Green inside activism for sustainable development: political agency and institutional change

Erik Hysing and Jan Olsson are frequent contributors to this journal on the subjects of the green state, sustainability transitions, environmental public policy, institutionalism, and others. Perhaps one of the richest seams of their individual and collective scholarship revolves around the role of the state, servants of the state, and state transitions in meeting global environmental challenges. In their latest book, aimed predominately at the development of theory, they make the case for how and why public bureaucrats utilise political agency as green inside activists in legitimate institutional change.

Hysing and Olsson begin by contextualising green institutional change and how bureaucrats can exercise political agency towards this outcome. They construct this argument based on Michael Lipsky’s Street-Level Bureaucracy, Rosemary O’Leary’s The ethics of dissent: managing guerrilla government, and Laws and Forester’s notion of ‘street level democrats’, amongst others. From these, they construct a post-Weberian conceptualisation of the quasi–institutionalised bureaucrat making decisions based upon their discretion, extant environmental values and ethics, and political agency, whilst also under the influence of their role specification, managerialism, and professional codes. When these extant environmental values clash with executive environmental decision-making, this leads to conflicts which, if unresolved, can precipitate the bureaucrat acting as an activist within their agency. The authors thus conceptualise bureaucrats as acting as ‘lone wolf’ style actors, undertaking activism on single issues, trying not to fundamentally undermine their organisation or the state itself, but, rather, seeking institutional change on specific personally salient environmental issues.

Hysing and Olsson’s review of the existing institutional theory and literature certainly reveals a gap in the theoretical landscape with regard to accounting for the effects of political agency. The wider scholarly community has spent years exploring differences in policy and legislation without a proper theory of environmental bureaucratic behaviour. This new book is timely in moving beyond the use of street-level theory and meeting a clear gap in the literature in the present age of environmental crisis. Building on previous contributions from Hysing and Olsson, it offers a well-argued case for why the actions of conflicted environment-facing bureaucrats must be considered activist in nature.

Several aspects of the authors’ new green inside activist approach are particularly compelling for scholars at the intersection of public administration and environmental politics. Their sketch of the three dimensions of bureaucratic street-level agency – coping, negotiating, and resisting the executive and policy – is particularly insightful and represents a cogent conceptual (and analytical) framework for investigating environmental bureaucratic behaviours. Similarly, their detailed discussion of the criticality of legitimacy in bureaucratic activism is important, as it addresses one of the main critiques of street-level discretionary behaviours. This represents an evolution of O’Leary’s guerrilla government (2014), by framing green inside activism as a legitimate activity for meeting wider societal environmental goals – as opposed to merely a mechanism for bureaucratic self-gratification.

While the book represents a new and important addition to the field, it is not without opportunities for further enhancement and validation. For example, the arguments about the consolidation of power at senior grades as a precursor to green inside activism feel problematic. As Hysing and Olsson establish, there are likely reasons pertaining to senior-level discretion as an enabler of green inside activism, though this also runs the risk of framing inside activism as an elite activity without avenues for dissent by lower grade or less powerful bureaucrats. This conceptualisation does not appear to chime empirically with what can be seen in groups such as Doctors for Extinction Rebellion (in the UK) who exhibit both inside and outside activist aspects at non-senior management grades. Thus, the risk is that the authors’ arguments might be framed as a uniquely Scandinavian phenomenon with limited international generalisability. This risk does not impugn the legitimacy or effectiveness of the theory writ large; indeed, it appears a significant contribution, but to gain wider appeal and generalisability it would likely benefit from validation through follow-up empirical research in different international settings.

In summary, the book makes an important contribution to the theoretical landscape about how and why environment-facing bureaucrats make decisions that diverge with policy and the executive. The intersection of public administration and environmentalism has lacked a cogent and dedicated theory for decades, and green inside activism goes some way towards meeting this gap. The worsening global environmental crises, heightened public awareness, and turbulent political contexts make the theory of this nature more important than ever.