Local hegemonies resisting a green shift and what to do about it: the introduction of a regional park in southern Norway (original) (raw)

A play for rurality – Modernization versus local autonomy

Journal of Rural Studies, 2009

It is common to understand the governing of rural space as the outcome of a conflict between some romantic protectors of a lost past on the one hand, and the people who worry about creating economic values on the other. However, the power to shape the rural should not only be searched for in the open struggle between protectors and developers, but also should be analysed at the level of discourse, in the play between discourses about how to deal with the rural. In this paper I therefore present a modernist discourse and demonstrate how taken-for-granted truths about the rural – its history, its present and its future – are made possible by this discourse. Secondly, I will reveal how rurality takes on a different meaning in an alternative to the modernist discourse, emphasizing local and regional autonomy. In demonstrating that rurality is contingent upon a play between these two discourses, I want to provide some new insights into an important force behind the persistence of ideas a...

Eco-Cities: Technological Showcases or Public Spaces

A growing body of critical literature seeks to identify conceptual and practical problems accompanying the realisation of mainstream ‘eco-city’ initiatives around the world. However, little attention has been paid to the status of the ‘city’ itself within the broader discourse. If eco-cities are to be more than experimental ‘technological showcases’, and aim to transform urban life more generally, the question of what types of ‘cityness’ will ensue is of considerable importance. To effect a more significant sustainability transition, eco-city plans and policies may need somehow to encompass a more nuanced conceptualisation of cities as complex, unpredictable, and emergent spaces. The incompatibility of such a conceptualisation with liberal-modernist modes of planning means that radically innovative new approaches to eco-city development may need to be found. This thesis considers whether the eco-city, theorised as a multiple process of real-world experimentation, may shed some light on how ‘cityness’ might better be planned for in future. To do so, it conceptualises cityness through the lens of ‘publicness’. It makes an original contribution to knowledge by developing a new theoretical model of publicness as an ‘assemblage’ of space and behaviour, with an ‘emergent’ and ‘civic’ modality. It thereby extends recent debates over the idea of ‘urban assemblage’, and makes innovative links between theories of planning and of the public. This model informs the analysis of original empirical research, investigating the conceptualisation of the public in an international sample of official eco-city documents, and exploring the publicness of two implemented initiatives, in Portland, Oregon (US) and newly built Sejong City (South Korea). The research finds that publicness tends to be poorly articulated in mainstream eco-city plans and policies, with potentially negative implications for sustainability in the ‘urban age’. However, it also argues that state institution-led planning – even when experimental ‘governance’ approaches are adopted – may inevitably be limited in its ability to encompass the emergent public life of the city. The thesis concludes by considering the prospects for overcoming or more productively acknowledging these limits in future.

Antagonism, Co-optation, Fragmentation: Unravelling the Triple Bind of Green Political Struggle

Climate change represents the entry of the planet and its inhabitants into uncharted territory, but a meaningful collective response is elusive. This thesis seeks to unravel this political deadlock, in both senses: to trace its structural causes and to transcend it. It aims to trace and to advance the fortunes of ecologism as a political ideology. It approaches climate change as a problem of cultural politics, as a contest to define climate change, as it is the meaning of climate change that sets the parameters of what action can appropriately be taken. Part One employs discourse theory to analyse the formation and reproduction of environmental discourses, how they recruit subjects, and the conflicts between them. Chapter one examines the climate sceptic movements in the US and Australia. It goes beyond analysis of the material bases of these movements to explain how they exploit deep-seated imaginaries of nation and frontierism to corrupt rational deliberation. At the other end of the scale, leading climate nations spruik their green credentials. Yet by analysing the official climate discourse of Great Britain, chapter two reveals a co-optive strategy aimed not at ecological crisis but at the legitimation crisis it poses to key market and state institutions. A third feature of climate politics is the ‘silent majority’. Chapter three enumerates the unfulfilled conditions that keep certain citizens from engaging in climate politics, even when they accept the science. Part One concludes that ecologism, which seeks to reconcile ecology and society, is caught in a triple bind of antagonism, fragmentation, and co-optation that preserves the hegemonic order of growth- and consumerism-based capitalism. Part Two assesses possible ways to transcend the triple bind. Chapters four and five pursue the promise of an ecological subject, a collective agent that retains a kernel of autonomy from hegemonic discourse. It suggests such a subject does not exist behind or before discourse – as a primordial, pre-linguistic subject – but in the spaces between discourses, spaces that are not, as such, natural, but social. Chapter six further develops this argument. Enlisting the burgeoning ‘post-nature’ literature, it contends that an ecological subject, as liberatory social subject, is held back by the overarching category of Nature. Nature is implicated in the hegemony of capitalist modernity, and engenders a transcendent, ‘monotheistic’ planet immune to the damage humans inflict upon it. Finally, I turn to the strategic question of how Greens may negotiate the choice between radicalism – ‘pure’ but irrelevant – and the Faustian bargain of reform. Chapter seven contends that a third strategic alternative exists. It suggests that co-opted environmentalism can undermine the binaries that exclude its radical wing through a strategy of ‘subversive rearticulation’. Through a carefully orchestrated series of discursive pivots, subversive rearticulation can incrementally deflect, and ultimately unravel, the hegemonic logic of the triple bind.

Forward to nature: Ecological subjectivity after the discursive turn

2016

Contemporary environmental politics is generally dominated by two discourses: scepticism/denialism and liberal, managerialist reformism. Romantic-inspired environmentalism and deep ecology, on the other hand, promote the notion of an ecological subject as the key to unlocking this double bind. Yet theoretical accounts of ecological subjectivity are mired in a myriad of problems that stem from the attempt to somehow go back to a nature that pre-exists language and culture. Employing Lacanian theory, this paper aims to correct this misrecognition. It maps the putative ecological subject onto those fleeting moments of dislocation in which established discourses of nature and culture reveal their historically contingent origins.

The long-term transformation of the concept of CSR: towards a more comprehensive emphasis on sustainability

2021

This article adds to the discussion of the long-term transformation of CSR, presenting a perspective on the interplay between CSR debate and public discourse on business responsibility. 50 years after Milton Friedman’s provoking claim that the only responsibility for business is to seek profit, a broader debate has emerged aligning CSR with an increasingly comprehensive concept of sustainability. We trace this evolution of the concept during the last three decades focusing on the intersection of economic, social, and environmental responsibility. Based on discourse analysis of news articles and opinion pieces in the largest public newspaper in Norway from 1990 until 2018, the study confirms that discussions on CSR, sustainability and the social model often approach the same challenges. We argue that sustainability has become the dominating term in popular usage for describing the relationship between business and society. Based on our analysis of the public debate, CSR has become a ...

The political nature of fantasy and political fantasies of nature

Journal of Language and Politics, 2021

Within post-structuralist discourse theory, there has been an ongoing interest in fantasy and the fantasmatic logic. We propose a new way forward and suggest a focus on fantasies of 'nature' and what is deemed 'natural'. Fantasies are structurally entwined with language, desire, and political ontolo-gies. Discourses of nature hold a privileged position in this entwinement. We use the psychoanalytic concept of fantasy to explore how symbolic engagement with the world is supported by fantasmatic mechanisms. We argue that political fantasies express political subjects and objects via the imaginary mechanisms of splitting and projection. In an era of ecological crises and global pandemics, we find that fantasies that create a split between nature and society are a central part of the transformation of political imaginaries and discourses. Studying fantasies of various "naturecul-tures" and the politics of nature is thus an important new direction for discourse theory to explore anti-essentialist ontologies.