Ecological modernisation is not neo-liberalism

The relationship between ecological modernisation and neo-liberalism is characterised by interaction and affinity. From the outset, ecological modernisation has interacted with the nascent governmental practices of neo-liberalism, attempting to harness the power of market design to govern environmental outcomes. This was most pronounced at the beginning of the 1980s in ecological modernisation’s first incarnation, which Mol describes as “a very optimistic, perhaps naive, attitude toward market actors and market dynamics in environmental reforms” (2001, p. 57). But rather than display a blind faith in markets, ecological modernisation theory identified the failure of a purely market- based environmentalism, and quickly moved on the next phase, taking “a more balanced view of state and market dynamics in ecological transformation processes” (ibid., p. 58). While ecological modernisation’s success is no doubt partly due to its affinity with neo-liberalism, it is certainly not a neo-liberal philosophy or instrument. Fundamentally, neo-liberal political philosophy regards the market as the ultimate arbiter of what society ‘should’ be like (Mirowski, 2009). The government, or governing authority, is to take its cues from the price signals and revealed preferences that emerge

from market interactions. Government is not supposed to intervene in the market by favouring one producer, or consumer, over another; the only intervention from government should be to implement and facilitate the smooth functioning of the market. As far as neo-liberalism is concerned, there is no environmental problem beyond that which market actors consider to be a problem. If the people who live in the environment think that the environment should be protected then they will make decisions and take actions toward that end. If the market decides not to protect the environment, then it should not be protected (Bhagwati, 1993; Hayek, 1945).

This is the fundamental normative difference between neo-liberalism and ecological modernisation. Ecological modernisation begins with the premise that the environment should be protected. It does not require the normative function of the market to determine legitimacy of such a stance—it has the transcendental foundations of modernity for that: science provides robust knowledge of the problem, reason dictates that the problem must be solved, rationality provides the tools to solve it. With these beliefs in place, the only normative question is how the environment should be protected. Ecological modernisation breaks the fundamental rule of neo-liberal political philosophy. Its raison d’être is to alter how producers produce and what consumers consume. It has a desired market outcome in mind from the outset, and seeks ways achieve that outcome. It openly relies upon scientific knowledge and technical expertise—rather than the market—to make decisions about desired environmental outcomes, and would happily deploy strong regulation to govern the behaviour of producers. In short, ecological modernisation is willing to use the State to defy markets rather than to enable them. But that is not to say that ecological modernisation is against neo-liberalism. The first incarnation of ecological modernisation keenly experimented with neo-liberal techniques—which in later iterations were unceremoniously abandoned. The purpose was not to implement neo-liberalism itself, but to find the most effective way of achieving the desired environmental outcomes within the rubric of liberal economic orthodoxy.

The ease with which the two shared an affinity, however, demonstrates the distance between ecological modernisation and other more radical forms of environmentalism, in which capitalism itself is viewed as the centre of the problem. The radical environmentalism of the 1970s was at odds with neo-liberalism in a broad-ranging battle of ideas (cf. Beckerman, 1974; Simon, 1981). In many ways, the neo-liberal critique of environmentalism clung to the original reflex that ecology and modernity were

incompatible, and so environmentalism must be belittled and discredited. But the debates of the late 1970s were a little more sophisticated, displaying what Dryzek (2005) refers to as the ‘Promethean’ discourse on the environment.

Prometheanism is based on an ontology of value. It holds that value is not extracted from natural resources; value is created by people, who transform nature into useful or desirable things. The implication is that it does not matter if we can no longer use a certain material or technique; we will create another way to satisfy our desires. It also implies that economic growth can continue indefinitely, despite the finitude of the Earth, because value is created, not extracted from materials. Prometheans extended their faith in human ingenuity to argue that environments could be protected, pollution cleaned, alternatives developed, if only people were free to engineer it. There were instances of denial—Simon denied the existence of climate change for a remarkably long time (Myers and Simon, 1994)—but neo-liberal environmentalism was characterised more by boundless technological optimism, and staunch political liberalism.

Neo-liberalism’s initial rejection of environmentalism was a resistive act, against the radical environmentalist discourse of the late 1970s. The modern environmental movement, dominated by environmental Malthusianism, wanted to smash everything and replace it with a new economic and political order that was, to use Foucault’s terminology, a ‘disciplinary’ order—a normative order, which knew what it wanted you to be, and would do whatever it took to make you that way. Foucault described neo- liberalism as a rejection of disciplinary power, a new mode of governing which sought to govern without the splint of normalisation (2008). In this respect, neo-liberal environmentalism was a rejection of a mode of governance rather than its motive. Neo- liberalism tried to develop a philosophy of environmental governance, evident in the thought experiments of Simon (1981) and Beckerman (1974), but it was a young enterprise, ‘understaffed and underfunded’ as it were, and completely incapable of governmentalizing the ecological problematisation against the tide of the environmental movement.

Ecological modernisation clearly has a great deal in common with neo-liberal environmentalism, but this is not a function of ‘being neo-liberal’, it is merely the result of seeking solutions from within the broader institutional structures of modernity. When caught within a system that demands economic growth, one must find ways to grow without transgressing ecological limits. It follows that one must find technological solutions, find fungible materials, find new products and processes to satisfy both

competing sets of demands. It does not mean that ecological modernisation is ideologically wed to those outcomes; only that it is pragmatically led to a similar conclusion. The major difference, in this respect, is that ecological modernisation is not in denial about the ecological problematisation. It does not need to substitute the fantasy of non-existence for problems that cannot be solved from within the neo-liberal rubric. When markets fail to govern pollution, ecological modernisation has other options. 7.4.2 Neo-liberalism is the sine qua non of ecological modernisation

The history of neo-liberalism has been covered in great detail in the existing literature (Burgin, 2012; Davies, 2014; Foucault, 2008; Mirowski and Plehwe, 2009; Peck, 2010; Stedman Jones, 2012), which I have no wish to recount in full. Rather, I would like to pull on a single thread, artfully stitched by Foucault, which lays out the difference between the neo-liberal approach to government, and that which went before. Foucault’s analysis of neo-liberalism spans two lecture series, beginning with the intellectual foundations of 20th _{century governmental rationality in Security, territory, population}

(2007), and ending with the real world manifestation of that rationality in the form of neo- liberalism in The birth of biopolitics (2008). Foucault’s analysis amounts to what Tribe (2009a) describes as ‘the political economy of modernity’, and it is this view of modernity I wish to bring to the fore in my consideration of ecological modernisation.

To begin, Foucault invokes a distinction between two modes of the exercise of power: disciplinary power, and bio-power. I have provided a short overview of each in chapter 3 (§ 3.6.3), and a full treatment can be found in Foucault’s Discipline and punish (1977) and History of sexuality, vol. 1 (1978), respectively, but for the purposes of this discussion, I will focus on the way each mode of power treats the role of normativity and the practices of normalisation8_{, so as to contextualise neo-liberalism in the history of}

political thought, and thus its relationship to ecological modernisation.

Disciplinary power can be thought of as the instrumentalisation of normativity. It is a direct intervention at the site of the body; an ‘anatomo-politics’ intended to shape and cajole the individual to conform to a pre-conceived ideal. The techniques of discipline are characterised by this relation of power, wherein the knowledge possessed by experts is

8 _{Foucault uses two terms: ‘normation’ and ‘normalisation’ (2007, ch. 3), to distinguish between disciplinary and}

other forms of normalisation. Such a distinction is unnecessary in this instance. For clarity and simplicity, I use ‘normalisation’ in a generic sense.

used to define the ideal and develop methods of correction, and the authority of governing institutions is deployed to legitimate the primacy of expertise and to impose their corrective techniques—by force if necessary. In short, disciplinary power is a ‘we know best’ form of norm creation, and a ‘whether you like it or not’ approach to normalisation. Bio-power reconceptualises normativity, not as an ideal of perfection, but as an acceptable range; an outer limit, rather than a central target. It operates at the level of populations—or the entire species—rather than individuals, and as such, its knowledge is made of statistics rather than case studies. This ‘bio-politics’ of the population is concerned not with the deviancies of individual bodies, but with the murmuration of the swarm, its inputs and outputs, tallies and trends. Its approach to normalisation is not to intervene at the level of the individual, but to govern around the edges, facilitating the whims of those within the acceptable range; impeding those who fall without. In Foucault’s analysis, neo-liberalism is an attempt to forge an anti-disciplinary mode of governance, which ends up exercising bio-power instead.

The claim of neo-liberals themselves is that neo-liberalism is precisely not a normalising force. The central thesis of Hayek’s (1945) exhortation of the market, for example, is that people know better than the State, and the market can collate that knowledge better than any expert. In other words, norms are allowed to emerge from below, not be imposed from above. This basic belief is what sets neo-liberalism apart from its classical forebear. Classical liberalism had a vision of what society should be like—a place of economic liberty, of laissez-faire—and wished to use the power of the State to bring it about. It urged political liberalism, for the purpose of economic liberty. Neo-liberalism inverts this relationship. It does not presume to know what the outcome of a liberal society should be. Economic liberty is not the end; it is the means. Neo- liberalism urges economic liberalism for the purpose of political liberty, the power of the State being redirected toward the facilitation of a higher knowledge, distilled by carefully designed markets (Tribe, 2009b). But in Foucault’s analysis, the lofty intentions of neo- liberals—if indeed those are their intentions—merely shift the site of normalisation onto a different vector; still fully intent on shaping society, but done so out of sight, around the edges, at a distance: “action is brought to bear on the rules of the game rather than on the players” (Foucault, 2008, p. 260).

This basic attitude toward the role of government—to facilitate, rather than dictate—is what characterises neo-liberal governance in all areas of society. It is the credo of both classical and neo- liberalism that ‘one always governs too much’, which is to say

that, while government is necessary, one must always strive to reduce it. The difference between classical and neo- liberalism is the thing being facilitated: to classical liberals it was the exchange of commodities; to neo-liberals it is mechanisms of competition. “The homo œconomicus sought after”, says Foucault, “is not the man of exchange or man the consumer; he is the man of enterprise and production” (ibid., p. 147). The society sought by neo-liberalism is not laissez-faire, nor even the ‘market society’ denounced by Marx; it is a social order regulated by the mechanisms of competition. The role of neo-liberal government is to facilitate those mechanisms.

This is the political context in which ecological modernisation was forged. As argued above, the conditions of possibility for ecological modernisation were instigated by the creation of the Polluter-Pays Principle, which sought to price pollution into the market. The purpose of pricing it into the market was to enable the mechanisms of competition to perform the role of government. There were other options available— regulation, prohibition, investment in alternatives—but the mechanisms of competition were deemed by the OECD to be the most effective and—perhaps more importantly— the least disruptive of society’s existing institutional and economic configurations. The moment environmental governance was integrated into the mechanisms of competition, a new environmentalism was born, and the possibility of market-compatible environmentalism[s] paved the way for ecological modernisation.

As noted above, it was only the first iteration of ecological modernisation in the early 1980s that could truly be described as a form ‘neo-liberal environmentalism’. For most of its existence, including up to the present, ecological modernisation has been marked by affinity and interaction with neo-liberalism, not interchangeability. Ecological modernisation is still open to neo-liberal forms of environmental governance, but is not bound by them. One example of this is the system of tradable permits aimed at internalising the cost of greenhouse gas emissions, known as carbon trading. This particular instance of environmental governance has been identified by Mirowski (2013, ch. 6) as the architype of neo-liberal market design, deploying the mechanisms of competition to regulate and govern the problem of climate change. As with the Polluter- Pays Principle, its effectiveness is debatable, but to ecological modernisation, this is not the full extent of environmental governance, only one string to its bow. Neo-liberalism was the sine qua non of an alternative environmentalism; ecological modernisation has long since out-grown it.