The state and environment: spatial dysfunctions
One of the earliest themes in Green writings concerning the state concerned questions of scale. Two rather distinct orientations can be distinguished here. The earliest contained in the invocation ‘small is beautiful’ popularized by Fritz Schumacher (1976) and suggests that the central problem is that modern societies have grown too big in scale for their socio-ecological well-being.
Much of this was a reaction (of a socially conservative or progressive sort) to ‘impersonal bureaucracies’, the spatial demands of modern life (commuting, work travel, etc.), and an aesthetic reaction to ‘big’ architecture, cities, governance systems. But the distinctly ecological dimension is best articulated by Dryzek (1987) and Saurin (1994). The eco-logic is that the larger the scale of human activities, the more remote are those making decisions concerning resource use and the production of pollution from the consequences of those decisions. For Dryzek, the socio-ecological feedback loops need to be short to make for ecologically rational decisions; for Saurin, the distancing involved in modernity/globalization effects a displacement of ecological effects across large scales. In general, in this image, ecological questions are held to be irreducibly local, to do with specific places, ecosystems, and their management. Moreover, Bauman (1989: 25), demonstrates how features of modernization, including distanciation, interrupt our ability to think and behave ethically in the context of globally mediated environmental impacts such as those produced by consumption patterns. For Bauman globalism is synonymous with an ethic of instrumentalism, and the intrinsic asymmetry of global relations between the powerful and the powerless and how for example, the minority world in the West/North is ‘always already’ harming the majority world in the South.These processes were, and still are, set in train by a fundamentally political process of reshaping property relations, which is usually called ‘enclosure’ (The Ecologist 1993; Latouche 1993).
Enclosure entails a transformation from the management of particular places through varied communal practices towards the modern regime of private property rights. Enclosure ushers in a new political order which disembeds economic activities from their social constraints and reconstructs them in terms of private property rights, monetary exchange systems, legally binding contracts, and of course the state apparatus to enforce them. The ‘resources’ which were previously resolutely local and particular become through this process abstract and thus available for the global market, with all the distanciating processes noted above. At the same time, ‘nature’ is linguistically reconstructed as resources for resource management. (Note the quote marks around the term nature, which indicate its highly contested and problematic place in political discourse, of course particularly problematic for Greens. See Latour 2004 for a useful argument concerning the term.)Thus, the state has set in train these ecologically problematic processes, and is thus at the centre of these questions concerning scale. The state is the site around which centralized decisions coalesce, and where forms of representation concerning the impacts of ecological degradation are articulated. But when representatives are both themselves physically removed from the sites they represent, and represent a large and diverse population with highly diverging interests (especially regarding particular ecological questions, say a resource extracting activity), then the possibility of responding adequately to the articulation of ecological concerns and interests is remote.
But there is a second spatial metaphor prevalent in Green thinking. This is that ‘the Earth is one but the world is not’ (WCED 1987: 27). In this discourse, the central contradiction is between the (putatively) global character of ecological questions and the spatial separation of political institutions into territorially organized states.
Most starkly put, the logic is for world government (Ophuls 1977); since states are irredeemably oriented around protecting the interests of those within their own territory, they will never be able to pursue environmental co-operation to the extent necessary to avoid ecological collapse. But many more modest arguments for ‘transfers of authority’ exist, advocating the development of supranational institutions ‘with teeth’ able to impose solutions to global ecological problems on states. These can be seen in other ‘ecoauthoritarian’ arguments in the 1970s (Heil- broner 1974), in the arguments of the WCED (1987), in current debates about a ‘World Environment Organization’ (Low and Gleeson 1998; Newell 2001; Biermann 2000), and the environmental elements to debates about UN reform, most recently in UNEP’s attempt to promote new powers for its Governing Council/Global Ministerial Environment Forum in the run up to the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg (2002), to debates about multi-level environmental governance (Vogler 2003), of which Eckersley’s arguments for a ‘multi-tiered’ political system is best known within green theory (Eckersley 1992: 144, 175 and 178), to some within the ‘global justice’ movement (Monbiot 2003).While both arguments have had their green supporters, the decentralist one has been predominant in green theory and practice. Decentralization is one of the key planks of the Programme of the German Green Party (1983), for example, a document widely taken as a key statement of Green principles, and most Green parties around the world similarly advocate decentralization of power away from central states.
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- Green critiques of the state
- The active role of the state
- What is the state?
- The concept of the state
- Beyond the state?
- Marxism and the state
- SANCTION AND THE STATE