P O L I T I C AL S T U D IES: 2002 VO L 50, 659–682
Environmental Transformation of
the State: the USA, Norway, Germany
and the UK
John S. Dryzek
Christian Hunold
David Schlosberg
Australian National University
Drexel University
Northern Arizona University
with
David Downes
Hans-Kristian Hernes
Victoria Department of Education
University of Tromsø
Modern states underwent two major transformations that produced first, the liberal capitalist
state and second, the welfare state. Each was accompanied by the migration of a previously
confrontational movement into the core of the state. In the creation of the liberal capitalist state,
the bourgeoisie could harmonize with the state’s emerging interest in economic growth. In the
creation of the welfare state, the organized working class could harmonize with the state’s emerging interest in legitimating the political economy by curbing capitalism’s instability and inequality. We show that environmental conservation could now emerge as a core state interest, growing
out of these established economic and legitimation imperatives. This examination is grounded in
a comparative historical study of four countries: the USA, Norway, Germany, and the UK, each
of which exemplifies a particular kind of interest representation. We show why the USA was an
environmental pioneer around 1970, why it was then eclipsed by Norway, and why Germany now
leads in addressing environmental concerns.
The modern state embodies residues of the social movements that gave it form. In
Europe, the social movement of the bourgeoisie against aristocracy, monarchy, and
theocracy helped create the liberal state. Later, the social movement of the organized working class against unrestrained capitalism helped create the welfare state.
We investigate the prospects for a third transformation: the development of a green
state made possible by the incorporation of environmentalism. At present there are
no green states in the terms we define. But our inquiry is not merely speculative.
It is grounded in a comparative history of the environmental movement since its
emergence in the late 1960s and its relation to the state in the USA, Norway,
Germany, and the UK.
These four states are selected because each represents the best approximation to
an ideal type of orientation to civil society. Our classification of states has two
dimensions. On the first, states are either exclusive or inclusive towards social interests. Exclusive states limit effective representation to a chosen few, denying access
to others. Represented interests might cover substantial numbers – for example,
a union federation – but their ordinary members have little voice. Here we are
concerned only with open and developed societies, where exclusive states find it
© Political Studies Association, 2002.
Published by Blackwell Publishing, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA
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Table 1: Classifying States
Passive
Active
Inclusive
Exclusive
Pluralism: USA
Expansive corporatism:
Norway
Legal corporatism: Germany
Authoritarian liberalism:
UK 1979–90 and beyond
necessary to welcome at least some actors, if only large corporations. Inclusive
states are open to a wider range of interests, though equality of access and influence is not required.
On the second dimension, states are either passive or active in their orientation to
who gets represented. An active state is prescriptive when it comes to the character of interests that are organized in civil society and take political force. Thus an
active state tries to affect both the content and power of political interests. In contrast, a passive state is agnostic when it comes to the range of organizations and
movements active in civil society, and does not try either to promote or impede
the capacities of particular groups. Combining the two dimensions produces four
ideal state types, as shown in Table 1.1
A passively inclusive state accepts any mix of groups and movements generated by
social forces. This acceptance might involve access for interest group lobbyists to
legislatures and administrative agencies, or the ability of a movement to organize
as a party to contest and win seats in elections, or integration of activists into established party organizations, or receptiveness on the part of the legal system. The
most pervasive contemporary kind of passive inclusion is a pluralism in which a
variety of interest groups can utilize multiple points of access to the state.
An actively inclusive state, in contrast, does not simply accept the mix of interests
generated by social forces. Rather, government officials anticipate and organize
interests into the state to secure a desired pattern of interest articulation. Among
developed states, active inclusion is associated with expansive corporatism. Traditionally, corporatism involved tripartite concertation in policy making by the
executive branch of government along with encompassing business and labor
federations (see Schmitter and Lehmbruch, 1979), which rein in their members in
exchange for a share in policy making. Expansive corporatism moves beyond the
traditional form to include in addition groups such as women’s and environmental
organizations.
Traditional corporatism exemplifies the passively exclusive state form, in that once
labor and business have been organized into the state, other interests are left out.
Exclusion is passive because the state simply leaves these interests alone, providing few channels of influence but otherwise doing nothing to undermine them.
Parliament is often inconsequential, so public policy does not respond to election
results.
An actively exclusive state attempts to prevent the formation and impede the
operation of social movements that oppose its agenda. Within developed open
ENVIRONMENTAL TRANSFORMATION OF THE STATE
661
societies, the best examples are states under the influence of market liberal
ideology. (Obviously, dictatorships in less developed societies are mostly actively
exclusive.) Market liberalism supplies a public choice theory of politics that interprets motivation in self-interested material terms. Thus organized interests are
believed to seek benefits for themselves at high cost to taxpayers or to the efficiency of the economy, and so merit destruction. The initial targets are normally
trades unions, but attacks can be extended to other movements and organizations.
The USA is the best example of a passively inclusive state, its pluralism presenting
comparatively few obstacles to, and every incentive for, social movements to organize as interest groups to lobby government. (The radical literature by authors such
as Connolly, 1969, claiming that the USA falls far short of pluralist ideals, leaves
our comparative classification unmoved.) Norway is an actively inclusive state that
organizes concerns that in other countries would motivate social movements.
Germany is passively exclusive. While some countries are more corporatist than
Germany, there are no better approximations to passive exclusion, which in
Germany is buttressed by administrative secrecy and a legalistic, organic, unitary
notion of the public interest that sees opposition as illegitimate obstruction. The
UK in the 1980s is the best example of an actively exclusive state, where government deliberately tried to undermine the conditions for association in civil society.
These categorizations are enduring but not immutable. The USA and Norway are
unchanging since the 1960s. Germany’s passive exclusion changed somewhat in
the 1990s, though limited increases in points of access and the Greens’ entry into
the federal governing coalition in 1998 actually left most of the apparatus of legal
corporatism intact. The UK sees more significant changes with time, becoming in
the 1990s something of a dual state with both actively exclusive and passively
inclusive faces. We will attend to such changes, which complicate but do not vitiate
our analysis.
We use this framework to explain why the USA was around 1970 an environmental pioneer, but has now lost that status; why Norway is among the greenest
of states, but unlikely to become any greener; why transformation to a green state
is now most plausible in Germany; and why the UK was long not in the running
(though that may finally be changing). These comparative performance judgments
require empirical corroboration. The problem is that there are no widely accepted
summary indicators of environmental performance (of the sort we can use, for
example, to measure welfare state development). Countries face different sorts of
environmental problems, and some (for example, Japan) are adept at exporting
environmental stress in a way that would not show up in summary indicators. That
said, our ranking of the four countries in the 1990s is corroborated by three recent
summary assessments. Jahn (1998) computes an ‘index of environmental performance’ based on pollution levels (air, water, soil, and solid waste) and changes in
these levels over a previous decade. For 1990, out of 18 OECD countries, Germany
ranks second, while Norway, the UK, and USA rank tenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth respectively. Scruggs (2001) computes a performance index based on rates
of change in pollution levels between 1980 and 1995. Among 17 OECD countries,
Germany ranks first, while Norway, the USA, and UK rank tenth, twelfth, and
thirteenth.
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Table 2: Comparative Environmental Performance Rankings, 1990s
Germany
Norway
UK
USA
Our
ranking
Jahn
index
Scruggs
index
Lafferty and
Meadowcroft
WEF
index
1
2
3
4
1
2
3
4
1
2
4
3
2=
1
2=
4
3
1
4
2
Note: 1 = Country ranked first of the 4 countries here, 2 = second, and so on.
Using more in-depth and nuanced comparisons of government engagement
with the idea of sustainable development over the 1987–98 period, Lafferty and
Meadowcroft (2000, p. 412) classify Norway’s response as ‘enthusiastic’, Germany
and the UK as ‘cautiously supportive’, and the USA as ‘disinterested’ (they mean
‘uninterested’). They recognize that in 1990 Germany was a pioneer, but that
a rigid statist approach to policy and a preoccupation with the consequences of
unification in the 1990s meant that it slipped back. However, they believe Germany
was on the comeback trail in the late 1990s ‘even before the formation of
the SDP/Green coalition in the fall of 1998’ (p. 419). We agree with Lafferty and
Meadowcroft that the assessment of performance – and, we would add, potential
– must be done in a way that goes beyond summary indices to look at policy
commitments (and, we believe, problem solving beyond the state). The USA was
a pioneer in the 1970s because of the content of its policies, irrespective of immediate improvements in quantitative performance.
These comparisons are summarized in Table 2, along with the ranking of potential
for environmental transformation that we will develop in this paper. For the sake
of completeness, we also present a 2001 ranking of environmental sustainability
done for the World Economic Forum by researchers at Yale and Columbia
Universities in which we have little confidence.2 The latter aside, these studies
confirm our placement of the UK and USA in the laggard category in the 1990s,
and Germany and Norway as leaders. But our case studies must dig beneath this
surface. The key in each case is the degree to which environmental conservation
can become part of the core business of the state, as opposed to just another area
of government activity. To answer this question, we need an account of just what
that core consists of, and how it came to be that way. So we begin with a brief
(inevitably stylized and oversimplified) history of the state.
A Brief History of the State
The early modern authoritarian state had three core tasks: to keep order internally,
compete internationally, and raise the resources to finance these first two tasks
(Skocpol, 1979). These can be termed the domestic order, survival, and revenue
imperatives. State imperatives can be defined as the functions that governmental
ENVIRONMENTAL TRANSFORMATION OF THE STATE
663
structures have to carry out to ensure their own longevity and stability. Such
imperatives will always be in the interests of public officials, overriding any
competing preferences they may have.
In the early modern state, revenue was raised via extractive taxation from a fairly
static economic base. With the development of capitalism, a growing economy
enabled revenues to increase without any increase in rates of taxation, while simultaneously promoting social order by increasing the size of the economic pie. Thus
a fourth imperative developed from domestic order and revenue: the economic one
of securing economic growth (what Marxists call accumulation). This development
enabled entry of the bourgeoisie into the state from the critical public sphere it had
previously constituted (Habermas, 1989), for its interest in profits was now in
harmony with the economic growth imperative.
The further development of capitalism produced an organized working class that
threatened the stability of the political economy. At first this challenge was met by
repression. Eventually the welfare state developed to cushion the working class
against the dislocations of capitalism. Thus a fifth imperative developed from the
domestic order one: what post-Marxists (e.g. Offe, 1984) would call legitimation.
This development enabled entry of the organized working class into the state, for
its defining redistributive interest could be attached to the legitimation imperative.
Contemporary states engage in many activities not captured by these five core
functions. However, these five imperatives – domestic order, survival, revenue,
economic and legitimation – define the core of the state. This core is a zone of
necessity. It features only limited democratic control, because democracy connotes
indeterminacy in policy content. Lindblom (1982) refers to an ‘imprisoned’ zone
of policy making conditioned by the need to maintain the confidence of actual and
potential investors – our economic imperative. When it comes to foreign and security policy, it has long been recognized that ‘reasons of state’ often prevail over
popular control (Smith, 1986). The periphery of state activity is more indeterminate, hence potentially more democratic.
It matters a great deal to a social movement whether or not it can connect its defining interest to a core imperative. If it can, there are in principle no limits to the
degree to which the movement can penetrate to the state’s core (be it as a political party, interest group, or party faction). Clearly the entry of first the bourgeoisie
and then the working class into the state was a good bargain for the class in question, because each could connect its defining interest with an emerging imperative. If such a connection cannot be made, then a movement is likely to receive
symbolic or marginal rewards as a result of its engagement with the state. Whenever the movement’s interest comes up against the core, the movement loses; it is
co-opted (Saward, 1992).
Many contemporary social movements have little prospect of securing such a
connection to the core. Movements such as that for civil rights in the USA, racial
or ethnic equality elsewhere, and feminism have had sporadic success in linking
to the legitimation imperative – especially when they have demonstrated a destabilizing capacity. This situation long characterized environmentalism, locked in a
zero-sum conflict with the economic imperative with a predictable losing outcome
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Table 3: Three Transformations of the State
Kind of state
Movement incorporated
State imperatives
Early modern
None
Domestic order, survival, revenue
Liberal
capitalist
Early bourgeois public
sphere
Domestic order, survival,
revenue, economic growth
Keynesian
welfare
Unions, socialist parties
Domestic order, survival,
revenue, economic growth,
legitimation
Green
Environmentalism
Domestic order, survival,
revenue, economic growth,
legitimation, conservation
whenever it approached the state’s core, alleviated (as we will show) only by a
transient connection to legitimation in the USA. We will show how this situation
can change in that the defining interest of environmentalism can be linked to
the economic and legitimation imperatives more securely. Thus contemporary
environmentalism has historical significance that other movements have yet to
demonstrate – though we invite analyses that parallel our own (for example, for
feminism).
The emergence of the economic imperative enabled democratization of the modern
state through inclusion of the bourgeoisie in the core, creating the liberal capitalist state. The emergence of the legitimation imperative further democratized the
state by including the organized working class in the core, creating the welfare
state. The emergence of an environmental conservation imperative would further
democratize the state by including environmentalists in the core, creating the green
state.3 These three transformations are summarized in Table 3. However, the
prospects for the third transformation vary substantially across our four kinds of
states. Our story begins with the USA.
How the USA Became an Environmental Pioneer,
then Fell Behind
When modern environmentalism arrived in the late 1960s it did so in a manner
that challenged the core economic imperative. Aside from the inchoate idealism
and anti-materialism of the first Earth Day in 1970, the discourse was predominantly one of limits and survival. This discourse crystallized in the efforts of the
Club of Rome, which sponsored the Limits to Growth study carried out by a team
at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Meadows et al., 1972) – which soon
sold over four million copies worldwide. The basic message of the book was that
exponential human economic and population growth would eventually hit
limits imposed by either the fixed quantity of the world’s resources or the carrying capacity of the ecosphere. It is hard to imagine a more direct challenge to the
state’s economic imperative. Thus the limits discourse did not have any profound
ENVIRONMENTAL TRANSFORMATION OF THE STATE
665
impact on the policies of states – let alone on the identified need for coordinated
global action.
Yet the early 1970s did see a massive burst of environmental policy innovation.
The USA was the trailblazer in setting up a federal Environmental Protection
Agency, in passing a National Environmental Policy Act to force all government agencies to consider the environmental effects of their plans using environmental impact assessment, and in legislation such as the Clean Air Act and Water
Pollution Control Act. This comprehensive embrace of (moderate) environmentalism on the part of the federal government suggested that environmentalists were
welcomed into the core of the state. How could this happen, in the face of the
evident conflict between early 1970s environmentalism’s defining interest and
the economic imperative? The answer is that environmentalism could be linked
to the legitimation imperative. The USA in the late 1960s saw a movement against
the Vietnam War, a radicalization of sections of the civil rights movement for racial
equality, which along with movements for women’s liberation and radical environmentalism aligned with an anti-system ‘counterculture’. To contain this destabilization, the Nixon administration sought to make peace with the environmental
movement, and so pull it away from those parts of the counterculture more
explicitly interested in undermining the US political system.
The Nixon administration, enthusiastically supported by Congress, sought to
regain legitimacy for the political economy without acceding to more radical
counter-cultural demands. The environmental movement did not by itself threaten
legitimacy, but the discontent manifest in the numerous movements of the time
was widely perceived as a threat (Crozier et al., 1975). The imperatives of the state
and the environmental movement were not identical, but the threat to legitimation from the anti-war and New Left movements could be met by inclusion of a
different but related movement – environmentalism. By identifying his administration with the environmental cause, ‘Nixon explicitly sought to distinguish
between the antisystem New Left and counter-cultural activists and the consensus-seeking effort to fix the system’ (Gottlieb, 1993, p. 109). In his State of the
Union address in 1970, Nixon argued that the environment is an issue of ‘common
cause’ which would allow the nation to move ‘beyond factions’. He hoped to
pull the environment movement from the grasp of the New Left, and succeeded
brilliantly.
The USA was the leader in environmental policy in this era, and many other countries copied its policy initiatives, such as a national regulatory agency for pollution
control, impact assessment, a council of environmental advisors (modeled on the
US Council on Environmental Quality), and professional resource management
bureaucracies. However, the copies rarely had the power of the original – precisely
because nobody else faced an urgent legitimation threat.
Matters changed quickly with the passing of this threat and the arrival of the energy
crisis in 1973. The inclusion of the movement in the state in the form of a set of
interest groups persisted, but the economic imperative and the necessity to secure
energy supplies now came to the fore. From 1973 onward, from the construction
of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline to George W. Bush’s 2001 withdrawal from the Kyoto
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Protocol on greenhouse gas emissions, when environmentalists encountered the
economic imperative, they normally lost (though some legislative momentum was
retained in the mid 1970s, and of course environmentalists had many successes in
the periphery of the state). We do not have the space to go over every issue, but
instead simply examine the peak of environmentalist inclusion achieved during
the Clinton presidency.
In the initial days of the new administration, about two dozen environmentalists
were hired directly from environmental groups (Dowie, 1995, p. 178). Beyond
positions in Interior, Agriculture, and the EPA, they were also appointed in the
State Department, Office of Management and Budget, and the National Security
Council. Other sympathetic appointees included Bruce Babbitt (former head of the
League of Conservation Voters) as Secretary of the Interior and Carol Browner at
the EPA. Audubon lobbyist Brock Evans is famously quoted as saying ‘I can’t tell
you how wonderful it is to walk down the hall in the White House or a government agency and be greeted by your first name’ (Dowie, 1995, p. 179).
Yet these appointments belie a deeper problem in an administration that featured
access without influence. In 1992 Clinton campaigned on proposals to raise fuel
economy standards in cars, and to elevate the EPA to cabinet-level; he backed down
on both. He proposed a tax on energy use; Democratic friends of the oil and gas
industry persuaded him to drop it. Babbitt at Interior proposed to protect rangelands by raising grazing fees on government lands closer to their true market value,
and to reform antiquated and costly mining laws. But he was defeated on both
grazing and mining. Babbitt also created a new National Biological Service; it was
eviscerated within two years. Other setbacks included an Everglades ‘protection’
plan that allowed sugar growers to continue destructive pesticide use, and the first
move toward a repeal of the Delaney Clause specifying zero tolerance for carcinogens. All this occurred in the first two years of the Clinton administration, while
the Democrats still controlled Congress.
This kind of co-optive outcome is secured by the passively inclusive character of
the American state. It is very difficult for movements to resist the lure of organization as an interest group and subsequent devotion of energies to fundraising,
lobbying, participation in public hearings, and litigation. Correspondingly, the USA
long featured less in the way of a green public sphere at a distance from the state
of the sort we will shortly describe for Germany. The emergence of the US environmental justice movement in the 1980s and 1990s might appear to contradict
this summary judgment. However, this movement arose largely in response to a
kind of passive exclusion practiced by the established major groups in association
with government; local activists felt that they and their concerns were excluded by
the majors and the state, and so developed alternative forms of action (Schlosberg,
1999). When environmental justice advocates succumbed to the lure of passive
inclusion and moved into government, they typically encountered frustration
(Dryzek et al., 2003, Chapter 3). The rise of the environmental justice movement
did not coincide with any legitimation crisis, and so could not change the character of the state in the way its predecessor did around 1970. Moreover, in the US,
environment and economy remain cast in zero-sum conflict, precluding connec-
ENVIRONMENTAL TRANSFORMATION OF THE STATE
667
tion to the economic imperative of the sort we will shortly describe for Norway
and Germany. These problems prevent the articulation of environmental interests
in such a way as to enable their eventual connection to core state imperatives, but
this will take a comparative perspective to reveal.
With the pioneering US role in environmental policy now a distant memory, more
interesting possibilities exist in states with different sorts of orientations to social
movements. These states, notably Germany, are better placed to take advantage of
some emerging changes to imperatives that are in principle common to all states.
Before turning to the experience of these states, we consider the content of these
changes.
Ecological Modernization and Risk Society
Ecological modernization posits that the basic system of capitalist production and
consumption can be rendered less wasteful, more efficient, and so more sustainable. In this light, pollution represents inefficient usage of materials. ‘Pollution
prevention pays’ further because a clean and pleasant environment means highquality inputs to production, happy and healthy workers, and opportunities for
profit in clean technology. Thus economic growth and environmental conservation can be mutually supportive.4
In this basic or ‘weak’ form (Christoff, 1996), ecological modernization promises
continued economic growth without disruption to the liberal capitalist political
economy. On this view, mature movement groups can discard radical critique,
informal organizational structures, and protest politics in favor of pragmatism and
professionalization, taken seriously by government and business. Continued
scientific uncertainty does however mean reliance on the precautionary principle,
in which any possibility of significant and irreversible environmental damage is
met with preventative action. Weak ecological modernization is a moderate social
project (see Mol, 1996 for a defense) that has permeated policy making in several
West European countries, beginning in Germany and the Netherlands in the 1980s.
Ecological modernization is resisted in the USA, where policy discourse features an
old-fashioned stand-off between economy and environment. ‘Rather than asking
more fundamental questions about how to balance and integrate economic growth
and ecological sustainability, policy-makers are mired in efforts to defend or attack
the regulatory system that has been in place since the 1970s’ (Bryner, 2000, p.
277). This situation is solidified by the conservative majority in Congress and
the policy positions of the George W. Bush administration (for exceptions to this
rule, see Gore, 1992; Lovins and Lovins, 1999). With few exceptions (such as
Resource Advisory Councils for range-land management), the politics of land
management and wilderness protection still pits old adversaries against one
another (loggers, miners, and ranchers on one side, environmentalists on the
other). The environmental justice movement may have, in the words of its most
visible campaigner, Lois Gibbs, succeeded in ‘plugging the toilet’ on waste disposal,
but this has not led to the creative redesign of production processes to minimize
waste generation.
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A stronger version of ecological modernization questions the structure of the
political economy and argues the need for a discursive and democratic negotiation
of the terms of an ecological modernity (Christoff, 1996). This strong form has
made limited headway in Germany. Weak or strong, ecological modernization is
attractive to many environmentalists because it allows their concerns to be taken
seriously in a world where economics is the first concern of government; in
our terms, it enables attachment of environmental values to the core economic
imperative.
The ‘risk society’ thesis, popularized by Ulrich Beck (1992), argues that politics
in developed societies is increasingly about the production, selection, distribution,
and amelioration of risks. Such risks relate to nuclear power, genetically modified
organisms, food safety (as in the Mad Cow Disease/BSE issue in Europe), and toxic
chemicals. To Beck, the degree to which this new politics supplants the class politics of industrial society heralds a ‘reflexive modernity’ where society confronts the
unintended consequences generated by the combination of science, technology,
and economics that has driven ‘progress’. Progress itself is called into question,
especially if defined in technological terms, along with faith in economic growth
and scientific rationality.
For Beck, reflexive modernization is furthered by a decentralized ‘subpolitics’
where non-governmental actors constitute political spaces where problems can be
solved without exclusive reliance on the state. Examples include both confronting
corporations directly through boycotts and protests, and working cooperatively
with corporations to minimize risks. In our terms, risk society connotes a legitimation crisis of the political economy. Environmentalists therefore have the opportunity to connect those aspects of their defining interest that can be expressed in
terms of confronting risks with the legitimation imperative of the state.
Ecological modernization enables connection of environmental values to the state’s
economic imperative, while risk issues enable connection to legitimation. These
two developments could make environmental conservation an additional imperative. There is in fact considerable overlap between strong ecological modernization
and subpolitics of the sort Beck postulates. The conceptual continuum of ecological modernization maps on to a continuum of strategies practiced by environmental
movements, with the weak version corresponding to moderate action, the strong
version to more radical, discursive politics. However, the mediating influence of
state structure will make some strategies from this continuum more available to
particular groups than others. Hence the mix of movement strategies will vary
across different national contexts, as will the content of public policies. Ecological
modernization is not available to all states equally, as we will show.
The mix of groups emphasizing action within the corridors of the state and those
seeking to establish more autonomous public spheres should then vary crossnationally. Such spheres are concerned with public affairs, but are separate from,
and often confront, the state, while not seeking any formal share in state power
of the kind sought by interest groups and political parties (Isaac, 1993). This last
feature is consistent with the definition of new social movements as ‘self-limiting’
(Cohen, 1985).
ENVIRONMENTAL TRANSFORMATION OF THE STATE
669
Actively Inclusive Norway: Weak Ecological
Modernization, No Subpolitics
Our framework predicts that environmentalists facing an actively inclusive state
are well placed to participate in weak ecological modernization. However, they also
face the greatest challenge in achieving and sustaining strong ecological modernization and associated subpolitics. For actively inclusive states cultivate groups that
moderate their demands in exchange for state funding and guaranteed participation in policy making. Conventional and routinized forms of engagement will
dominate environmental politics.
These expectations are borne out for Norway. Norway is ‘an organizational society’
(Selle and Strømsnes, 1998, p. 5). There is consensus that the ‘third sector’ should
receive financial support from government. By 2000, 19 groups were receiving
operating and project grants administered by the Ministry of the Environment.
Total funding has expanded consistently over the years. The main beneficiary has
been the Norwegian Society for the Conservation of Nature. The law that set up
operating grants for environmental groups was very much a lex Naturvernforbundet. Project grants are distributed in accordance with government’s priorities (for
example, sustainable consumption in the early-mid 1990s), and the grant specifies
what must be done with the money. Thus environmental groups do not in general
constitute an autonomous public sphere; they are arms of the state. They not only
implement government policy, but also help to make it (Smillie and Filewod, 1993,
p. 217), reinforcing Rokkan’s (1966) description of Norway as a plural corporatist
state. Norway is ‘the country of a thousand committees’ (Klausen and Opedal,
1998). Committees are set up by cabinet, and are used to generate proposals for
parliament, traditionally a rubber stamp for committee decisions. They can be
permanent or short-lived, and environmental groups are represented on both –
be it a temporary committee that oversaw the introduction of green taxes in 1991,
or the permanent Fisheries Management Board. Committees are central to sectoral
corporatism.
The fact that committees generally work behind closed doors means that ordinary
members of groups have little influence. Groups rely on government rather than
their members for finance, so it is not surprising that Norway’s environmental organizations have a significantly lower member support base than those in neighboring countries. The largest group, the Society for the Conservation of Nature, has
just 28,000 members, whereas its equivalents in Sweden (which has about double
the population) and Denmark (with about the same population) exceed 200,000
members (Selle and Strømsnes, 1998). Unlike the USA and UK, the moderation of
the established Norwegian groups has not been met by a resurgence of radical
activism in the 1990s. The only time Norway saw such activism was in anti-dam
protests at Mardøla (1970) and Alta (1980). In both cases Norway’s ‘hydropower
complex’ prevailed, dams were constructed, and the movements faded.
New groups did appear in the 1990s, but of a very odd sort. The Environmental
Home Guard was established to support the government’s sustainable development
agenda, but has no members, only ‘participants’ who promise to behave in environmentally sound ways. The most visible group became the Bellona Foundation,
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which seeks only money from supporters, not influence from members, and also
engages in consultancy work for business. Bellona is really more of an ‘environmental enterprise’ than a movement, but in the absence of any possibilities for the
development of activist organizations independent from the state, this organizational form may be the only available response to the incorporation and decline
of the older groups. Surprisingly for an electoral system featuring proportional
representation, Norway has only a tiny and inconsequential green party, perhaps
because environmentalists recognize that the committee system is where the action
takes place, not parliament. So the overall picture is of a movement small in
numbers, activism, and autonomy. The moderation of the movement is highlighted
by the lack of any domestic opposition to the main blot on Norway’s environmental
record, commercial whaling.
Still, the public perception that Norway is leading most other European nations
in environmental policy (Sverdrup, 1997, p. 74) is in many ways correct, as confirmed by the comparative performance studies cited earlier. The days when the
‘hydropower complex’ defined part of the core of the state from which environmentalists were excluded are long gone. As befits the home of Gro Harlem
Brundtland, sustainable development has been pursued seriously since the late
1980s, and Norway has pioneered the application of green taxes to environmental ‘bads’. There is no core of the state off limits to environmentalists, who have
secured participation in crucial policy-making committees – not just via the
Environment Ministry (to which their German counterparts are confined). Norway
is rightly regarded as a leader when it comes to ecological modernization. The cooperative relationship between business, environmentalists, science, and government
is well placed to oversee the project (though there is some business resistance to
green taxes; Kasa, 2000).
However, ecological modernization in Norway is weak and set to remain a
moderate, top-down project. No significant actors raise critical questions about
the structure of the political economy or the basic direction of public policy, no
social movements constitute an autonomous public sphere that can act as both a
source of ideas and a reminder of the seriousness of concerns. These absences are
reinforced – perhaps guaranteed – by the Norwegian state structure. The risk
society thesis does not appear to play out at all; that is, issues of environmental
risk do not affect the legitimacy of the political economy, and so do not provide
opportunities for political innovation such as Beck’s ‘subpolitics’. Norway is in the
end a thin democracy where policy is made in committees behind closed doors
with no opportunities for grassroots influence. To see how matters can be different, let us turn to Germany.
Passively Exclusive Germany: Stronger Ecological
Modernization and Subpolitics
Germany is the best example of a passively exclusive state. Germany’s dominant
policy style is legal corporatism, with extensive cooperation between government
and various private associations granted public standing by law (Lehmbruch and
Schmitter, 1982; Offe, 1981). In keeping with the Prussian administrative tradition, groups without this privileged status received no access and no information
ENVIRONMENTAL TRANSFORMATION OF THE STATE
671
from a public bureaucracy hostile to freedom-of-information requests. The paternalistic behavior of civil servants is rooted in the country’s Rechtsstaat legalistic tradition (Dyson, 1980; Loughlin and Peters, 1994), where law expresses the state’s
will. The public interest is specified in terms of abstract legal norms rather than
societal interests, regardless of what citizens may demand or need. State and society
are regarded as an organic whole, such that conflict among competing interests is
unrecognized, and opposition is seen as obstruction.
The participatory revolution (Kaase,1984) launched by new social movements in
the 1970s reacted against this organic view. Passive exclusion meant that the
modern environmental movement emerged as participatory and oppositional
citizen’s initiatives groups. By 1972 these groups had formed the Federal Association of Citizens’ Initiatives for Environmental Protection (BBU), an organization
closely identified with the environmental movement’s radical wing as well as
the peace movement. Die Grünen, formed in 1979, advocated (initially at least)
participatory and anti-institutional values. The BUND (Bund für Umwelt und
Naturschutz Deutschland), established in 1975, remains the largest environmental
organization in Germany, and was instrumental in the large anti-nuclear protests
in the 1980s. Opposition to nuclear power became the new environmental movement’s focal point. Conventional lobbying channels yielded little response as
neither Parliament nor the Executive was willing to engage in a debate and none
of the major political parties was prepared to adopt an anti-nuclear position
(Kitschelt, 1986, p. 70). The movement was excluded by the technocratic government described by Wagner (1994, p. 266) as an ‘opposed totality which could not
be won over, but only fought against’. Movement protest peaked in 1983, when
environmental, peace, and women’s groups carried out over 9,200 protest actions
(Balistier, 1996).
Moderate organizations such as the German League for Nature Conservation and
Environmental Protection predate new social movement protest, but they have had
a low profile, and only ever achieved limited and conditional access to the state.
In keeping with a unitary view of the public interest, they had access only if they
could assist in a scientific search for the truth. Access to the bureaucracy (more
important than parliament in a corporatist system) increased with the establishment of a federal Ministry for Environment, Nature Conservation, and Nuclear
Safety in 1986. However, this Ministry functioned as a classic co-optive device,
featuring access without influence, given that it has only ever been peripheral to
policy making.
The social movements had their successes in the 1970s: a proposed reactor at Whyl
was never built, and public opposition to the planned nuclear reprocessing facility
at Gorleben was so fierce that the conservative Lower Saxony state government
gave up on the project, against the wishes of the SPD/FDP federal government.
The major parties came to adopt increasingly green policies, including antipollution legislation, partly to head off the electoral appeal of the Greens, but
partly to defuse protest. Public policy actions here are consistent with the idea
of a risk-induced legitimation crisis. Ecological modernization begins as both a
discourse and policy practice in the 1980s, when environmentalists were still
excluded from the state – and especially from its core.
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Beginning in the 1980s, stricter government regulations have dramatically reduced
acute forms of water, air, and soil pollution (Jänicke and Weidner, 1997). Nuclear
energy has suffered serious setbacks, culminating in the SPD/Green government’s
1999 plan for gradual phase-out. This plan owes a lot to prior movement activity.
Critics argue that parliamentary representation has brought mostly symbolic gains
at the cost of taming the Greens’ radicalism. Inclusion does of course favor groups
with moderate agendas (Tarrow, 1994). The pragmatists who control the party
today reject ecoradical goals and embrace the aim of ecologically modernizing
the country’s social-market economy (Zittel, 1996). Green MPs today have a more
polished look than the diverse group of nonconformists who wore jeans and
sweaters on the floor of parliament in 1983. Fundis viewed the party’s professionalization as evidence for the iron law of oligarchy in action (Tiefenbach, 1998),
while Realos saw political efficacy and electoral credibility (Offe, 1998; Raschke,
1993). At issue is an ‘ecological transformation of industrial society’ not its abolition. The movement’s earlier battle with industry turned into a ‘critical dialogue’
rooted in ecological modernization discourse.
Organizations willing to support ecological modernization have gained some access
to the state, whose passively exclusive character they have diluted. However,
according to one activist we interviewed:
As a rule, environmental groups haven’t figured prominently in ministerial decisions. I am not optimistic that this is about to change: business
simply has greater influence. Business lobbying organizations are so
strong that environmental groups – even well-funded ones like NABU –
can hardly keep up.
The continuing upper hand of business in environmental policy debates derives
from the fact that individual firms must often implement the policies demanded
by environmentalists, who in turn must show their reasonableness. A veteran environmental scientist and Social Democrat member of parliament summarizes the
challenge:
The situation is completely different today: local environmental calamities and protests and the spirit of unruliness are gone. But environmental calamities reach all areas of life. Keeping them politically alive requires
scientific proof that there is no necessary contradiction between ecology
and the economy. If you can piggyback the issue of the environment on
to the dominant issue of the economy, the environment will have a
chance again. For all intents and purposes, it is no longer possible to
argue for the environment against the opposition of business (von
Weizsäcker, interview, 1999).
Pragmatic environmentalists can claim the state and certain sectors of the economy
now accept environmental policies that do not go too far in violating economic
constraints. Nuclear power is a dramatic case in point, given that this is an area
where the movement and the economic imperative long conflicted. Following forty
years of federal support for nuclear energy, after 1998 environmentalists suddenly
had the federal government on their side – up to a point. However, it was
Economics Ministry officials and nuclear industry representatives who negotiated
ENVIRONMENTAL TRANSFORMATION OF THE STATE
673
the terms of ending the program, with environmentalists and the Environment
Ministry sidelined. This situation confirms Katzenstein’s (1987) earlier observation
concerning the remarkable continuity of Germany’s legal-corporatist policy making
processes across changing governments.
Thus passive exclusion persisted, and so did protest. Radicals such as the BBU still
operate outside policy making. The anti-nuclear movement has shown that it can
still mobilize large numbers of activists. This mobilization required, for example,
30,000 police to be activated in 1995–97 to protect the route of trains returning
spent fuel rods to Germany for long-term storage from reprocessing plants in the
UK and France (Kolb, 1997). The protests persisted even after the Greens had
achieved the planned phase-out of nuclear power. Part of the bargain was that the
Green Party would then acquiesce in renewed shipment of reprocessed wastes. But
several groups – not only the radical BBU, BUND and Greenpeace, but also the
moderate DNR and NABU – refused to accept this position, and organized nonviolent protests against the shipments in 2001 (Hunold, 2002).
The oppositional public sphere is now mostly specific to the anti-nuclear movement, more limited than that of the 1970s and 1980s (see Rucht and Roose, 1999).
But in comparative perspective, it remains large and vital. Moreover, the role of
movement groups in subpolitical activity has been supplemented by a burgeoning
sector of for-profit environmental consultancies, to which public agencies and firms
interested in ecological modernization can turn for information and advice. One
of the movement’s responses to the state’s exclusionary strategy of the 1970s and
early 1980s was to establish environmental policy institutions of its own. The
Working Group of Ecological Research Institutes alone comprises approximately
eighty institutes (Hey and Brendle, 1994, p. 133). Thus, the Institute for Applied
Ecology, founded in 1977, sought to meet the demand for scientific and technical
data that could be used to support plaintiffs challenging environmentally questionable industrial facilities in the courts. Additional independent ecological
research institutes were established in subsequent decades. Examples include the
Wuppertal Institute for Climate, Environment, and Energy and the Potsdam Institute for Climate Research.
Any oppositional public sphere accompanying passive exclusion need persist only
so long as the defining interest of the movement in question cannot be assimilated
to a state imperative. The public sphere in question can outlast the subsequent conjunction of interest and imperative – and the fact that old habits of legal corporatism die hard in Germany means that it does. However, it need not persist once
the conjunction has happened, as the movement can then enter the state without
merely being co-opted into the state’s periphery. In Germany we do eventually see
such conjunction with the onset of ecological modernization and the increasing
salience of risk issues. But is then, the only difference between a passively exclusive state like Germany and inclusive states like the USA and Norway that we just
have to wait longer for inclusion in the state?
We believe the difference is much more significant. Consider the concise history
of the state with which we began. Each historic wave of inclusions – that of the
bourgeoisie which produced the liberal capitalist state, that of the organized
working class which produced the welfare state – was preceded by a lively oppo-
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sitional public sphere where the category in question honed its arguments and
political skills. We have argued that a passively exclusive state is much more conducive to the development of such a sphere than its more inclusive alternatives.
So even if the members of the public sphere in question are destined for eventual
inclusion in the state, it matters enormously whether they are included as more
critically competent former members of a social movement (as in Germany), or as
individuals with a background only in a moderate professionalized organization (as
in Norway and the USA).
A more conventional but, we believe, superficial explanation of Germany’s environmental performance would emphasize the electoral success of the Green Party,
in turn made possible by Germany’s system of proportional representation.
However, such an explanation would be inconsistent with the understanding of
Greens themselves. Our interviews show that Green politicians and environmental activists are today acutely aware of how much the success of their agenda
has depended on pressure based on mobilization in civil society. The paradox the
Greens face is this: the better the policy results politicians manage to negotiate, the
more difficult it is to organize protests, even though further environmental policy
progress requires continued public pressure (Hermann, interview, 1999). The
arrival of the Greens in the governing federal coalition in 1998 did not signal a
sea change in policy, except (arguably) on the nuclear issue. Within German state
structure, the important arena is often the bureaucracy rather than parliament,
and this has not been reached by Green electoral success. Moreover, many of the
most interesting developments we describe are ‘subpolitical’ in Beck’s terms,
beyond the reach of party politics.
Germany has, then, experienced stronger ecological modernization than our other
three countries. This experience in turn has now enabled more effective connection of environmental movement interests to core state imperatives than in the
USA and Norway. Ecological research institutes for their part are at the center of
a ‘dialogue between expertise and counter-expertise’ that Beck sees as central to
the ecological democracy of risk society. These developments were facilitated by
the passively exclusive character of the German state, which provided the space
and impetus for a green public sphere to develop. Ironically, strong ecological
modernization is advanced as exclusion diminishes with the increased access of
environmental groups to the state and the entry of Greens into government –
though, as we have indicated, many of the exclusions associated with legal corporatism live on. How long will this combination of circumstances persist? Our analysis might suggest that this condition is unstable, because it depends on the recent
experience and memory of an autonomous green public sphere. If so, Germany
may lapse into passive inclusion of the American sort, with an associated weakening of ecological modernization. Alternatively, Germany could develop an environmental corporatism that includes a green elite, but passively excludes others.
The persistence of the anti-nuclear movement supports this interpretation. The
latter would not necessarily be a bad outcome, possibly constituting a further turn
of the historical spiral in which passive exclusion means a revitalized public sphere.
But that is to look too far into the future.
ENVIRONMENTAL TRANSFORMATION OF THE STATE
675
Actively Exclusive Britain
Our analysis of Germany points to the positive impact and legacy of passive exclusion when it comes to meaningful incorporation of environmental concerns into
the core of the state. To confirm that it is passive exclusion that is operative, we
need to look at a case of active exclusion. Actively exclusive states are rare, but
they can be found in connection with market liberal experiments, especially in the
Anglo-American world since 1980. The best example is the UK in the era when
Margaret Thatcher was Prime Minister (1979–90). Unlike our other three countries, the UK has no plausible claim to leadership in environmental affairs in the
modern environmental era that begins in the late 1960s. In the 1950s it was something of a leader in anti-pollution legislation, but was eclipsed by the USA around
1970, then left behind by its North European neighbors (Weale, 1997).
Prior to the Thatcher era, the British government’s response to environmental
policy was ‘informal, accommodative and technocratic’ (Lowe and Flynn, 1989, p.
257). Institutional access was unpromising in a comparative light – for example,
to an Environment Ministry that in reality had the environment as one of the least
important aspects of its portfolio (compared to local government and housing).
Groups had some access to government, though only by discretion, not right, if
they could demonstrate scientific competence, and a moderate, accommodative
kind of environmental lobbying was the norm. When it came to issues such as the
construction of the motorway network and nuclear energy, the movement had
zero influence.
The authoritarian liberalism of the Thatcher government involved suppression
of dissent in civil society and an individualization of social life to undermine the conditions for public association and action. Commitment to a market agenda therefore
involved a stronger, more centralized state (Gamble, 1988, p. 183). Information
about government activity was curtailed, and civil servants who leaked information
were prosecuted. Secret Cabinet committees made key decisions (Hillyard and
Percy-Smith, 1988, p. 54), excluding even other Cabinet members. In the early
Thatcher years, doors were shut on environmentalist access to government, which
was pursuing a relentlessly developmentalist agenda (though the main targets of
government attacks in the interests of this agenda were the trades unions). By 1986
Thatcher was deriding environmentalists as part of the ‘enemy within’ (Porritt,
1997, p. 62), and the market ideologue and anti-environmentalist Nicholas Ridley
was Secretary of State for the Environment. The security services were deployed to
harass activists. For example, members of Friends of the Earth involved in making
the case against nuclear power at the 1985 Sizewell B Public Inquiry were bugged
by MI5, the counter-intelligence service (Lamb, 1996, p. 106). The 1986 Public
Order Act diminished freedom of political action by making protest organizers
responsible for the actions of participants.
Active exclusion diminished following Thatcher’s departure in 1990, after which
Britain became something of a dual state in the terms we have established. On the
one hand, it welcomed moderate groups into dialogue, especially around issues of
sustainable development. The key turning point here was Thatcher’s own sudden
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recognition of the reality of global environmental problems in a landmark speech
to the Royal Society in September 1988. On the other hand, radical activists
continued to be hammered by active exclusion. The Criminal Justice and Public
Order Act of 1994 criminalized kinds of protest that were until then either legal
or at most subject only to civil action. The Act created the offences of ‘aggravated
trespass’ and ‘trespassory assembly’, and specified increased police powers to
control those intending, let alone engaging in, such actions.
Unlike Germany in the 1970s and 1980s, active exclusion in the UK in the 1980s
did not produce a flourishing oppositional public sphere. British environmental
groups did grow in numbers of members and supporters; between 1981 and 1991
total membership of the established groups doubled (Rootes, 2000; see also Weale,
1997, p. 97). Most of this increase came in 1988–90 as environmental issues underwent an upsurge on the international political agenda. The established environmental groups developed better links with each other (Grove-White, 1991, p. 34).
But numbers of members and the continued search for ways to make a difference
tell only part of the story. Much of the action was defensive. Tony Burton, Policy
Director at the Council for the Preservation of Rural England, reflects on the late
1980s:
I suppose it was best to describe it as ‘fire-fighting’. We were in the
business of damage limitation in relation to government policy at the
time ... the opportunity to even think positively or over the long term
was very very difficult (interview, 1999).
What is peculiar about the UK throughout the 1980s and into the early 1990s is
the lack of any new social movement form of environmentalism. Friends of the
Earth and Greenpeace ‘represented the radical end of the spectrum of British
environmental groups at the beginning of the 1990s, but they were neither very
democratic nor participatory in practice’ (Doherty, 1999, p. 278). As Rootes (1992)
points out, there is a British ‘exceptionalism’ that needs explaining. Elsewhere
in Western Europe, a low degree of protest politics was accompanied by either a
very low level of environmental group membership (as in the Mediterranean countries) or a movement that had strong access to the state (see also Doherty, 1999,
p. 278). Only in the UK do we see minimal protest politics coexisting with relatively high membership of environmental groups and no access to the state. The
plot thickens inasmuch as the breadth of support for post-materialist values was
just as strong in the UK as elsewhere in Northern Europe. Moreover, given that
the modest consultative channels that did exist were suddenly blocked in 1979,
one might have expected groups to then explore oppositional action in the public
sphere.
British exceptionalism when it comes to environmentalism in the 1980s is matched
by the exceptionalism of its state. The UK in this era was the only European outpost
of radical market liberalism, with an authoritarian, actively exclusive state to
match. Our argument here turns on the degree to which this kind of state undermined democratic authenticity in civil society in general, and in the environmental movement in particular. In part this is a matter of the state increasing the costs
associated with radical action. A more important factor is that the actively exclusive state undermines the conditions that enable collective interests to be felt and
ENVIRONMENTAL TRANSFORMATION OF THE STATE
677
articulated to begin with. Mechanisms here include the radical individualization
and marketization of society, and the associated redefinition of citizenship in terms
of obligation and responsibility, not political involvement.
Only when we put active exclusion in comparative perspective does its deleterious
impact on civil society become apparent. Our other exclusive state, Germany,
featured more advances in democratic authenticity in the 1980s than did the
UK. Equally revealing is what happens when the exclusion is later ameliorated. In
Britain after 1988, leaders and activists in movement groups heaved a sigh of relief
and accepted governmental invitations to participate in renewed consultations,
especially around sustainable development. This turn actually led to paralysis of
the mainstream groups as, in the words of one of our interviewees, they became
‘barnacle-encrusted’ as opposed to ‘muscle-bound’ with their new commitments.
If anything there was a retreat in democratic authenticity in civil society in the
early 1990s, though this was soon ameliorated by the development of an anti-roads
movement, which Doherty (1999, p. 276) believes is the first arrival of the new
social movement form in Britain. The major negative effect of active exclusion may
be in just how little groups are prepared to settle for once it is lifted. In Germany,
in contrast, after the waning of confrontation, oppositional civil society leaves a
strong democratic legacy.
There was no ecological modernization in the Thatcher era, as the government
subordinated environment to economy. Come the 1990s, environmental groups
could re-enter the corridors of power as the excesses of market liberalism eased.
But the British government did not adopt ecological modernization’s components
as policy (Weale, 1997, p. 105). Various roundtables, commissions, and committees on sustainable development established in the 1990s produced little policy substance. Policy making continued to be dominated by a requirement to demonstrate
scientific proof of a hazard prior to response – the antithesis of the precautionary
principle (Hajer, 1995). Road building continued to be the focus of transportation
policy, lip service to alternatives by the Blair Labour government after 1997
notwithstanding.
‘Subpolitics’ in Beck’s terms is not completely absent from Britain in the 1990s.
The most prominent example is the 1995 case of the Brent Spar, a redundant oil
storage platform in the North Sea. The Shell Corporation proposed to dispose of
the platform in deep waters of the North Atlantic, and received approval from the
British government. After a Greenpeace-led occupation of the platform and consumer boycott of Shell, the company backed down and agreed to dispose of the
platform on land. The British government, prepared to use force to dislodge
protestors, reacted angrily to the Shell decision. Grove-White (1997, p. 17) believes
that the Brent Spar controversy essentially ‘rewrote the rules’ in British environmental politics, illustrating ‘the mounting significance of public opinion for emerging new concerns about corporate social responsibility’. An editorial in The
Independent (21 June 1995, p. 20) similarly concluded from the campaign’s success:
‘It is now clear that neither governments nor big business are strong enough to
withstand a new phenomenon: an alliance of direct action with public opinion’.
However, it was in Germany that the boycott of Shell was most effective – and
which arguably was decisive in forcing Shell’s hand.
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The UK did eventually see three developments that indicated a belated arrival of
some elements of ecological modernization. In 2000 the government suddenly
embraced solar photovoltaic energy as a technology that would both reduce greenhouse emissions and provide economic opportunities (Paterson, 2001, p. 13), as
well as talking up the idea of offshore wind farms. In 2001 a Climate Change Levy
came into force, imposing a per-kilowatt charge on energy generated by fossil fuels
used by business and government bodies. The charge was opposed by the Conservative Party and the Confederation of British Industry, and its implementation
was accompanied by the negotiation of a complex system of discounts and exemptions. More radical still, a 1998 report of the Royal Commission on Environmental
Pollution entitled Setting Environmental Standards recommended abandoning the traditional British secretive and informal approach to regulation. The report recommended ‘that the whole process of analysis, deliberation and synthesis should take
place in a context in which the articulation of public values should be included at
all stages of the policy process’ (Weale, 2001, pp. 362–3). In its discursive democratic prescriptions, the report is actually consistent with strong ecological modernization. However, the government’s response was lukewarm, and at the time of
writing it remains unclear whether any of its recommendations will be adopted.
As the UK slowly shook off the legacy of active exclusion in the 1990s, radical
green public spheres began to emerge, in opposition to genetically modified organisms as well as road construction. This arrival of social movement activism suggests
that the kind of oppositional politics necessary for a strong version of ecological
modernization to gain ground was now present. However, this activism was mostly
in areas where the state still shows its actively exclusive face. Ecological modernization policy momentum is entirely in the area of pollution control, where there
is no oppositional movement activity, without which radical proposals such as the
1998 Royal Commission report are unlikely to be implemented.
Britain has still seen no state transformation as witnessed in Norway and Germany.
The continuing influence of the partial and ineffective inclusion that long characterized the UK remains detrimental when it comes to anything like strong ecological modernization. The shock of active exclusion that characterized the 1980s
was unfortunate in that it demonstrated to environmental groups that a return to
the traditional alternative was not so bad. Our conclusion about the destructive
impact of active exclusion on the prospects for ecological modernization remains
firm. It remains to be seen whether the UK can escape this legacy.
Conclusion
If we array our four countries according to the degree to which they have achieved
strong ecological modernization and associated subpolitics, and by implication the
degree of connection this reveals between environmental movement interests and
core state imperatives, then Germany is in front. Germany has reaped the benefits of a history of passive exclusion, whose legacy may be persistent and positive
in these terms. Here our categorization of states becomes more dynamic, because
Germany advances on these criteria while its passive exclusion is modified – though
certainly not abolished. Actively inclusive Norway may be ranked second, but only
on the dimension of ecological modernization, which it has pursued in weak form.
ENVIRONMENTAL TRANSFORMATION OF THE STATE
679
But nothing stronger can be envisaged for Norway, and no subpolitics is apparent.
Recent developments place the UK third, as it struggles to escape the legacy of
active exclusion. In the USA, national politics still features an old-fashioned standoff between economy and environment. The USA featured by far the strongest
connection between environmental values and core state imperatives around 1970,
but that peak and American leadership are distant memories.
More conventional explanations for these differences might emphasize differences
in the commitment of public opinion to environmental values, or variations in
the strength of organized interests. Both explanations fail. There are no significant
differences when it comes to public opinion across our four countries (see, for
example, Dalton’s (1994, pp. 51–73) analysis of Eurobarometer surveys, which
show little difference between public support for environmental values and actions
in the UK and Germany over time). And environmental interest groups are far
stronger in the USA than in Norway throughout, but this has not prevented
Norway leaving the USA well behind on any performance measure.
We began with a contention that an emerging connection of environmental values
to both economic and legitimation imperatives to constitute a green state with a
conservation imperative could constitute a development on a par with two prior
transformations of the modern state. Our conclusion is that this connection with
environmentalism is contingent on the presence of an active oppositional public
sphere, if only as a recent memory (as in Germany). Ecological modernization in
its weak form does not require such an oppositional sphere, as Norway shows. Yet
we would hesitate to describe a state pursuing weak ecological modernization as
a green state. Anything stronger and more secure requires an effective and
autonomous public sphere as both a memory and a presence.
(Accepted: 2 April 2002)
About the Authors
John Dryzek, Social and Political Theory Program, Research School of Social Sciences, Australian
National University, Canberra ACT 0200, Australia; email: jdryzek@coombs.anu.edu.au
Christian Hunold, Department of History and Politics, Drexel University, 3141 Chestnut Street,
Philadelphia, PA 19104-2875, USA; email: hunoldc@drexel.edu
David Schlosberg, Department of Political Science, Northern Arizona University, PO Box 15036
Flagstaff, AZ 86011-5036, USA; email: David.Schlosberg@nau.edu
David Downes, Office of Higher Education, Department of Education, Employment and
Training, 2 Treasury Place, East Melbourne, Victoria 3002, Australia.
Hans-Kristian Hernes, Department of Political Science, University of Tromsø, 9037 Tromsø,
Norway; email: hansh@isv.uit.no
Notes
For advice and comments we thank Peter Christoff, Richard Couto, Andrew Dobson, Robyn Eckersley,
David Marsh, James Meadowcroft, Chris Rootes, and Leslie Thiele. This research was financed by the
Australian Research Council (grant A79802823).
1 This framework was originally developed in the context of democratic theory and democratization
by Dryzek (1996a, b).
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J. S. DRYZEK ET AL.
2 It is hard to know what to make of an index that rates Brazil and Russia as more sustainable than
Italy and Belgium. Norway, the USA, Germany and the UK are ranked second, eleventh, fifteenth
and sixteenth among all the countries of the world. See
http://www.ciesin.org/indicators/ESI/rank.html.
3 The third transformation differs from its predecessors because it does not involve incorporation of a
social class. But none of our analysis turns on the class character of these earlier inclusions. All three
transformations entail both an interest included in the state and a discourse shift concerning the
state’s role.
4. For details, see the special issue of Environmental Politics, 9 (1), Spring 2000.
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