Decision, choice, solution: ‘agentic deadlock’ in environmental politics

Abstract

The combined challenges of climate change and resource depletion demand a rapid socioecological transition on a global scale. However, environmental politics in liberal democracies is caught in an ‘agentic deadlock’ inhibiting the implementation of effective transformative measures. I offer a conceptual framework for the analysis of this agentic deadlock and its structural root causes, building on the analytic distinction between three ‘agentic operators’ – decision, choice, and solution – which connects the analysis of agency with the analysis of structural constraints in liberal democracies, enabling us to understand better why agency channelled through the market or institutions of administrative rationality generates very different outcomes than agency channelled through institutions of collective decision making. While market (choice) and administrative rationality (solution) approaches are more in line with the specific needs of liberal-democratic regime stabilisation, decision-centred approaches have greater transformative potential. The powerful but potentially disruptive agentic operator ‘decision’ is systematically underemployed due to the system’s prioritisation of internal integrity, while the operators ‘choice’ and ‘solution’ are overburdened with transformative tasks they are ill-equipped to fulfil. This imbalance must be corrected if the transition towards sustainability is to be successful.

Keywords:

• agency
• decision
• democracy
• political consumerism
• sustainability
• governance

Acknowledgements

I thank Andrew Dobson and Ingolfur Blühdorn for their comments on earlier versions of this work, as well as the two anonymous reviewers for their helpful suggestions.

Notes

1. A socio-metabolic regime, as defined by Fischer-Kowalski and others, is ‘a dynamic equilibrium of society–nature interaction’ (Fischer-Kowalski and Rotmans 2009), based on a specific ‘energy regime’. For example, industrial society is based on a fossil energy regime, without which many of its core functions could not be executed. The ‘metabolism’ of this type of society is heavily dependent on the cheap and highly concentrated energy that coal, oil, and gas provide. Getting ‘off’ fossil energy would therefore be as dramatic a shift as the ‘Great Transformation’ from the Agrarian to the Industrial Age (Haberl et al. 2011).

2. I use the terms ‘mode’ and ‘operator’ interchangeably, as each operator constitutes a distinct mode of agency.

3. The idea that our myriad of self-interested market choices together form an ‘objectified’ and naturalised core of social reality that can serve as a more stable basis for the political institution of society than the irreconcilable ‘passions’ involved in moral and political doctrines has itself become an influential doctrine in the eighteenth century. It was put forward by Adam Smith in the metaphor of the ‘invisible hand’, but also by Charles de Montesquieu, Blaise Pascal, and Giambattista Vico, amongst others (cf. Hirschman 1997).

4. I have discussed the structural necessity for modern democracies to base their legitimacy on an ‘opaque core of social reality’ under the term ‘epistemic legitimation’ in more detail elsewhere (Hausknost 2012)

5. Take the examples of agriculture and transport. These are sectors that need to undergo radical sustainability transformations, but liberal-democratic governments relegate the pressure for change to ‘choice’ as the agentic mode of individual (market) behaviour and to ‘solution’ as the mode of technological innovation (higher yields, more efficient engines). These modes do not yield any radical changes other than the emergence of ‘niches’ for sustainable behaviour for those who have the moral will to change their ‘preferences’ (organic food, vegetarianism, bicycle clubs, ‘carbon offsetting’ for air miles, etc.) Would a liberal-democratic government take a decision to switch the entire agricultural production to ‘organic’ or to carbon-tax meat, or to ban cars that emit more than 100g CO₂ per kilometre or to tax short-haul flights heavily, it would ‘upload’ the ideological ‘undecidability’ of these problems into the political system and destabilise it. Thus, it chooses stability at the cost of inaction.

6. A government decision to turn all food production organic (with the result of a doubling of meat prices), for example, or to ban combustion engines for private transportation, would be regarded as an ideologically driven assault on personal freedom by many, and lead to political antagonism that the liberal system is ill-equipped to handle.

7. Michael Maniates (2010) has coined the term ‘choice editing’ for political decisions that eliminate unsustainable choices.

8. For example, the creative capacities of thousands of climate activists and advocates worldwide are tied to the rationality of ‘carbon trading’, as this is the ‘only game in town’ within the existing administrative rationality of capitalist democracies. Any more ambitious or radical forms of change are either delegated to the individual’s moral capacity of ‘ethical behaviour’ (i.e. its ‘private ideology’), or to the fringes of civil society where marginalised ‘radical’ groups try to keep some alternative visions alive. There is no democratic decision making involved in determining the ways in which our societies are to transform.