The post-sustainability trilemma

ABSTRACT

The paper introduces the Post-Sustainability Trilemma (PST) and argues that it provides a novel description of current environmental politics which is alternative to the one provided by the narrative of sustainability. According to PST, the three policy goals of (i) economic growth, (ii) participation, and (iii) environmental protection cannot be simultaneously attained. Only two of these could. The three possible combinations of PST are then analysed: (i)–(ii) techno business-as-usual; (ii)–(iii) post-growth approaches; (i)–(iii) environmental authoritarianism. Finally, the paper questions whether and under what conditions PST stands. That at least two policy goals could be obtained is a debatable, and debated, claim. In this sense, PST might be considered an over-optimistic framework to organise environmental politics. These considerations open up a space to argue that, given the set of policy possibilities offered by PST, more radical conclusions – such as radical degrowth, radical decentralisation or, even, uncivilisation – might follow.

KEYWORDS:

• Authoritarianism
• degrowth
• democracy
• environment
• geoengineering
• trilemma

Introduction

In the last decade, the field of global environmental politics has been shaped by renewed urgency to find a durable solution to the environmental crisis. Until a few years ago, environmental politics was dominated by the sustainability narrative, according to which environmental governance should be neo-liberal, growth-oriented, and optimistic about institutional capacity.¹ This article takes a critical view of the sustainability narrative and argues in favour of a novel ‘post-sustainability’ framework – according to which current environmental politics is best understood not as an attempt to realise all the policy goals linked to the three pillars of sustainable development² but, rather, by the impossibility of it. Once we accept this reasoned premise, at least three different approaches to environmental politics emerge. These three approaches to environmental governance – techno business-as-usual, post-growth, and environmental authoritarianism – which have so far been analysed separately in the environmental politics literature, are treated here as part of a bigger policy framework which, it is argued, could be useful to policy analysis.

Sustainable development still warms the heart of many actors in environmental governance – business actors, politicians, diplomats of the international institutions and NGOs – to the point that it is now at the core of the development agenda of the UN. Yet, since its introduction into the international policy discourse back in 1987 (World Commission on Environment and Development, 1987), it has not delivered on its basic promise to develop the Global South (Hickel, 2017a) while protecting the environment. Just to take the three banner issues of Rio 1992: carbon emissions are up to the point that we have less than ten years before we exceed the carbon budget to meet the aspirational goal of Paris (MCC, 2019); biodiversity is rapidly declining (Kolbert, 2014; Rockstrom et al., 2009); and desertification is advancing (Cherlet et al., 2018).

Narratives, however, are not about listing facts but about understanding problems and framing solutions. Here too, however, the narrative of sustainability seems increasingly old-fashioned. Drawing on a rich scholarship which viewed economic growth and material well-being as conducive to environmental protection (Castro, 2004; Grossman & Krueger, 1991; Hirsch, 1976; Inglehart, 1977), the sustainability narrative is premised on an understanding of environmental problems in terms of market failures – e.g. writing within this Weltanschauung, Nicholas Stern has defined climate change ‘the greatest market failure the world has seen’ (Stern et al., 2007) – and of citizen participation as a tool for redistributing power that will prove ultimately beneficial to align the interests of public and private actors (Sconfienza, 2015).

Lately, some scholars are starting to take a different view. Rather than failure, the causes of environmental problems are increasingly being framed in terms of market success (Hamilton, 2015). An array of techniques are at the disposal of market actors to escape measures designed to address market failures and, thus, make them borne the social cost of environmental degradation: from framing climate change and environmental problems as risks,³ and thus make them susceptible to be addressed with the usual risk management tools already available to them (Wright & Nyberg, 2015), to divulging research which minimises⁴ or denies climate change⁵ (Dunlap & McCright, 2011; Oreskes & Conway, 2010); or lobbying and campaign contributions⁶ (Christiano, 2012). And rather than stressing how opening up avenues to participate in the environmental debate could overcome barriers placed by vested interests, researchers are starting to explore how this process is limiting progress in addressing environmental problems. Media outlets, for example, contribute to gridlocking environmental policy when they consciously polarise a political issue, such as climate change, in order to secure loyalty to their branded political ideas and, in turn, ramp up user engagement with their content (Lessig, 2017). Social media further amplify this fragmentation by dispersing users into smaller networks of like-minded people who mutually reinforce the group’s values and beliefs (Jamieson & Di Paola, 2018). The social media and the fragmentation of the old and new media ultimately contribute to the erosion of a democratic culture – which is a necessary precondition for a participatory model of environmental governance to work – because, in the absence of a common debate, different political groups in society talk past each other.

Through the lenses of the sustainability narrative we cannot appreciate approaches to environmental governance which, in light of the evidence of environmental problems worsening, move past the view that effective environmental protection can and should be compatible with both the current growth-oriented capitalist economy and with participation in environmental politics as it is currently practiced in Western liberal-democracies.

Caveats are necessary at this point. Some readers might not agree that growing awareness over the fact that (i) several actors have managed to appropriate the sustainability narrative for their non-green interests and that (ii) it has become more difficult to have a common debate to move environmental policy forward warrant a wholesale abandonment of the sustainability narrative. This narrative has proven to be resilient in the face of criticism and has managed to unite under the same environmental banner different actors who, nolens volens, should be involved in environmental protection, multinational corporations included. It has shown vitality and complexity which might prove useful in the decades ahead, when, perhaps, the narrative will be reinterpreted again to serve the interests of a more innovative, radical, and courageous form of environmentalism.

To these readers, I ask to suspend their disbelief and follow my exploration into an alternative framework which considers a different starting point from which to analyse environmental politics. This starting point is that the resilience and vitality of the sustainability narrative might turn out to be liabilities more than assets because turning around decades of neoliberal indoctrination is not easy and might take more time than we have. The three policy goals of economic growth, effective (i.e. capable of moving policy forward) participation in environmental politics, and environmental protection – which stand at the core of each one of the three pillars of the concept sustainable development as it has been operationalised since the late 80’s (e.g. Barbier, 1987; Cocklin, 1989; Dixon & Fallon, 1989) – are not currently simultaneously realised and, given our current technology, cannot be simultaneously realised in the timeframe which interest us all.⁷ In the face of these poor outcomes, relying on the sustainability narrative for diagnosing and curing the environmental patient might turn out to be a dangerous distraction.

If this is so, the sustainability narrative is not useful to understand or organise environmental governance. As per definitions, a theory of socio-ecological transformation, such as the one underlying the narrative of sustainability, can be used to understand environmental governance if it provides a good description of what politicians, decision-makers, concerned citizens, and stakeholders in general actually do. A theory can be used to organise environmental governance if it provides an actionable guide to politics. A different analytical framework – the Post-Sustainability Trilemma (PST) – might be more useful to understand current environmental governance (section 2). According to PST, only two of the above-mentioned policy goals could be attained at any one time; thus, within this framework, each combination of two policy goals represents a different approach to environmental politics. As such, PST shows a greater sensitivity to alternative divergent paths to an environmentally safe world than the sustainability narrative. Techno business-as-usual is the combination of economic growth and political participation (without environmental protection); post-growth approaches are the combination of political participation and environmental protection (without economic growth); environmental authoritarianism is the combination of economic growth and environmental protection (without political participation). Finally, in section 3, I will provide some initial arguments according to which PST might be an overly-optimistic framework to organise environmental governance. These considerations open up a space to argue that, given the set of policy possibilities offered by PST, more radical conclusions – such as radical degrowth, radical decentralisation or, even, uncivilisation – might follow.

The aim of the article is, thus, (i) to introduce PST as a heuristic device which is useful to conceptualise an important set of incompatible policy pathways, i.e. PST can be used to understand environmental politics in an epoch in which the three policy goals (economic growth, political participation, and environmental protection) cannot be simultaneously obtained; (ii) to use PST to show that, even if environmental actors move past the sustainability narrative, there are still no simple solutions to our environmental problems, i.e. PST cannot be used to organise environmental politics. A conclusion will follow, in section 4, in which I summarise the article by retreading its content to this two-pronged aim.

The post-sustainability trilemma

Before moving on to analyse the PST framework, it is now appropriate to define the delicate categories – political participation and environmental protection, in particular – composing this framework. Throughout the article, the category of political participation is intended as a proxy for Western forms of democracy: it comprises all the public and private avenues through which is possible to have an impact on the policy of one’s chosen political jurisdiction, be it by running for elections, adhering to associations, partaking to protests marches, or using the power to buy, sell, and boycott to change the behaviour of powerful market actors who have an impact on environmental policy.

More problematic is the category of environmental protection. It is fair to say that there seems to be a class of environmental problems for which all three policy outcomes can be attained. Cases of localised pollution – like a polluted river – are sometimes successfully internalised into the local economy. If this is the case, some counterexamples could be marshalled against the general framework of PST and my criticism of the sustainability narrative as a discursive phenomenon at odds with the reality of environmental politics on the ground. For example, Nordic countries top the lists of the environmental attitudes of their citizenship (Franzen, 2003; Franzen & Vogl, 2013) and are usually considered champions in protecting their environment. However, much as they are successful in protecting their environment, they – or, for that matter, any other developed country – show poor performances in terms of the global biophysical boundaries transgressed⁸ (O’Neill, Fanning, Lamb, & Steinberger, 2018). The focus of this article is on global environmental problems – climate change, in particular – and environmental protection here refers to the policies which would allow the states – or other political entities – implementing them to stay within the planetary boundaries established by the literature (e.g. O’Neill et al., 2018; Rockstrom et al., 2009). Since the main purpose of the article is to introduce the general PST framework, I will not focus on issues concerning degrees of environmental protection or make comparisons among specific environmental policies; a more precise definition of environmental protection – e.g. in terms of the number and type of biophysical boundaries transgressed – would not, in this context, add analytical rigour.

PST is a useful heuristic to conceptualise an important set of incompatible policy goals. It departs from the narrative of sustainability, acknowledges its shortcomings, and explores whether and how a less stringent set of the three policy goals could address environmental threats to human well-being. The three binaries are obtained through an analytical process which is part deductive and part inductive; on the one hand, it considers which approach to environmental governance could emerge from a less stringent set of policy goals and, on the other, compares this with established literature in environmental politics. As such, the paper aims to contribute to the wider literature in environmental political thought which focuses on how environmental problems are understood and solved (or, perhaps, defined away) depending on the way they are framed.⁹ In this sense, the three binaries embed three different worldviews.

PST remains neutral to the possible hierarchical orderings of the three policy goals. Different hierarchical orderings of the three policy goals are internal to PST. This means that techno business-as-usual would likely work along the lines of weak sustainability (three equal goals and the possibility of trade-offs), post-growth approaches along the lines of strong sustainability (or, e.g. doughnut economics), and environmental authoritarianism would elevate growth above both environmental protection and political participation. PST, which is the encompassing framework, remains neutral to these various hierarchies; which is not to say that, according to it, the three goals are all on the same level. Building a hierarchical ordering of the three goals – even one in which the three goals are equal among themselves – would have made the framework a prescriptive policy-making instrument rather than a descriptive, policy-analysis one. The possibility that hierarchical orderings might be different from those implied by each of the three binaries drives, instead, the analysis of the shortcomings of PST as a possible conceptual policy-making tool (section PST as an organisational principle?). Thus, for example, environmental authoritarianism’s approach to environmental governance is likely to be defeated by the impossibility of making environmental protection compatible with the pursuit of strong economic growth.

In the following sections, I analyse the three binaries, each one exploring a different approach to environmental governance. Each section will explore in particular how and why pursuing two policy goals drives out the possibility of achieving the third one (the case of techno business-as-usual) or how and why the missing policy goal is supposed to help to achieve the other two (the case of post-growth and environmental authoritarianism). The first section – techno business-as-usual – covers recent scholarship which questions the idea that economic growth within a liberal democratic regime could be conducive to environmental protection. The second section – post-growth – surveys the arguments according to which growth, intended both as society’s throughput and as GDP growth, makes impossible to achieve environmental protection. The third section explores an argument according to which political participation, intended as the freedom to decide goods and policies within a substantively neutral liberal space, would be conducive to an unsustainable system in which competition for goods drives environmental degradation. Later in the paper, I will argue that, while PST is a good framework to understand current approaches to environmental governance, it is nonetheless not suitable to provide policymakers with an actionable blueprint for action and more radical solutions need to be explored.

Techno business-as-usual

The first combination – economic growth + political participation, without environmental protection – is the most obvious continuation of the policies of sustainable development in the XXI century. Techno business-as-usual is a label which is meant to reframe the narrative of sustainability by breaking the pervasive association between sustainable development and the discursive phenomenon of the three mutually compatible policy goals.

Techno business-as-usual shares with the narrative of sustainability the idea that our political institutions should merely provide the conditions for the individuals to pursue what is valuable to them. As in contemporary societies the satisfaction of disparate needs depends on some sort of economic exchange, it follows that enlarging the economic pie is the best way to satisfy people’s preferences. Governments thus create the conditions for markets to work freely and efficiently. It is not in principle denied that people might value environmental protection but it is usually acknowledged that this taste for environmental quality arrives much later in people’s rankings after one has satisfied more pressing needs. This theory of socio-ecological transformation remains problematic even if we move beyond the debate of conflicting discursive understandings of the social world and, instead, fully accept its premises. First, when such tastes for environmental quality do appear in the people’s preference rankings, it might be too late, as catastrophic tipping points in the climate system may have already passed (Rockstrom et al., 2009). We simply do not have the luxury to wait for a majority of the population around the world to develop a green consciousness. This would take time even if the few corporations with a vested interest in pollution and sitting on potentially stranded assets stopped throwing spanners in the works of fair opinion formation and democratic deliberation. Second, even when a taste for environmental quality produces improvements in one place, these might come at the expenses of environmental degradation in another – a so-called ecologically unequal exchange (Moran, Lenzen, Kanemoto, & Geschke, 2013). Finally, studies aimed at proving that environmental quality follows economic growth have recently come under scrutiny on the grounds that economic growth is not conducive to lower emissions, rather to lower concentrations of emissions (Stern, 2004). This is line with the hypothesis that, as economies keep developing, industry-intensive production previously located at the outskirts of big cities moves to rural areas thus greening the cities and leaving space for the service economy. Emission concentrations sometimes truly diminish while emissions keep growing.

There is some evidence that liberal democracies have a positive impact on the environment compared to autocracies (Buitenzorgy & Mol, 2011; Fredriksson & Neumayer, 2013; Li & Reuveny, 2006; Shandra, 2007). This would prima facie falsify the claim that economic growth, political liberties, and environmental protection cannot all be pursued at the same time. The literature on this matter, however, remains contentious. Roberts and Parks (2007) and Scruggs (1998) find no significant correlation between democracy and environmental performances, while Congleton (1992) and Midlarsky (1998) argue that democracies have a negative effect on the environment. However, even if we ignore the studies which claim that democracies are not benign towards the environment, does this mean that democracies can or will achieve environmental protection? If we look at the data from O’Neill et al. (2018), this does not seem to be the case. The research on the environmental performances of democracies, for the time being, only proves that democracies are better at producing incremental efficiency gains in the treatment of polluting substances or in reversing the loss of forest cover. This does not yet prove that they are able to put in place the transformative policies necessary to avert environmental degradation before dangerous tipping points are hit. And the opposite might not be necessarily true, i.e. that authoritarian societies are always worse at protecting the environment. This type of analyses becomes even more complicated when the categories of ‘east’ and ‘west’ are superimposed as political systems cannot be analysed in isolation from path-dependent regional issues and situations: policies which are successful in one place might not be in another. As reported by Beeson, ‘the Philippines, the country with arguably the most vibrant civil society in Southeast Asia, also has one of the most appalling environmental records’ (Beeson, 2010, p. 281).

Time is running out for policy solutions based on the principle that growth leads to environmental protection and there is no correlation between democracy and transformative and effective environmental policy. For the time being, keeping in place the political institutions of the developed Western world and, at the same time, pursuing economic growth will come at the expenses of effective environmental protection. Within this approach to environmental protection, a possible way out of the Trilemma comes in the form of a potentially dangerous deus ex machina: a technological fix which keeps everything as it is but sucks greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere. These are called Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR) technologies, of which bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS) is currently the most popular. Technological fixes represent the acknowledgement that our democratic institutions, while they have proven to be too valuable to be discarded just yet, might make our societies addicted to carbon consumption too slow to react. These fixes epitomise the commitment to and the faith in the idea that economic and technological advancements will lead to environmental protection, maybe not as a consequence of an acquired taste for environmental amenities, but through the idea of modernity made reflexive and aware of its intrinsic dangers.

This exit strategy from PST, however, comes with risks more serious than environmental degradation itself. The large deployment of BECCS, so popular because it appears in 184 out of the 204 scenarios assessed by Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC, 2014) which meet the 2°C target, is not fully understood in theory, much less tested in practice (only a handful of small facilities around the world currently exist). According to two comprehensive overviews of recent literature on the possible consequences of its deployment (Burns & Nicholson, 2017; Williamson, 2016), BECCS is likely to negatively impact food security, freshwater availability, biodiversity, and disrupt the nitrogen cycle. A less costly, more easily deployable, but rightly less popular, geoengineering option is solar radiation management (SRM): by injecting gas, such as sulfur dioxide, into the stratosphere, part of the solar radiation would be reflected back into space, thus increasing the surface reflexivity of the Earth and quickly cooling it. The consequences of misuse of this technology are even more dire than CDR’s (Burns & Nicholson, 2017; Niemeier & Tilmes, 2017).

Even if the geoengineering bet does pay off, without curbing economic growth this strategy might only increase our carbon budget for a few years while leaving unaddressed the several structural factors which drive climate change. 65 per cent of anthropogenic emissions come from fossil fuels; 35 per cent are the by-product of economic activities which are unrelated to the technology employed to produce energy (land-use change, soil depletion, landfills, industrial meat farming, cement, and plastic production). Even if the energy mix were to become 100 per cent clean through renewables or negative emission technologies, by doubling the economy every 24 years (this is what is implied by a 3% growth each year), greenhouse gasses emissions would soon rise again to dangerous levels (Hickel, 2017a; Kallis, 2019).

Post-growth

The second combination – political freedoms + environmental protection, without economic growth – groups all the theoretical accounts that explicitly value and try to retain the basic tenets of the Enlightenment lesson – the value of liberalism and of democratic institutions in decision-making – but at the same time would like to provide a lasting solution to the current environmental problems. These positions maintain that individual well-being could only be achieved if growing material desires are curbed and, thus, try to explore how needs can be met and human flourishing achieved without economic growth.

While grouped together within the framework of PST, post-growth proposals can differ significantly. Here, I will focus in particular on degrowth and a-growth proposals. They differ on: what specifically needs not to grow, what is economic growth, and what is needed to realise those visions of future society. While the debate on growth versus the environment is old, these two proposals represent its newest iteration.

Society’s throughput – the materials and energy extracted, processed, transported and distributed within the economy which are then consumed and returned to the environment as waste (Daly, 1996) – is what needs to be scaled down according to degrowth proposals. Gross Domestic Product (GDP) will decline as a consequence of reduced throughput. A smaller economic pie will inevitably give rise to distributional tensions which degrowth theorists address by recurring to an ambitious package of reforms redistributing work, leisure, wealth, and natural resources. Reduction in working hours, basic income, generous services such as health and education afforded by redistributive taxations and controls on tax havens not only are said to increase social welfare but make the transition to the degrowth society acceptable for the worst off. The a-growth proposal – mainly the brainchild of van den Bergh (2011, 2017), but others have put forward similar proposals (Jakob & Edenhofer, 2014) – focuses squarely on GDP growth as a problematic indicator for economic activity in times of environmental degradation. In particular, GDP growth is a poor measure of welfare, excludes valuable informal transaction between people, and neglects income distribution. All of these problems have been known for a long time, yet somehow have not prevented GDP growth to become a staple of modern policy-making (van den Bergh, 2009). van den Bergh then suggests that policymakers should forget about this indicator and pursue social welfare where it is, irrespective of whether it induces positive or negative GDP figures (van den Bergh, 2017).

A better understanding of the difference between the two proposals is afforded by looking at the concept of economic growth. Following Georgescu-Roegen (1971), degrowth theorists consider growth as an integrated process and thus claim that in the long run there is no such thing as economic growth strictly speaking. All growth is, in the long run, uneconomic, i.e. it happens at the expenses of natural resources and energy that were more valuable left where they were (Kallis, 2019). On the other hand, according to van den Bergh, growth can be good – economic growth strictly speaking – if it increases social welfare. He understands growth as an accounting convention which can justify moderate amounts of environmental degradation if properly internalised in cost–benefit calculations through taxes or cap-and-trade measures.

The greatest distance between the two proposals is to be found at the level of the respective blueprints for societal change. While van den Bergh claims that ‘economic restructuring’ through steep taxes and cap-and-trade is needed, which will induce a behavioural shift and might well cause a decline in GDP, degrowth theorists reiterate the difficulty of implementing these measures in the current social-political-economic situation. Furthermore – continues Kallis (2011) – even if we managed to get the price of polluting and environmentally degrading activities right, this would increase the number of goods and services which become market commodities; this process might increase the likelihood of social and economic crises (Polanyi, 1944) and might erode the non-market motivations towards environmental quality (Frey, 1992). The gulf between the two post-growth approaches is in part explained by their respective academic backgrounds: while degrowth proposals take their cues from the cultural and anthropological critique of growth and development of the post-WWII period (Castoriadis, 1985; Debord, 1967; Galbraith, 1958; Illich, 1973; Marcuse, 1964), the a-growth approach remains firmly rooted in an economic understanding of the world in which the social reality and the ontology of economics (prices, preferences, individuals, firms, etc.) match.

Environmental authoritarianism

Environmental authoritarianism represents the position that a strong and undemocratic central authority might assume in order to protect the environment while continuing to pursue economic growth, which is considered a proxy for political power in international relations, as well as domestically necessary to alleviate poverty. This is the path that China has started pursuing. The idea is that political participation might manifest itself in a set of choices which, when aggregated at the social level, might impact negatively on the environment. When it happens, participation needs to be curtailed. Less environmentally harmful forms of participation could be maintained.

Implicit in the theory underpinning environmental authoritarianism is the idea that competition – for positional goods among individuals and for natural resources among firms – is what is truly damaging to the environment. Competition can be especially acute in Western democracies as liberal non-perfectionist states cannot predetermine the goals people will pursue in life, nor the goods they might want to acquire. A fair distribution of goods in society is premised on the condition of moderate scarcity (one of the so-called ‘Humés circumstances of justice’). Indeed, under conditions of abundance, distributive justice would not be needed; on the other hand, under conditions of extreme scarcity, such as famines, people would live in a constant zero-sum game in which resources are immediately put to use to satisfy immediate needs instead of cooperatively worked on to obtain a bigger share in the future. Liberal theories of distributive justice, such as Rawls’s (1971), take the circumstance of justice of moderate scarcity at face value, as their theoretical building, which resolutely avoids a substantive theory of the good, does not allow questioning the extent to which the resources to be distributed are truly scarce. In other words, if all aspirations for a share of resources are legitimate and as not all aspirations can be satisfied, resources are scarce by definition. If it were possible to distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate aspirations, then also scarcity, instead of being assumed, would be a real condition some of the time and an unreal one at other times, when certain resources are available for all legitimate demands (Schramme, 2006). Environmental autocracies, on the other hand, can and often do espouse a substantive idea of the good to be pursued in society and therefore could distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate aspirations. This option is also available to democratic regimes which could distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate aspirations through the process of fair collective deliberation and mutual reason-giving. Yet these are extremely divisive issues and democracy takes time; time is in short supply.

There are two reasons why autocracies such as China might want to go down the path of environmental authoritarianism; both have to do with self-interest. First, as rapid economic development made the environment extremely fragile (Liu & Diamond, 2005), effectively coping with environmental problems will increasingly play an important role in legitimising the ruling elite – it might become a metric of ‘performance legitimacy’, alongside economic growth – and helping it to stay in power; all the more so as social unrest over pollution has already taken place (Haas, 2016). Given the reasonable assumption that autocratic regimes want to stay in power and the commonsensical observation that government by the few always depend on the will of the many who are ruled, which can take the form of either active consent or passive acquiescence, environmental authoritarianism might be the only environmentalism available to autocracies. Second, China might use the solution of some of its domestic environmental problems – while trying to lead in the solution of global ones – to project a moral leadership over the Western world, which it currently lacks. In this context, it is a revealing anecdote that in the aftermath of Donald Trump’s electoral victory, it was China who urged the USA to press on with the commitments taken in Paris at COP 21, not the other way around (Clark, 2016). Furthermore, China might want to pursue environmental authoritarianism at home to show the world that its economic and political system has what it takes to solve the most pressing problems of our time.

Gilley’s (2012) analysis of Chinese environmental politics in terms of the three categories of outputs, implementation, and outcomes is instructive for understanding what environmental authoritarianism has promised and delivered so far. China’s environmental policy outputs are impressive: since the early 2000s, China’s has rapidly passed comprehensive legislation on curbing carbon emissions and energy efficiency measures. Following a 2009 report by the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) (Jiang et al., 2009), the Communist Party of China’s Politburo approved the implementation of targets which would reduce CO2 emissions per unit of GDP by 40%–45% by 2020, compared to 2005. The state apparatus is the dominant vehicle through which environmental protection is administered; for this reason, rapid policy outputs have been accompanied by the massive rise of local Environmental Protection Bureaux, which are the administrative entities articulating environmental interests across the state (Mol & Carter, 2006). While speed and scope have been impressive, the rapid rise of environmental legislation has produced an incoherent policy framework characterised by a complex layering of regulations.

Implementation of policy outputs is more chequered. As we will see in the following section, there are reasons to argue that, after the supposedly low-hanging fruit of environmental protection through improvements of extremely inefficient processes of production such as cement have been picked, economic growth and environmental protection might be incompatible policy goals. This, together with the decentralisation and flexibility in meeting centrally established environmental targets allowed by Chinese top bureaucrats in the early 2000s, makes the implementation of environmental policies difficult: local administrators are still evaluated mainly in terms of their growth performances, which does not incentivize a greener local leadership (Eaton & Kostka, 2014). Beeson (2017) also reports that environmental policy implementation is hampered by the lack of power and influence of the relatively new Ministry of Environmental Protection, compared, for example, to the NDRC.

The outcomes are promising, yet Chinese economic activity continues to take a huge toll on the environment. The regulatory initiatives have resulted in improvements in the energy mix to the point that China reached peak coal in 2013 (Qi, Stern, Wu, Lu, & Green, 2016). However, the lack of a coherent regulatory framework and the mixed set of incentives faced by local administrators make compliance with national regulations weak. This often results in local administrators fabricating their energy use reports (Gilley, 2012). The laxity in the implementation of national environmental regulations has been faced with a re-centralization of certain aspects of environmental policy: the central state has refined the system employed to evaluate towns and added environmental indicators to it (Economy, 2006). According to Mol and Carter (2006), mayors are increasingly required to sign documents in which they guarantee that they meet environmental targets. These measures have resulted, in certain provinces, in a draconian approach to environmental policy: energy targets had to be met through blackouts and factory shutdowns. Even hospitals have not been spared (Watts, 2010). A State Council circular of 2008 went as far as requiring public sector employee to wear casual clothes in the summer (State Council, 2008). This is an early taste of what an environmental autocracy bent on protecting the environment as a matter of national stability could impose on its subjects. Looking forward, it is easy to see how widespread facial recognition cameras and algorithmic surveillance could be used to monitor environmental behaviour.

PST as an organisational principle?

The three combinations of PST provide a description of environmental politics in what could be called the current post-sustainability epoch. They are ideal-types – e.g. environmental politics in China is currently characterised by elements pertaining to other combinations, such as some limited form of public participation and small-scale testing with CDR technologies. Yet, the three combinations of PST do capture three approaches currently popular in environmental politics. Techno business-as-usual characterises the short-termism of capitalist democracies. Post-growth approaches represent an innovative solution to environmental problems which explicitly reject dangerous technological fixes. While, for the time being, they are to be found mostly in scattered local initiatives, academic papers, and some not-so-mainstream publications, some of their core ideas have been trickling down to left-wing national politics: Jeremy Corbyn in the UK and Bernie Sanders in the US put forward proposals for climate and energy policy similar to those advanced by van den Bergh, whereas the 5 Stars Movement (M5S) in Italy initially campaigned on a veritable degrowth platform.¹⁰ Environmental authoritarianism characterises China, and the regimes looking up to it, which will increasingly face pressure to tackle environmental problems.

PST might not have the allure of sustainable development, with its promise of environmental quality and a society largely indistinguishable from what we currently take for granted in the Western world but, in the current climate of reduced expectations, the three combinations of the trilemma might each provide an actionable guide to environmental politics. After all, techno business-as-usual might be received as a challenge to research and experiment with saviour technologies in a reckless, but not yet lost, bet against time. Post-growth approaches promise a ‘reduced’ lifestyle counterbalanced by better services and a new understanding of what it means to live together. Environmental authoritarianism is not much different from authoritarianism simpliciter; certain preferences might be adaptive and the subjects of such authoritarian regimes might come to justify their limited liberties in the face of environmental challenges. Thus, can PST be used to organise environmental protection? In other words, can we have at least two policy goals?

There are two possible problematic scenarios which could characterise the techno business-as-usual approach to environmental politics. First, the blind pursuit of economic growth within a system which leaves intact the personal freedoms to reproduce (i.e. reproductive rights) and produce, acquire, and discard goods might engender environmental problems on a scale sufficient to bring not only democracy but society to collapse. This could happen both in case of greatly insufficient mitigation efforts – what is currently happening – and in case of geoengineering gone wrong. In a short science-based fiction book, Oreskes and Conway (2014) imagined that the collapse of Western civilisation could result from the political clout of what they call the carbon-combustion complex, i.e. fossil fuel industries and those relying on inexpensive energy. Projected temperature increases of 4°C – argues Anderson – are ‘incompatible with any reasonable characterisation of an organised, equitable, and civilised global community’ (Anderson, 2012, p. 29).

Even by bracketing the environmental problems – and this is the second scenario – the stability of the techno business-as-usual approach might still be impaired by the fact that the pursuit of economic growth can erode democracy. Arguments in favour of this hypothesis are found across disciplinary fields: e.g. the economist Piketty (2014) claims that, under conditions of slow economic growth – the norm for much of history except in the post-war years – the pursuit of profits tends to create an oligarchy through always higher levels of inequality; the political theorist Brown (2015) claims that the pro-growth narrative of neoliberalism has given rise to a political rationality which replaces the political lexicon with the market lexicon and which hollows out democracy from within; the historian Judt (2011) links inequality – a consequence of policies targeting growth – with lower level of mutual trust among the citizens, which is, admittedly, rather important in a healthy democracy. There are two problems with this second scenario. First, living in a well-functioning democracy is morally desirable independently of its practical consequences – what political philosophers call non-instrumental value. Second, a reduced democracy where citizens are not able to build government capacity notwithstanding public support for policy change might prevent a coalition supporting post-growth solutions – i.e. the other democratic approach to environmental politics within PST – to ever materialise. Irrespective of what one thinks of post-growth proposals, this would unduly limit the set of policy choices available to address environmental problems.

Post-growth approaches face different hurdles altogether. Their problem is not one of stability but implementation. Market ideology has permeated the imaginaries of the people across the globe who accept and affirm in their daily lives the objectives that make capitalism capable of reproducing itself and expand. Post-growth analyses – degrowth ones in particular (e.g. Latouche, 2009), built on postwar critiques of development – link current dysfunctional level of consumerism, arguably the most visible symptom of the market ideology, to postwar liberalism and neoliberalism. These analyses ignore the much longer and richer history of consumerism. They also ignore that owning things is a nuanced phenomenon which has given people identity, a better quality of life, and a sense of liberation (Trentmann, 2016). Post-growth proposals such as educational campaigns and restrictions on advertising are unlikely to make a dent in the pro-market ideology.

Degrowth advocates have to face another problem: without economic growth the prospect for global poverty eradication are slim. This challenge is usually met by arguing that global redistribution together with degrowth in the Global North and growth in the Global South should suffice to bring everyone to a dignified and flourishing life. Furthermore, adequate levels of well-being are possible at very low-income levels. The poster child of this argument is Costa Rica, which has one-fifth of the GDP per capita of the US but surpasses it on several well-being indicators; it is in the top 7% of the world for levels of well-being and has 79.1 years of life expectancy (Hickel, 2017b). However, the first counter-argument runs afoul of the fact that global redistribution of a smaller pie is going to be fatally unpopular in the current climate of secular rise of nationalist politics (Judt, 2010). Furthermore – and this is the problem of the second counter-argument – the fact that certain low mean income countries can provide good social welfare does not imply that higher mean income countries can maintain their social welfare (or, in any case, provide social welfare comparable to the poorer countries) at a lower mean income (Ravallion, 2017). The example of Costa Rica shows how degrowth could be theoretically possible, but also that degrowth scholars have yet to figure out how to get there without giving up on our democratic institutions.

The problems of environmental authoritarianism are even more serious. Recent literature on decoupling shows that economic growth is incompatible with lower environmental degradation, no matter the political system. Jackson (2009) argues for it by adapting Ehrlich and Holdren’s I = PAT equation¹¹ (Ehrlich & Holdren, 1971) to both the current state of the world population – along with its projected growth – and the technology available and shows how absolute decoupling between domestic material consumption and GDP cannot at present be realised. More recently, Ward et al. (2016) adopted the same model and compared it to both historical data and projections; their findings do not support the claim that absolute decoupling is possible and, as a consequence, they argue that designing growth-oriented environmental policy with the expectation of absolute decoupling is misleading.

Stability can also be a problem affecting environmental authoritarianism as enlightened environmental policy might not survive the deposing of the environmental dictator. This happened in the Dominican Republic in the reconstruction of Dominican environmental politics offered by Diamond (2005). Joaquín Balaguer, ‘democratically’ elected thrice (allegations of voter fraud were raised for two of his elections) and President of the Dominican Republic from 1960 to 1962, 1966 to 1978, and 1986 to 1996 put in place an extensive and ambitious plan of environmental protection and implemented it with an iron fist. While the consequences of its rule are still visible – Diamond uses Dominican environmental politics as an argument against environmental determinism: Haiti and the Dominican Republic share the island of Hispaniola but whereas Haiti is arid and barren, the Dominican Republic is green and lush – subsequent governments have rolled back on some of Balaguer’s policies of environmental protection. The result is now an environment under increasing pressure from speculators and which cannot count anymore on an adequate monitoring system of its reserves.

Concluding remarks

This article departed from the observation that the political and economic clout of market actors with a vested interest in environmental degradation made sustainable development – and the narrative of progress through participation associated with it – an outdated framework for understanding and organising current environmental politics. While certain readers might argue that these shortcomings might not warrant the wholesale abandonment of the sustainability narrative, they at least compel us to explore which other approaches to environmental governance could emerge from a less stringent set of policy goals than the one promised by the narrative of sustainability. Furthermore, whereas the empirical studies proving that democracies score higher than autocracies on several environmental variables might have seemed encouraging a couple of decades ago, they now implicitly showcase the inadequacy of achieving piecemeal ecological modernisation in the face of possible catastrophic environmental problems.

Against this backdrop, I have argued that PST might be a more useful framework to understand current environmental politics: three different approaches to environmental politics – techno business-as-usual, post-growth, and environmental authoritarianism – explain the different avenues environmental protection can take depending on the policy goals environmental actors prioritise. Through the PST framework, it is possible to understand how three different competing approaches to environmental governance actually share a common conceptual place and counterproductively interact in the search for practicable paths to a green world.

Finally, I have taken a first look at the implications of PST and whether it can be used to organise environmental politics: achieving two goals is also optimistic. What are we left with? Here is why framing environmental politics through PST is particularly valuable: it describes current environmental politics in a way which makes clear that there are no easy ways out. The wider architecture of the choices policymakers will have to make in the future is more complex and wicked than commonly understood. Environmental authoritarianism is unlikely to provide both economic growth and environmental protection (intended here as absolute decoupling) after the low-hanging fruits of massively inefficient production technologies have been picked. Post-growth approaches have a problem of implementation, not stability, which means that even though their blueprints for a fairer, sustainable (in the literal sense that it can sustain itself), decentralised, and low-impact society could be realised, this is unlikely to happen before ecological limits make it an absolute necessity – although it would be advisable and well worth a try. And, finally, technological fixes are not currently a serious option. I will stop here because, in light of extensive scientific evidence concerning the immaturity of available technology, along with the lacking of institutional infrastructure to deploy it, or, even, a shared ethical outlook among states on it, the burden of proof falls squarely on the would-be adopters.

Some limitations to the present study, as ever, apply. First possible limitation: albeit political participation, ever since its introduction into international policy discourse, has been considered central to the social agenda of sustainable development,¹² the social agenda of sustainable development cannot be neatly reduced to the goal of political participation. I have isolated the goal of political participation because, by its absence, it is possible to account for approaches to environmental governance which presuppose that environmental protection in complex societies is only possible when an authority is not constrained by the need to mediate between competing preferences and interests. Going forward in the attempt to explore the analysis afforded by the PST framework, the social goal of political participation could be substituted by other social goals: reducing inequality would, just as well, enlighten the tensions among the three policy goals.

The second possible limitation derives from the fact that PST is conceptually inspired by sustainable development and, in particular, by the ‘three pillars’ conceptualisation of it. On the one hand, this raises the question of how ‘post-’ is PST, given that it remains anchored to an understanding of environmental protection as a policy goal in relation to the other two policy goals (economic growth and political participation). This conceptual legacy might unduly limit the set of possible environmental governance approaches to three polar scenarios which might not be relevant for policy analysis. On the other hand, however, sustainable development and its narrative have been so prominent in environmental thought that a framework, such as PST, which uses the same categories to ‘think’ and ‘see’ otherwise might prove to be useful for advancing policy analysis. Furthermore, the three polar scenarios are not simply the product of armchair theorising in a vacuum but three enduring attitudes in environmental thought – technological optimism, the post-materialist critique of growth, and the flirtation with the thought of a green dictatorship – which continue to shape environmental politics. Finally, while PST is inspired by the ‘three pillars’ conceptualisation of sustainable development, it remains open to further adaptations. Further policy goals, such as national security, might be advanced or constrained by the achievement of the other three policy goals, thus returning us a richer understanding of the forces shaping environmental governance. At the moment, however, this would have unnecessarily complicated what is at stake in this article, which was to introduce a framework to show how current environmental politics is best understood not as an attempt to realise the three policy goals of sustainable development but, rather, by the impossibility of it.

While PST cannot be used as an organisational principle to guide policy towards one of the three governance approaches of the trilemma, its analytic power can, nonetheless, lead to useful analyses of environmental issues. First, the PST framework could drive novel empirical work in environmental politics: the three approaches could represent three ideal-typical governance approaches through which real-world approaches could be compared, producing further patterns, exemplars, and interesting outliers. For example, according to a recent study, the deployment of geoengineering would be consistent with the neoliberal political economy of the US (Ott, 2018) where vested interests in slowing mitigation, a narrative of technological innovation, and a strong ‘free market’ worldview all contribute to creating momentum behind solutions which would firmly place the US in the realm of the techno business-as-usual approach. At the local level, transition towns are experiencing with post-growth governance by promoting energy descent and fiscal localism. These experiments, however, are mostly unfamiliar to the wider sector of the population and implicitly showcase the problems of scaling up these initiatives. The study of environmental governance in China has driven the analysis of environmental authoritarianism and there is little to add here. China is now an assertive country which has started to act like an empire, even if it does not want to be called one (Frankopan, 2018). Empires project a cultural and political leadership which brings the subjected countries to adopt their practices; therefore, China’s model of dealing with environmental problems is likely to be replicated in the future by states gravitating around its sphere of influence.

Second, the analysis of the opportunities for the practical implementation of the three approaches shows a disconcerting convergence towards illiberalism. For the time being, these developments are only posited and warrant further research. However, these considerations dovetail with interesting studies on the governance of geoengineering which contend that certain geoengineering technologies might not be compatible with liberal-democracy (Szerszynski, Kearnes, Macnaghten, Owen, & Stilgoe, 2013; see, however, Horton et al., 2018 for a contrasting opinion). Concerning post-growth approaches, Karlsson argues that degrowth is unlikely to be compatible with liberal-democracy because a degrowth agenda ‘would need to be very carefully orchestrated at the global level and, once implemented, would also have to be enforced indefinitely to prevent new unsustainable patterns from spontaneously emerging’ (Karlsson, 2013, p. 5).

Third, by pointing to the incompatibilities among the different approaches and the limited possibilities inherited by the sustainability narrative, PST could bring researchers to consider more radical and innovative approaches capable of escaping the logic of the trilemma. A first perusal into the practical feasibility of each of the three binaries of the trilemma points us to some insightful observations which might be worth pursuing in future scholarship. Even discounting their undesirable traits, techno business-as-usual and environmental authoritarianism have problematic structural features which hamper their long-term stability. On the other hand, post-growth approaches have serious implementation problems – i.e. breaking away from rampant consumerism and a willingness to share resources – which, however, seem to be more malleable to be changed by cultural norms. As noted by Jamieson and Di Paola (forthcoming), climate change and environmental problems have erased the liberal public/private distinction. Previously harmless private actions (eating meat, taking hot showers, driving, etc.), when aggregated, impinge on a global ecological system with negative effects on people and ecosystems. As private citizens, we cannot anymore freely participate in the market with the knowledge that our actions are harmless. This calls for a drastic redefinition of what stands on each side of the private/public distinction and opens up the opportunity to shape new norms which could ease the implementation of post-growth approaches. A new definition of what it means to participate in politics and the market would fundamentally alter the logic of the trilemma. Perhaps, it is time to view untrammelled consumption as a public matter and consecrate the private domain to other ways of expressing ourselves and leading meaningful lives, like caring, exercising creativity, being involved in a community, enjoying recreational activities, etc.

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Dr. Ruper Read for helpful comments and suggestions. I would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their careful reading of the manuscript and their many insightful comments and suggestions. This paper also benefited from the inputs of the participants in the Politics seminar at the University of East Anglia, the Legal Theory seminar at Glasgow University, the Paper Workshop Series of the Cluster of Excellence ‘Normative Orders’, and the 6th International Degrowth Conference ‘Dialogues in Turbulent Times’ in Malmo. Financial support by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) through the Cluster of Excellence ‘The Formation of Normative Orders’ (EXC 243) is gratefully acknowledged.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Umberto Mario Sconfienza is a Postdoctoral Fellow at Cluster of Excellence “Normative Orders” at the Goethe University Frankfurt. He does research on environmental politics and political philosophy.

ORCID

Umberto Mario Sconfienza http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8312-6631

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) [grant number: EXC 243].

Notes

1 For a reconstruction of the sustainability narrative, how it started from a radical environmental idea and has been progressively appropriated by actors profiting from the status quo, see Dryzek (2013, ch. 7); Tulloch (2013); and Purvis, Mao, and Robinson (2019).

2 Throughout the paper, I use ‘sustainable development’ to refer to the concept of sustainable development as crystallised by the Bruntland Report (World Commission on Environment and Development, 1987), whereas I use ‘sustainability narrative’ to refer to the narrative which come out from the neo-liberal, pro-growth operationalisation of the concept of sustainable development in the ‘90s (see note 1).

3 For example, oil corporation Shell has been for many years at the forefront of scenario-planning methods to identify risks to their business and explore potential opportunities (Funk, 2014). Similarly, Michael Bloomberg, together with other key financial leaders, released the Risky Business report (Duane et al., 2014) to explore the financial risks of climate change. The pernicious aspects of these legitimate exercises is that they construct the consequences of climate change in terms of monetary valuations which are comparable and exchangeable and that provide ready-made actors and institutions which are unlikely to challenge the neoliberal worldview of dealing with environmental problems through market mechanisms (Wright & Nyberg, 2015).

4 According to the study of Supran and Oreskes (2017), oil corporation ExxonMobil deliberately misled the public by sponsoring editorial-style advertisements (‘advertorials’) which express doubt that climate change is real and human-caused. This contrasts with the majority of ExxonMobil’s internal documents, which acknowledge this fact.

5 According to Dunlap and McCright (2011, p. 147) the ‘climate-change denial machine’ includes several actors: fossil fuel corporations (e.g. ExxonMobil, Peabody Coal), industry groups (e.g., the US National Association of Manufacturers), conservative industry-funded foundations (e.g., the Koch and Scaife Foundations), think-tanks (e.g., the Cato Institute), and front groups (e.g., the Cooler Heads Coalition).

6 Coll (2012, p. 75) documents that during the 2010 US election cycle, ExxonMobil gave the large majority (90%) of their campaign contributions to Republicans following a strategy based on a four tiers division of the possible recipients: first, Republicans allies from oil-rich states; second, supportive free market Republicans; third, Republicans and Democrats against ExxonMobil’s interests but who could be swayed; fourth, Democrats and environmental campaigners hostile to ExxonMobil (also called ‘the enemy’).

7 I cannot here provide a general overview of all the shortcomings of the sustainability narrative, it would be an article in itself; furthermore, others have done it already (see Foster, 2008, 2014). I will, however, explore in some detail the argument that the three goals are currently not simultaneously realised, and will not be in the foreseeable future, in the sub-section ‘Techno business-as-usual’.

8 Norway, Sweden, and Finland all transgress six out of the seven biophysical boundaries identified by O’Neill et al. (2018); these boundaries relate to climate change – (i) CO2 emissions, (ii) material footprint, and (iii) ecological footprint – biogeochemic flows – (iv) phosphorus and (v) nitrogen – (vi) freshwater use, and (vii) land-system change. None of the three Nordic countries is currently transgressing the freshwater biophysical boundary.

9 Two works which feature prominently in this scholarship domain, and thus help in better placing this contribution into this crowded field, are Dryzek’s The Politics of the Earth (2013) and Clapp and Dauvergne’s Paths to a Green World (2011).

10 ‘Initially’ because the need to appeal to an ever greater segment of the population have brought the M5S to distance themselves from themes which are perceived as too radical. However, some of their representatives, along with a sizeable fraction of their electorate, still subscribe to degrowth as a policy goal to be actively pursued.

11 The human Impact on the environmental equals the product of Population, Affluence, and Technology.

12 Agenda 21 states that public participation is a ‘fundamental prerequisite for the achievement of sustainable development’ (UN Conference on Environment and Development, 1994, p. 270); furthermore, political participation is now mainstreamed throughout the UN’s development agenda – it appears in several SDGs, in particular, goal 5, goal 11, and goal 16 – to address economic inequality, gender inequality, and make urbanisation more inclusive (Development Strategy and Policy Analysis Unit, 2015).