the book “assesses both the character and the fate of environmental politics”, say the authors. written by two authors with background in australian environmentalism, the book gives a global perspective on the actors involved in environmental policy-making, the political systems in which such policy-making takes place, and how the interactions between actors and structures can shape the outcomes. it is a good starting point in thinking about environmental policy-making. much appreciated is the openness to the global South environmentalism, the attention paid to the differences between environmentalism in the minority and majority worlds. and the heads-up on how environmentalism in the majority world is shaping global environmentalism.
in the initial chapers, which present various political systems and institutional settings in which environmental politics is made, as well as define important concepts for environmental action, i stumbled upon this little comment–a common idea, that the poor have a more harmful impact on the environment (as they are more interested in basic survival, linked to the idea than environmentalism is a middle-class concern); doyle and mceahern offer a simple dismissal of this argument, which seems to have been embraced by major international groups working on poverty and environmental protection–it seems crucial to delink these two, otherwise, if we accept this automatic link, it appears inevitable that the poor must embrace the same path of development and growth of the global north to eventually reach environmental care; when, in fact, many societies and groups defined as “poor” live in better harmony with the environment than the global north
IMF 1993: “Poverty and the environment are linked in that the poor are more likely to resort to to activities than can degrade the environment”. a similar argument made in 1990 in the United Nations Human Development Report.
Doyle and MaEahern (45): there are two key problems with this line of argument. first, all poor people are regarded in a homogenous fashion, rather than existing in vastly different types of poverty with different relationships to their environments. second, many western environmental security theorists fail to weigh up the costs of advanced industrialism on a global scale, and issues of overconsumption in the minority world.
a description of various reactions (mostly governmental but also from other types of policy-makers) to environmental concerns: denial (skeptics of climate change, for example, or those who warn that growth would be threatened by interventionism to protect the environment); just green rhetorics, not matched in action at any level (Thatcher); sustainable development (since the Brundtland report 1990)–to be noted, say Doyle and McEahern, that sustainable development is not a radical environmental or green concept, since it accepts the prime need for economic growth and the dominance of human welfare over the needs of the environment (53); eco-radical theories proposing paradigmatic change (deep ecologists challenging anthropocentrism, social ecologists challenging hierarchies, eco-socialists challenging capitalism, eco post-modernists challenging modernity, eco-feminists challenging patriarchy).
after evaluating the various attitudes of governing actors towards environmentalism, and then going through various ideologies incorporating environmental concerns, the authors move on to a study of social movements, which they declare to be the birthplace of environmentalism (84). saying that the defining feature of social movements is their non-institutional nature, the authors decide to include NGOs in their study of social movements as a borderline case between institutional and non-institutional politics: the NGOs have legitimized themselves through the adoption of constitutions, setting rules of conduct and defining organizational goals. “Such NGOs are as formal as non-institutional politics gets.” (85) And their definition of social movements: a term used to refer to the form in which new combinations of people inject themselves into politics and challenge dominant ideas and a given constellation of power. (85) the features of new social movements, why are they new? because they address a new set of dominant ideas and another constellation of power; but, more importantly, because their radicalism is heightened by their awareness of what happened before, that radical movements ended up being incorporated and their issues and passions tamed; AND because of their structure, which overrides barriers and borders like class, religion, established political parties…their identity and structure is constituted through ongoing debate and interaction (the dynamic structure of new social movements); new social movements as defined by Doherty (2006): participants hold a common identity which is not simply based on ideas; they use extensive network ties to take common action and exchange ideas; they are involved in public protest which can be combined with counter-cultural lifestyles; they challenge some feature of the dominantcultural code or social and political values, going beyond mere policy changes. NOT ALL ENVIRONMENTAL MOVEMENTS ARE NEW SOCIAL MOVEMENTS.
Doyle and McEahern use the notion of PALIMPSEST (something having many layers and aspects beneath the surface) to describe social movements, made up of a dynamic combination of individuals, networks, informal groups and formal organizations)–other authors have taken the network aspect to the fore and described sm as networks of individuals, groups and organizations; the emphasis is on the amorphous structure, which keeps evolving and altering in time; and on the variation of policy goals and ideologies, united in a movement; the authors seem to be keen on a vision of SM described by them as recent among European theories on SM which states that it is the networks which determine the symbolic identity of the movements, rather than the opposite, the ideology determining the clustering of activists into networks (Melucci, Donati, Della Porta, Diani). a criciticm of the focus on NGOs, which is a result of a bias in favor of organizational theory in social sciences; in fact, NGOs are just one of the many components of SM, even though sometimes they are more visible than other elements.
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doyle and mceahern divide the environmentalists worldwide into three mega-trends: post-materialist, post-industrialist, and post-colonialist. i shall try to see where my RO and BG (and perhaps, more generally, eastern european) environmentalists fit? the post-materialist is often related to the rich, white, western world, related to inglehart writings based on the maslow pyramid of needs: basic needs are met, it’s time for higher concerns for the planet and so on…; post-industrialist refers to a larger criticism of modernity, both as capitalism and as state socialism, a criticism of growth-driven development, human-centered, at the expense of the environment; finally, post-colonialism they associate with the global South (or the majority world, their preferred terminology), framed more in terms of marxism and structuralist analysis, which still emphasizes a pretty well defined class struggle between the haves and the have-nots and focuses on recuperating the env for the locality, taking it from the hands of the rish, often foreign owners of capital–this trend, acc to the authors, resembles older social movements (labour movement) more than NSM. which of these defines best the EE environmentalists?
a paragraph describing the environmentalists in US East Coast (as opposed to West Coast, which is more conservationist, wildlife oriented) seems to depict well enough, unwittingly, the EE environmentalists: on the east coast, with such a high population density, it has been impossible to escape from the human element in ecology. consequently, air- and water-quality issues are rated highly (surveys like Eurobarometer in Ro and BG indicate concern for air and water polution as some of the most important among env concerns, sometimes above climate change in general). radical, systemic change is rarely proposed by the movement, dominated as it is by powerful NGOs. nature is construed in a limited, instrumental fashion, not unlike in the view of governmental bureaucrats and corporate think-tanks with which they often work. the env crisis is not really seen like a crisis but like a challenge for better management. env problems, in this sense, are seen as efficiency optimization projects played out in the marketplace (99)-
postmaterialist focus on conservation and, more recently, on city polution, is considered as characteristic of US
in Western Europe, there has been this trend, the conservationists, but since the 60s the postindustrialists came to the fore, with more systemic criticism, combining postmaterialism with new left-derived analysis of power–> can this mixture emerge in EE? the famous German Greens tenets of participatory democracy, social equity, non-violence, and ecology
my own impression is that the environmentalists in EE resemble the depiction of the US ones, not challening growth and capitalism, and trying to rely mostly on institutional forms of influencing policy-making, also keeping the anthropocentric focus, though there are some strong conservation groups as well, for which this plays out differently. however, EE societies are far from being well-off, and, additionally, they have started to be exposed to the issue of raising inequalities as a result of capitalism functioning for two decades; some activists argue for protection of communities and local lifestyles against foreign corporations and development schemes of the govt which are not seen to benefit the locals, often poor. this offers ground for a more systemic criticism, but the eastern hatred for the left makes any kind of anti-capitalist rhetoric still tabu. the grounds for such a criticism exist though. see a recent report of bbc newsnight on mega-farms built by british in the ukraine, taking advantage of large areas of land left uncultivated, and exploiting the potential of the world food shortage. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/newsnight/8218104.stm opposition to this is easily fit into a nationalistic frame, but this can be again reframed in terms of protecting the local against foreign corporations interests.
the historical background of EE environmentalists also makes them prone to a more systemic criticism, postindustrial type: they emerged in the 80s, in reponse to the industrial practices of Communist Parties and the environmental and heath hazards they produced; they turned out to be useful tools in the transition to market economy though, but are reemerging, and the new ties with global environmentalists and their own history prove the best grounds for a postindustrial criticism of modern growth-focused strategies.
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