contemporary condition.

In her contribution, ‘On the making of the environmental citizen’, Kersty Hobson shows how explanatory social theory, specifically ‘realist governmentality’ analysis, can help us to better understand the weaknesses of engaged normative political theories and their associated practices, specifically the theories and practices of ‘environmental citizenship’. So, like Blühdorn but unlike Schlosberg, she aims to explain or diagnose our failure to live up to our green ideals – in this case, to realise environmental citizenship. However, her aim is more modest than Blühdorn's. Hobson aims to explain why two particular kinds of intervention, namely, programmes that aim to promote small individual behaviour changes in the home and experimental mini-publics that create a space for small groups of people to deliberate together about climate change, fail to create long-term environmental citizens. In contrast, Blühdorn has sought to explain why all attempts to promote sustainability and democracy must fail in contemporary societies or, more accurately, why only ‘simulations’ of sustainability and democracy are now possible.

Hobson's article revisits and reinterprets her previous research into domestic sustainable consumption in the United Kingdom and Australia, which examined Global Action Plan UK's Action at Home programme in the late 1990s and the Australian Conservation Foundation's GreenHomes programme in the mid-2000s (Hobson 2003, 2004, 2006). She argues that her previous conclusions – that ‘clearer, firmer, and more open leadership is required, to circumvent participants' inclination to read Action at Home as offloading environmental problems onto those with least power to make a significant difference' – are ‘overly simplistic’ for, at least, three reasons (Hobson 2013, p. 62). First, there is a confusing array of small changes that we might make but this complexity is not acknowledged by sustainable consumption programmes. Second, the economic rationality assumed by many sustainable consumption programmes must compete with ‘other logics of comfort, relationships and cultural norms’ in the home (Hobson 2013, p. 62). Third, there is an inherent tension in participants’ attitudes to these programmes: on the one hand, they want behaviour changes to be kept simple; on the other, they see simple behaviour changes as inadequate because they merely reinforce the status quo. We might think this tension is a symptom of the fragmented identity that Blühdorn also identifies as a distinctive feature of the contemporary condition. Hobson's response is to consider the possibility that we should look outside the home for more effective forms of environmental citizenship – specifically, she applies her ‘realist governmentality’ approach to a more recent project that examined the effects on participants of taking part in a deliberative event discussing climate change in Australia. She argues that advocates of deliberative mini-publics, like advocates of sustainable consumption programmes, fail to take seriously the complex, fragmented and contingent identities of participants, which are reflected in the multiple positions that people take before, during and after deliberative events. Her conclusion is that the ‘environmental citizen [remains] a shadowy and distant figure in the modern polity’ (Hobson 2013, p. 69).

With the fourth article, we turn from political and social theory to party politics. The comparative study of Green parties and the environmental policies of mainstream parties have been (surprisingly) neglected in recent years. In his article, ‘Greening the mainstream: party politics and the environment’, Neil Carter asks whether Green parties have changed over time and whether there are discernible patterns in how mainstream parties have responded to environmental issues. Carter motivates his enquiry by pointing to recent research that suggests that ‘parties matter’ (Carter 2013, p. 73). More specifically, he reports two studies: a study of 18 OECD countries, which found that where government parties adopted more pro-environmental positions the number of environmental outputs increased (Knill et al. 2010); and an EU study that showed that countries got closer to meeting their Kyoto targets where either Green parties or mainstream parties that gave higher priority to the environment in their manifestoes were in power (Jensen and Spoon 2011). Carter's claim that parties matter might not convince those, like Blühdorn (and Schlosberg and Hobson?), who believe that more radical environmental policies are necessary to tackle the sustainability crises that we face – and who see little evidence that mainstream political parties or even Green parties in power are adopting such policies. For Blühdorn, political parties, like other actors ostensibly seeking to promote green policies, can only ‘simulate’ environmentalism, thereby, playing their role in the ‘governance of unsustainability’.

Carter uses raw data from the 2010 Chapel Hill expert survey and the Manifesto Project to compare the impact of the environmental dimension on contemporary party politics in Europe, Australia, Canada and New Zealand. He argues that Green parties still form a homogenous party family characterised by strong environmental, libertarian and left-wing policy positions despite some changes in the non-environmental issues that are most salient for them. They have become a ‘stable force, as minor (rarely polling over 10% at national level) but serious actors in many advanced liberal democracies’ (Carter 2013, p. 78). The limited success of Green parties indicates the importance of understanding how mainstream parties have responded to environmental issues. Carter argues that they have mostly employed dismissive (i.e. ignoring in manifestoes) and accommodative (i.e. including in manifestoes) strategies towards the environment, with very few examples of an adversarial (i.e. actively opposing environmental protection) strategy. The data from the expert survey suggests that left-wing parties are perceived as having adopted more pro-environment policy positions than right-wing parties. However, left-wing parties do not consistently pay more attention to environmental issues than right-wing parties. Carter's analysis of the data from the Manifestoes Project suggests that there are only marginal differences in issue salience that fluctuate over time. He concludes that mainstream parties show no signs of adopting radical environmental policies or even consistently prioritising more modest environmental policies and he suggests, in the spirit of the activist academic, that future research should seek to identify the factors that encourage mainstream parties to adopt pro-environmental policies so that it becomes an issue of party competition, which leads to better environmental outputs and outcomes.

The failure of political parties, operating at the national level, to deliver transformative – or even modest – environmental policies, in conjunction with a more general disaffection with conventional politics, has encouraged a large body of work on environmental social movements, non-governmental organisations and local activists (Rootes 2004, 2007, 2008, 2009). This work on civil society actors focuses on groups or collectives, at local, national and transnational scales, who autonomously choose to defend environmental interests (both their own interests and the interests of others, including non-humans). We might understand those involved in such groups as ‘environmental citizens’ but the contexts in which we are studying them are very different from the two contexts (sustainable consumption programmes in the home and deliberative mini-publics) in which Hobson was studying her contingent ‘environmental citizens’. We may, of course, find that even environmental activists are contingent environmental citizens with fragmentary identities that are not stable from one context to another. However, the collective nature of environmental movements and other civil society actors is also likely to mean that their ‘identities’ as well as their political ideals, resources, strategies and tactics are distinct from – but clearly related to – the attributes of their individual members. Therefore, we might say that environmental movements, as well as parties and individuals, matter in environmental politics. In his article, ‘From local conflict to national issue: when and how environmental campaigns succeed in transcending the local’, Chris Rootes focuses on local environmental activism in England.

Rootes begins from the acknowledgement that power is increasingly removed from local to national and global arenas with the result that local environmental activists struggle to defend their legitimate environmental interests locally and are generally unable to get their concerns taken seriously by supra-local authorities. However, occasionally local activists do secure national (or even international) attention and successfully defend the environmental interests that concern them. The aim of Rootes' article is to understand the conditions that facilitate such success. He examines campaigns concerning three issues – road-building, waste incineration and airport expansion – in England. At different times, local campaigners in England have achieved national attention on each of these issues. His analysis of the three cases suggests that local campaigns are most likely to succeed where they frame their concerns as translocal issues and they network with other local campaigns. Moreover, national environmental movement organisations, such as Friends of the Earth or Greenpeace, play a key role in facilitating such networking but are only likely to become involved when – and for as long as – the issue is nationally salient. More specifically, their involvement is most likely when there is a clear government policy that they are committed to opposing.

Derek Bell, Tim Gray, Claire Haggett and Joanne Swaffield also study local environmental activism in the United Kingdom in their article, ‘Re-visiting the “social gap”: public opinion and relations of power in the local politics of wind energy’. The distinctive feature of the wind energy issue is that there are ‘environmentalists’ on both sides: the advocates of wind energy who claim that it makes a necessary contribution to the transition to a low-carbon economy; and the opponents of wind energy who claim that it spoils places and landscapes. In their previous work, Bell et al. (2005) critically examined the popular notion that opposition to wind energy is best understood as NIMBYism (not in my backyard). They acknowledged that there was something puzzling about wind energy politics in the United Kingdom: public opinion surveys show high levels of support for wind energy yet the success rate for wind farm applications is much lower. They labelled this the ‘social gap’ in wind energy politics. However, they argued that NIMBYism, where an individual supports wind energy in general but opposes a local wind farm, was not the only – and might not be the best – explanation of the social gap. Instead, they suggested two alternative explanations: a minority group of unqualified opponents of wind energy might have sufficient power to block wind energy developments (democratic deficit); or most people might be qualified or conditional supporters of wind energy, who show up as supporters of wind energy in surveys but oppose developments that do not meet their specified conditions (qualified support). They argued that policymakers and developers would do well to understand why the social gap exists because different explanations suggest different policy responses.

In their new article, Bell et al. revisit their analysis taking into account the theoretical and empirical developments that have taken place since 2005. Their original explanatory framework is expanded and revised and new conclusions are drawn about the likely causes of the social gap. In particular, they distinguish two questions. First, what is the makeup of public opinion on wind energy? They argue that the simple typology used in public opinion surveys is as inadequate as the simplistic assumption that all opponents of wind energy are NIMBYs. Instead, they extend and refine their original typology, which included unqualified opponents of wind energy, qualified supporters of wind energy, and self-interested NIMBYs, by including a new category of ‘place-protectors’ and distinguishing different kinds of qualified supporters. They offer some conjectures about the relative proportions of each attitude type in the UK population based on the limited evidence available. The second question they consider is: What are the relations of power in the local politics of wind energy? Like Rootes, they argue that local activists can successfully defend their interests by blocking wind energy developments. In agreement with Rootes, they also highlight the importance of national non-governmental organisations, such as the Campaign for the Protection of Rural England, in supporting local campaigns. However, they also draw attention to new evidence that suggests that more affluent communities might be more able to resist wind energy developments than less affluent communities – raising significant concerns about environmental injustice.

The focus on local environmental politics continues in Harriet Bulkeley and Michele Betsill's article, ‘Revisiting the urban politics of climate change’. However, Bulkeley and Betsill's interest is not limited to local environmental activists. Instead, they are interested in the local – the city – as the space of environmental politics. In their previous work, Bulkeley and Betsill (2005) argued, on the basis of fieldwork mostly conducted in the late 1990s and early 2000s, that climate change was becoming more important in the urban politics of sustainability. They suggested that the best way of understanding the ‘urban’ governance of climate change was through a multilevel governance perspective, which recognised that urban climate governance was not confined to a local arena or to the actions of the state, but rather was a product of the interrelations between global, national and local state and non-state actors.

In their contribution, they highlight a variety of recent changes that lead them to develop and refine their analysis of urban climate politics. In particular, they argue that some local governments have adopted a new approach to climate change, which they call ‘strategic urbanism’, whereby addressing climate change is more thoroughly integrated into wider urban agendas and networks of local government actors, such as the signatories to the US Mayors Climate Protection Agreement, take a more explicitly political stance on the climate change issue. They also emphasise the increasingly complex political economy of urban climate politics as cities become involved in carbon markets and become more reliant on different types of ‘partnership’ between public and private actors. Bulkeley and Betsill argue that these (and other) changes have increased the complexity and fragmentation of urban climate governance so that the ‘statist’ focus of most multilevel governance analyses may not provide an adequate framework for thinking about where the ‘authority and capability for addressing climate change as an urban problem lie’ (Bulkeley and Betsill 2013, p. 145). Instead, they advocate a new focus on ‘the processes through which the political spaces of urban climate politics come to be configured and contested’, which should pay particular attention to both how climate change becomes ‘an issue on urban agendas’ and how urban climate politics are related to the broader ‘socio-technical networks that sustain urban life’ (Bulkeley and Betsill 2013, p. 150).

Andrew Jordan, Rudiger Würzel and Anthony Zito are also concerned with new modes of environmental governance but their focus is on the national and international rather than the local. More specifically, they are interested in ‘new’ environmental policy instruments (NEPIs) and other non-regulatory modes of governance, such as economic instruments and voluntary instruments. In their 2003 Environmental Politics special issue on NEPIs they examined the use of alternatives to regulation in environmental policy (Jordan et al. 2003a, 2003b). In particular, they argued that there were two important gaps between the theory and practice of non-regulatory policy instruments. First, the high level of interest among theorists did not seem to be matched by the relatively low uptake in practice. Second, the theoretical work, which was mainly by economists, suggested that non-regulatory policy instruments would have significant advantages over regulation, in terms of both efficiency and effectiveness, yet the practice of introducing new environmental policy instruments was proving politically problematic. Jordan et al. emphasised the importance of a more sophisticated political analysis of NEPIs to gain a better understanding of their potential strengths and weaknesses.

In their new article, ‘Still the century of “new” environmental policy instruments? Exploring patterns of innovation and continuity’, they re-examine the political interest in and use of NEPIs. They re-affirm their original conclusion that the interest in new instruments amongst policymakers and academics remains high while their adoption and performance in practice remains limited. However, they argue that work on the politics of new instruments has grown significantly since their 2003 articles, with the result that there is now a better understanding of both the reasons for their limited uptake and the political problems associated with them. Jordan et al. also aim to place the use and study of NEPIs in the broader context of theories of the policy process and theories of governance. So, in addition to examining the literature on specific instruments and their use, they also examine: the political dynamics which shape policy instrument choices in practice; the wider political context which shapes and is shaped by many aspects of instrument choice and use; and recent work that uses policy instruments as a prism through which to view wider shifts in governing.

The final article in this special issue, ‘Carbon flows, carbon markets, and low-carbon lifestyles: reflecting on the role of markets in climate governance’, by Gert Spaargaren and Arthur Mol, offers a detailed critical (but sympathetic) examination of one ‘new’ environmental policy instrument – carbon markets. Spaargaren and Mol's new work aims to relate the critical study of carbon markets to their previous work on ecological modernisation (Spaargaren and Mol 1992, Mol and Spaargaren 1993, 2000). Unlike some critics of carbon markets, Spaargaren and Mol are not opposed to market-based solutions to environmental problems. Instead, they argue that carbon markets ‘fit well in the complex, globalized institutional set up of reflexive modernity’ and we should regard criticisms of them as ‘starting points for reflection on how to improve [them] as potentially important instruments for global climate governance’ (Spaargaren and Mol 2013, p. 84). Spaargaren and Mol suggest that carbon markets are, in theory, a ‘radicalized version of the ecological modernization market approaches of the 1980s and 1990s’ because they place even more emphasis on private forms of environmental authority, with global carbon markets developing significant autonomy from state authority (Spaargaren and Mol 2013, p. 177). However, they acknowledge that so far carbon markets have not become genuinely independent institutions and, therefore, as Jordan et al. suggest more generally about NEPIs, there is a significant gap between the theory and practice of carbon markets.

Spaargaren and Mol critically examine different kinds of actual and potential carbon markets. They begin with state-sponsored markets, notably the European Union Emissions Trading System (EU-ETS), and then consider offset markets, mainly associated with the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), and voluntary markets, such as the now-defunct Chicago Climate Exchange, both of which, they argue, have been largely shaped by private rather than state actors. Their central argument is that the weaknesses of current carbon markets might not be best addressed through more state regulation of carbon markets. Instead, we should think more constructively about how networks of authority, including private actors and civil society actors as well as state actors, might regulate carbon markets by promoting new avenues for transparency and new forms of accountability. In particular, they highlight the potential role of personal carbon markets in making carbon emissions more visible and motivating civil society actors, or citizen-consumers, to play a role in holding carbon markets to account for their environmental consequences. However, they recognise that devolving responsibility for the management of carbon emissions to individuals may be problematic, for reasons identified by Hobson in her discussion of sustainable consumption programmes, namely, the complexity of (and the competing logics that would inform) individual decision-making about the use of carbon credits. As a potential solution, they advocate what they call a ‘midstream’ approach to carbon trading, which sits between the ‘upstream’ trading schemes that only allocate emissions rights to states or corporations and the ‘downstream’ trading schemes that allocate emissions rights to individuals and expect each of us to manage our own emissions budgets.

The next 21 years and beyond

Many of the contributors to this special issue raise questions – or suggest agendas – for future research in environmental politics. My aim in this section is not to attempt to summarise or prioritise those questions – or the many thousands of other important research questions that have been identified by contributors to Environmental Politics over the last 21 years. Instead, I want to take this opportunity to highlight two topics that the articles in this special issue have encouraged me to think more about. Unsurprisingly, this is a very personal selection reflecting my own interests but I hope it identifies ideas that have a broader resonance.

First, I was prompted to reflect more on the role of the environmental politics academic by several of the articles in this special issue, but especially by Schlosberg's and Blühdorn's contributions. Blühdorn (2013, p. 17) responds stridently to, what he calls, ‘ecologically committed commentators’ who ‘have rejected the theory of post-ecologist politics as politically disabling and a counsel of despair’. He emphasises the importance of a ‘rigorous distinction between eco-political campaigning and socio-political analysis’, which enables us to accurately describe and explain the condition of contemporary societies (Blühdorn 2013, p. 17). On this account, the role of the environmental politics academic – or, at least, the kind that Blühdorn aims to be – is clearly distinct from the role of the environmental activist. Moreover, the analysis of the environmental politics academic should not be shaped (i.e. distorted) by his or her eco-political goals. In contrast, Schlosberg (2013, p. 50) criticises some political theorists working on environmental justice for being ‘too detached from the actual demands’ of the environmental justice movement. He emphasises the ‘idea of praxis – that theory and practice must inform each other’: ‘Theorizing from movement experience works to expand our understanding of those movements; in return, those movements can and do inform theory in productive ways’ (Schlosberg 2013, p. 50). On this account, the environmental politics academic – or, at least, the kind that Schlosberg aims to be – should be politically engaged with environmental activists because that provides the best opportunity for mutual learning between theory and practice.

This is, of course, an example of a broader debate about the role of the academic in politics and practice that extends well beyond environmental politics – a debate that has probably received less thoughtful attention than it merits in recent times. It is plausible to think that there are multiple roles for academics and different positions that (different) academics can reasonably take on both how they should relate to (different) activists, policymakers and practitioners and how their work should relate to ‘practice’. However, the criticisms that Schlosberg and Blühdorn make of their respective interlocutors – and the related criticisms that Jordan et al. and Spaargaren and Mol make of some (particularly economic) theorists who ignore the political practice of NEPIs and carbon markets – suggest that not all roles or all positions are reasonable in all circumstances. The implications of this are not clear (at least to me) but it might suggest that some environmental politics academics, such as normative political theorists, like me, who have tended not to engage directly with the ideas of environmental movements, should reflect further on whether they can justify their epistemological and methodological approaches to the subject. More generally, it might suggest that the discipline would benefit from a renewed discussion of the relationship between studying environmental politics and doing environmental politics, and how that relationship is connected to different epistemological positions and methodological approaches.

The second topic that these articles in the special issue have encouraged me to think more about is the relationship between ‘governance’ and ‘identity’. This relationship is at the centre of the papers by Hobson and Blühdorn. Hobson's retrospective analysis of her own work, from a ‘realist governmentality’ perspective, leads her to ask two questions. First, ‘what forms of self are presupposed by [the] practices of governance [associated with attempts to promote environmental citizenship] and what transformations [of the self] are sought?’ (Hobson 2013, p.60). More specifically, what identities are we trying to form or promote through sustainable consumption programmes or deliberative mini-publics? Second, what forms of self or identity are actually produced through the practices of governance associated with attempts to promote environmental citizenship? So, how do the participants in sustainable consumption programmes or deliberative mini-publics actually construct their own identity in response to these interventions? Blühdorn's interest in the relationship between ‘identity’ and ‘governance’ is a little different. For him, the post-ecologist and post-democratic values that constitute the ‘liquid’ identity of modern citizens explain the character of contemporary governance – or, what he calls, the ‘governance of unsustainability’. So, where Hobson is interested in the intended and unintended effects on identity of practices of governance, Blühdorn is interested in the effects of identity on practices of governance.

The relationship between identity and governance is also raised – sometimes less explicitly – in other contributions to the special issue. For example, Bell et al. discuss ‘place attachment’ and other values, which might be considered constitutive of identity, as part of their discussion of ‘public opinion’ on wind energy and argue that these values may play a significant role in explaining the outcomes of the local politics (or governance) of wind energy. Spaargaren and Mol's discussion of the potential role of the ‘citizen-consumer’ in holding carbon markets to account might also be understood as seeking to promote a particular ideal of the self as an active participant in governance through market-based forms of authority. Finally, Schlosberg's discussion of new strands of the environmental justice movement that are seeking to design and implement more sustainable ways of life raises important issues about new ideals of the self and how they might be scaled up to provide models for more sustainable social and political arrangements. It is, I hope, clear that the contributors to the special issue discuss the relationship between ‘identity’ and ‘governance’ in quite different ways – raising different questions and offering different answers to those questions. However, I think that together they raise an important set of questions about the relationship: What identities or ideals of the self are consistent with just and sustainable governance? What identities are presupposed by particular forms of actually existing (or imagined) environmental governance? What effects on identity are produced by actually existing forms of environmental governance? How do actually existing identities shape or limit environmental governance?

The first 21 years of Environmental Politics have been very successful while in the same period most commentators on environmental politics – locally, nationally and globally – would probably describe a more mixed picture of ‘success’ and ‘failure’. We can be confident that the next 21 years and beyond will offer plenty for environmental politics academics to study and we can confidently expect that Environmental Politics will continue to prosper. Doing environmental politics successfully is likely to remain more difficult. We must, at least, hope that Blühdorn's diagnosis of the contemporary condition is incorrect, or that it is a condition that we can transcend. To that end, we should continue to imagine and critically examine alternative forms of environmental governance and the identities or ideals of the self that might be associated with them.