Sustainable development and ecological modernization – the limits to a hegemonic policy knowledge

Abstract

The implementation problems of effective global environmental politics have essentially to do with the fact that approaches to and the knowledge about sustainability remain sectoralized. There is a gap between the dominant or even hegemonic forms of environmental policy knowledge which are embodied in the concept of sustainable development, on the one hand, and the socially dominant forms of environmental knowledge concerning the appropriation of nature on the other. Until now, the policy knowledge of sustainable development has not been able to question the main assumptions and to shape existing practices of dominant forms of the appropriation of nature. This is shown along five crucial dimensions; of particular importance is the existence of the so-called valorization paradigm. Theoretically, the article is informed by the theory of societal relationships with nature and it focuses on the role of knowledge in social reproduction, innovation, and transformation.

Keywords:

• policy knowledge
• environmental knowledge
• global environmental politics
• sustainable development
• ecological modernization
• societal relationships with nature

Acknowledgements

I am indebted to Gülay Caglar, Christa Wichterich, Christoph Scherrer and Brigitte Young for their valuable comments and to Wendy Godek for the excellent editing of the text. Some arguments were presented in another paper which was published in Scherrer, C. and Young, B., eds., 2009. Gender knowledge and knowledge networks in international political economy. Baden-Baden: Nomos.

Notes

1. Cf. Brunnengräber et al. (2008), Park et al. (2008), Kütting and Lipschtz (2009), Young et al. (2008), Breitmeier et al. (2006), Newig and Fritsch (2009), Oberthür and Gehring (2006), Görg and Brand (2006), Brand and Görg (2008), Brand et al. (2008), Brand (2010).

2. When I refer to the concept of hegemony, it is used in the sense that societal relations are broadly shared and institutionalized and that different societal relations do not question hegemonic relations or are not able to articulate differing or even opposing interests, norms and values effectively.

3. Gülay Caglar (2009, pp. 43–53) argues that these approaches conceptualize knowledge in policy processes as influencing policies (and reality in general) rather than constituting them. Knowledge is understood as somehow external to power and policy processes as more or less a resource of information and legitimation. Change is caused by external shocks.

4. The knowledge about the human body and related practices is a different issue which is not dealt with in this article.

5. It should be noted that in some countries environmental issues were politicized and certain policies enacted since the 1960s, e.g. in Germany, because of water and air problems.

6. This dimension of sustainable development might change in the coming years. The already mentioned Millennium Ecosystem Assessment urges the promotion of cross-sectoral perspectives and policies (MASR 2005). Indeed, environmental or, more specifically, climate knowledge is only one aspect of various societal knowledge dimensions. It is articulated with other knowledge of problems and institutionalized policies concerning economic development, the creation of competitiveness, distributional aspects in society, etc. Seen from this perspective, the most important institutional innovation at the international level, which was able to shape societal relationships with nature, was not the two Rio conventions (FCCC and CBD), but the WTO.