Green Giants? Environmental Policies of the U.S. and the E.U (original) (raw)
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Comparative Political Studies, 2003
There have been widely differing claims about how environmental groups attempt to reform environmental policy-from those who see the movement as challenging the prevailing social paradigm through confrontation and violence, to those who lament the movements reliance on conventional styles of political persuasion. This article uses data from the 1998 Global Environmental Organizations Survey (GEOS) to map the political activities used by environmental groups across the globe and to determine what best accounts for these patterns of action. The authors examine the responses of 248 environmental groups in the GEOS; these data allow the authors to compare environmental group behaviors across 59 nations and 5 continents. They find that most environmental groups engage in a mixture of political methods and activities. Although there is little evidence that institutional structures influence participation, the mix of organizational resources and ideology are potent influences on participation patterns. The results help to explain the role that environmental groups play in contemporary politics and the factors that affect this role.
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Ecological modernisation theory has become one of the dominant sociological theories that try to understand and interpret how modern industrial societies are dealing with the environmental crisis. To do this it focuses on changing social practices and institutional developments associated with environmental deterioration and reform. This article both profits from and contributes to this theoretical framework by analysing the transformations
THE COMING ECOLOGICAL REVOLUTION Pt 6 Environmentalism as Politics
This part argues that realising the potential for a new ecological modus vivendi requires a new set of political practices and institutions. These practices and institutions affirm the co-construction of nature and culture through the practical reappropriation of the human powers alienated to the state and capital and the common control and comprehension of these powers as social powers. This creates the foundation for a renewal of public agency within public life and for popular identification with environmental and related public policies. This part pays particular attention to the notion of community self-regulation. To keep the above and the below in an interactive, organic fusion means going back to the grassroots and tapping into the social and human and natural roots that feed a genuinely Green politics. This requires that Greens start organising, campaigning and talking face to face, door to door, street to street, building a Green social identity neighbourhood by neighbourhood, community by community. A functioning social order requires extensive public spaces for social learning and cognitive praxis. A public life worthy of the name creates opportunities for citizen discourse and interaction, a civic solidarity in which citizens share social knowledge, discussing freely and critically the issues of common concern, the problems that confront all individuals collectively within communities and societies. Effective political engagement on the part of new and environmental movements is also an involvement in a public life on the part of individuals who have an "ecological consciousness". To nurture this ecological sensibility so that it contributes to cultural transformation requires a number of supportive conditions and social innovations generated by ecological praxis.
ENVIRONMENTAL MOVEMENTS, INSTITUTIONS AND CIVIL SOCIETY A new way to preserve common goods
Paco Partecipazione&Conflitto, 2014
This paper aims at studying environmental participative movements which have national/Euro- pean/international relevance and use digital media, as well as local connections and conventional net- works for interacting, socializing, mobilizing people and tackling civic and social issues. By using a compara- tive approach, this article focuses on Italian and European projects promoted by movements in order to support a culture of environmental security and a sustainable development for everybody. The analysis hi- ghlights significant differences among movements in terms of capability of interacting with institutions and other stakeholders, establishing partnerships and cooperating for local development and community em- powerment. The objective is to provide a first model of environmental socialization based on several pro- mising features: networks and innovative forms of partnership; level of activism and capability of planning participative initiatives; intensity of civic cohesion that is the ability of creating connections beyond their own movement, rooting inside the territorial community in a meaningful and enduring way.
ENVIRONMENT AND NEW SOCIAL MOVEMENTS
The relevance of the environmental problem in the contemporary society is mainly due to the existence of new subjects promoting the protection and conservation of the nature. These new entities are outside of the old ideological identification, especially when compared to the historical context like that of Europe or United States, India, and Africa. These new subjects of political and civil action are organized in complex, not classical formulas. They take part in the social conflict in the form of widespread, planetary claims and show, at the same time, a high fragility. The central conflict of the modern society appears that sustained by a party in the struggle against the dominance of the market and technologies and the authoritarian powers. This cultural conflict is now central, and so the economic conflict between industrial society and politics dominated the early centuries of our modernity. In this context, the concept of social movement shows its strong interest and highlights the existence of a specific kind of collective action. A form of social domination and / or social power referred against the general guidelines / society represents this. By reversing this latest formulation, we also recognize the existence of movements supported by the dominant classes and / or directed against the popular classes; these latter are seen as an obstacle to the social integration and economic progress. In both cases, the social movement is more than a simple group of interests or an instrument of political pressure, but it involves the rules governing the use of social resources and different cultural models.
"Part of The Coming Ecological Revolution Pt 4 Political Philosophy and Ethics by Dr Peter Critchley This paper examines the Green claim that society - indeed, civilisation as we know it - cannot survive on the current basis and that a sustainable society must now be built on ecological principles. For O’Riordan, greens offer a ‘simple binary choice’ between two opposing 'world-views' (O'Riordan 1981: 300). Except that there is no real choice between survival or self-administered destruction. The argument contrasts the 'Life Necessities Society (LNS) to 'the 'Industrial Growth Society (IGS)' (Kvaloy 1990) in terms of competing 'Bioregional’ and 'Industrial-Scientific' paradigms (Sale 1985: 50). These are not choices but alternatives, with green values or principles as imperatives demanding a fundamental reconstruction of political society. For Ophuls, 'liberal democracy as we know it ... is doomed by ecological scarcity; we need a completely new political philosophy and set of institutions' (Ophuls 1977a: 3). This means that incremental reform and a piecemeal gradualism within existing political institutions is merely part of the general crisis of the existing techno-industrial system and not a coherent response to it. The paper argues that the Green failure to develop a new political philosophy and a new institutional framework derives from on an internal fracture within Green politics, split between an authoritarian vision based on fundamental green values and ecological imperatives on the one hand, and a democratic vision which, within an unchanged parliamentary and electoral politics, is based on people’s own opinions. Without a transformation of political institutions, green politics is extremely vulnerable, having to dilute its principles in order to widen electoral appeal, thus risking accommodation and absorption within the existing system, or even coming to supply the rationale justifying authoritarian government when the impact of ecological crisis starts to be felt. To accept the horizons of the existing political system is to limit aims to incremental tinkering within the system, with green politics reduced to little more than the attempt to manage and administer a mounting ecological crisis and disaster. The alternative to Green politics as a rescue squad is ecological praxis bringing about the ecological society, the idea that the practical transformation which brings about the ecological society is at the same time a political transformation in which the individuals composing the demos come to be capable of participating within communitarian direct democracy, thus uniting means and ends, form and content. As a goal abstracted from the constitutive praxis that brings it about, the ecological society is a utopia, incapable of realisation and lacking in electoral appeal. The same applies to all other ecological values. The notion of ecological praxis identifies the individual members of the demos as change agents bringing about the future sustainable society."
Journal of Political Ecology -- Special Issue on Alternative and Non-Capitalist Political Ecologies
The articles in this special section, by offering ethnographically grounded reflections on diverse strains of economic activism, begin to articulate a non-capitalocentric political ecology that we think can help scholaractivists politicize, reimagine, and recreate socio-ecological relations. In this introductory article, we offer a useful vision of how scholar-activists can engage with and support more just and sustainable ways of organizing human-human and human-environment relations. Specifically, we argue that engaged researchers can significantly contribute to a meaningful "ecological revolution" by (1) examining the tremendously diverse, already-existing experiments with other ways of being in the world, (2) helping to develop alternative visions, analyses, narratives, and desires that can move people to desire and adopt those ways of being, and (3) actively supporting and constructing economies and ecologies with alternative ethical orientations. Each article in this collection attempts one or more of these goals, and this introductory article provides a conceptual grounding for these ethnographic studies and a synthesis of some of their primary contributions. We begin by describing why critique is analytically and politically inadequate and explain why we think a non-capitalocentric ontology offers an essential complement for engaged scholarship. We then turn to the work of J.K. Gibson-Graham and the Community Economies Collective in order to explain how ideas of overdetermination, diverse economies, and performativity better equip the field of political ecology to contribute to alternative futures. And finally, we discuss how the articles in this volume reconceptualize values, politics, and scale in a manner that illuminates our scholarly and activist efforts.