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ABSTRACT
This article aims to better understand the discrepancy between a relatively high level of awareness of the ecological crisis on the one hand, and insufficient political and social change on the other. This discrepancy causes a crisis of what we call the ‘Rio model of politics'. We approach the problem from the perspective of the concept of ‘societal nature relations' (gesellschaftliche naturverhältnisse), which can be situated in the framework of political ecology and, in this article, is combined with insights from regulation theory and critical state theory. The empirical analysis identifies fossilist patterns of production and consumption as the heart of the problem. These patterns are deeply rooted in everyday and institutional practices as well as societal orientations in the global North and imply a disproportionate claim on global resources, sinks and labour power. They thus form the basis of what we call the ‘imperial mode of living' of the global North. With the rapid industrialisation of countries such as India and China, fossilist patterns of production and consumption are generalised. As a consequence, the ability of developed capitalism to fix its environmental contradictions through the externalisation of its socio-ecological costs is put into question. Geopolitical and economic tensions increase and result in a crisis of international environmental governance. Strategies like ‘green economy' have to be understood as attempts to make the ecological contradictions of capitalism processable once again.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Translation from German: Tadzio Müller; editorial support: Wendy Godek and Hanna Lichtenberger. We would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for very helpful comments.
Notes
1. In section 2.3, we will look more closely at the difference between explicit and implicit environmental politics.
2. Within sociology and ecological economics, we also find an intense discussion, drawing on the theories of Anthony Giddens and Pierre Bourdieu, about unsustainable consumption practices as part of the fact that individuals are bearers of deeply rooted routine practices, which, in turn, are linked to competencies, meaning and material artefacts (Reckwitz, Citation2002; Shove et al., Citation2007; surveys in Røpke, Citation2009; Spaargaren, Citation2011).
3. In contrast to most of the recent contributions in the tradition of critical theory, the early work of Alfred Schmidt (Citation1971 [1962]) on the concept of nature in Marx's work was translated into English and has been discussed by different scholars such as, for example, Neil Smith (Citation1984). Smith criticises the work of Schmidt, and the Frankfurt School in general, for conceptualising the relationship between society and nature as dualistic, which, for Smith, is most prominently expressed in the term, ‘domination of nature'. He introduces the concept, ‘production of nature', in order to emphasise the social character of nature. As we see in Section 2.1, younger authors who have been inspired by early critical theory, particularly Christoph Görg (2003a), come very close to the production of nature concept, although there remains a difference concerning the conceptualisation of the materiality of nature. See also Biro (Citation2011).
4. A sink refers to an ecosystem that is capable of absorbing emissions, such as forests or oceans in the case of CO2.
5. Authors' translation from German.
6. These valorisation crises arise in historically contingent ways. They can be crises of over-accumulation, occurring when capital does not find sufficient productive opportunities for valorisation, or when it takes on the form of fictitious or interest-bearing capital (e.g. in the form of stocks or mortgages and financial transactions derived from them) and generates financial bubbles that burst when people stop believing that their claims can be redeemed. They might also arise in the form of the ‘underproduction of nature' (O'Connor, Citation1988). This occurs when the costs of the provision or repair of the natural basis of capitalist production and consumption increase to such a point that they affect the profitability of capital valorisation.
7. Here, we believe it is important to distinguish between inter- and supra-national forms of statehood. Both have gained importance in recent years and decades insofar as important state functions have been transferred to them. The difference between them, however, lies in the fact that international forms of statehood are primarily shaped by highly asymmetrical intergovernmental relationships, which are the cause of their stronger structural selectivity when compared to the nation-state, as well as of their institutional instability. In the case of the supranational statehood of, for example, the European Union, the intergovernmental elements are complemented and/or submerged by supranational elements that display a higher autonomy vis-à-vis shifts in the relations between states and between social forces. Furthermore, supranational state apparatuses, unlike international ones, have a clearly territorial reference point and, as a result, there is competition between different supranational entities. They have this in common with nation-states and it allows us to understand them as a re-scaled form of territorial statehood, something that is not possible in the case of international state apparatuses (for more details on this, cf. Wissen, Citation2011: ch. 4).
8. This reference to the Rio conference is not meant to suggest that environmental politics are conducted exclusively at the international level or indeed ‘from above'. The Rio process is a type of institutional and discursive dispositif of a variety of environmental policies and politics that are emerging on all spatial scales.
9. ‘Total material requirement' refers to all the primary materials (with the exception of air and water) that a national economy needs to extract from nature in the course of a year (Sachs and Santarius, Citation2007: 61).
10. The ‘ecological backpack' refers to (and calculates in terms of weight) the total amount of resources that have entered into a product. The ecological backpack gets bigger when the production of a resource necessary for a given product becomes more complicated, an example of which is increased debris from mining, or because it requires more energy.
11. This was complemented by distinctions between productive and financialised accumulation and between introverted and extroverted accumulation (the latter in order to understand the extractive economies of the global South, which are strongly oriented towards the world market (Becker, Citation2002)).
12. For these reasons, we are also aware of the difficulties connected with the terms ‘global North' and ‘global South'. They neither take into account the increasing differentiation between peripheral and semi-peripheral countries nor the increasing socio-spatial inequalities within southern and northern countries. Moreover, the former socialist countries tend to remain outside of such a classification. Because of the lack of a convincing alternative, we nevertheless keep the two terms with ‘global North' mainly referring to North America, Western Europe, Japan and a few other countries such as Australia, and ‘global South' to all other countries. However, as far as the global South is concerned, we are particularly interested in the semi-peripheral, new consumer countries such as, for example, China, India, Brazil and South Africa.
13. Cf., for example, an interview with Austria's former minister of the environment, Martin Bartenstein, in the Standard (25 November 2009), in which he says: ‘Well, in the Kyoto-negotiations the EU as a whole agreed to an eight percent reduction. When it then came to dividing up this responsibility in the context of EU-Burden-Sharing I went to Brussels, bringing along the even more ambitious reductions, to which parliament and the government had agreed, i.e. 20 to 25 percent! They of course knew that in Brussels, and I had my work cut out for me, making sure that we got off with no more than minus 13 percent' (our translation).