Risk society and ecological modernization

Environmental politics heralded the onset of ‘risk society’ (Beck 1992, 1995), a society where contests over the distribution of goods is now joined by deliberation on the distribution of risk.

Out of this learning, provoked by the agency of the environmental movement and others, has arisen a number of discourses on Ecological Modernization (EM). Again, risk society can be taken as an analysis of the way in which the regulatory mechanisms of contemporary society, which evolved largely during the nineteenth century, fail to deal with the ‘mega hazards’ of contemporary life. But it can also be taken as an argument that the logic of risk society is the generation of new means of responding to these hazards. Specifically, the attention to risk generates pressure for reflexive mechanisms which are able to articulate popular orientations to risk rather than technocratic ones which redistribute and manage risks.

EM is a key contemporary articulation of how the economy might be, and is being, transformed in an ecological direction.

For Hajer, EM is ‘basically a modernist and technocratic approach to the environment that suggests that there is a techno-institutional fix for the present problems’ (1995: 32). In this mode, there is little fundamental in terms of the transformation of the state involved, and Greens would suggest that many of the basic anti-ecological elements of the state remain in place. In terms of the state, this ‘weak’ form of EM (Christoff, 1996) consists largely of an accommodation between continental European corporatist traditions and neo-liberal globalization, and its ecological content is effectively a rhetor­ical assertion of the adding an ‘ecological’ dimension to policy-making.

But this masks a contestation at the heart of EM discourse. This ‘weak’ form of EM can be contrasted with ‘stronger’ forms in which a central element is the extension of democratic decision-making procedures, a more thorough restructuring of the economy, and also with a broader sort of social change which might be called ‘reflexive modernization’ (Barry 2003; Beck, Lash and Giddens 1994; Christoff 1996). The strong form, entailing as it does the potential for more far-reaching social and economic change and a properly political account of EM processes, entails also a much more thorough restructuring of the state. For example, work by Jänicke, one of the main proponents of EM, casts serious doubt on the delinking of economic growth and environmental protection, i.e. the ‘business as usual’ approach of weak ecological modernization. In a co-authored work, he and his colleagues conclude that

active promotion of economic growth needs to be questioned... ecologically-beneficial economic change tends to be neutralised by high growth. Growth rates themselves are an environmental problem. It is apparent that qualitative growth can in the long term only be limited growth, if ecologically negative growth effects are to be compensated by technological and structural change... The industrialised countries will not be able to afford the luxury of high growth rates for much longer. They will have to become accustomed to solving universal problems not by economic growth, but by political action, as in matters of distribution. (Jänicke et al. 2000: 149)

Frequently, strong ecological modernization is held to involve the devel­opment of deliberative decision-making procedures, the decentralization of decision-making combined with a range of participative processes (citizens’ juries and the like). This reflexive model of EM embraces and envisages transformations which extend into the realms of democracy and the public sphere with a view to breaking the scientistic monopoly on modern knowledge claims.