(Matthew Paterson) Understanding Global Environmen (BookFi)

Understanding Global
Environmental Politics
Domination, Accumulation, Resistance
Matthew Paterson
Understanding Global Environmental Politics
Also by Matthew Paterson
ENERGY EXPORTERS AND CLIMATE CHANGE POLITICS (with Peter Kassler)

GLOBAL WARMING AND GLOBAL POLITICS
Understanding Global
Domination, Accumulation, Resistance
Matthew Paterson
Lecturer in International Relations
Keele University
Staffordshire
First published in Great Britain 2000 by
MACMILLAN PRESS LTD
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First published in the United States of America 2000 by

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Paterson, Matthew, 1967–
Understanding global environmental politics : domination, accumulation, resis-
tance / Matthew Paterson.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0–312–23090–7 (cloth)
1. Environmental Policy. I. Title
GE170 .P38 2000

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99–053110
© Matthew Paterson 2000

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Contents
Preface vii
Acknowledgements ix
1 Introduction: Understanding Global Environmental

Politics 1
2 Realism, Liberalism and the Origins of

Global Environmental Change 11
Introduction 11
The realist and liberal global environmental change
research agenda 12
The causes of global environmental change in
realist and liberal IR theory 23
Towards a structural account of
global environmental change 29
Conclusion 33
3 The ‘normal and mundane practices of modernity’:

Global Power Structures and the Environment 35
Green politics and International Relations 35

Global power structures and global environmental politics 40
Development and the production of
global environmental change 54
Conclusions 58
4 Space, Domination, Development: Sea Defences and

the Structuring of Environmental Decision-Making 66
Projects of domination 66
Development and the origins of sea defences 74
Structuring environmental decision-making 77
Conclusions 94
5 Car Trouble 95
Introduction 95
Autohegemony 99
v
vi Contents
Cars and environmental change 110

Cars and the IR of the environment 111
Challenging car culture 113
6 Fast Food, Consumer Culture and Ecology 118
Introduction: McLibel 118

McDonaldisation: McDonald’s as modernity and
modernisation 123
Meat 130
The speed of fast food 135
Conclusions: resisting ‘McDonaldisation’ 138
7 Conclusion: Globalisation, Governance and Resistance0 141
Global civil society and global environmental governance 141

Globalisation and global environmental politics 145
Resistance and transformation 149
Toward a sustainable world? 153
Notes 162
Bibliography 175
Index 196
Preface
During part of my life as a student, we had a new Vice-Chancellor.

Knowing that some of his academic work concerned the politics of
environmental problems, I was optimistic concerning the possible
openings for campaigns to improve the way the university dealt with
its environmental impact. At that time (about 1991–92), the Green
Society of the Students’ Union was running a campaign concerning the
promotion of car-use by the university. One part of this campaign con-
cerned a plan by the university to spend £50 000, building a temporary
(if I remember rightly to last only one year) car park to accommodate
expanding demand for car-parking space, until funds and space
could be found for a permanent one. We (‘GreenSoc’, as the logic of
abbreviation by which all student political groups’ names operate had
it) produced a substantial document illustrating how, given the envi-
ronmental consequences of car use, the university’s limited resources
would be better spent subsidising bus passes, working with the local
council to improve cycle routes on to the campus, and so on. We timed
this to coincide with the arrival of the new Vice-Chancellor, sent him a
copy personally, on the assumption that what we needed to do was get
his interest so that he would take up the matter with the relevant com-
mittee, and to provide him with alternative information to counter
that produced by car-oriented bureaucrats in the planning office.
However, in an ensuing issue of the university’s official magazine, the
new Vice-Chancellor printed a response to the campaign which effec-
tively stated that the environmental problems associated with develop-
ments such as the car were determined by the logics of global
capitalism and there was little point in the university spending its
efforts or money in attempting to reduce the environmental impact of
its decisions.
At that point, I realised I could never be a proper structural Marxist.
At the same time, the reverse position, that all that is needed is to cre-
ate sufficient political will for action so that a sustainable future can be
forged, is equally unsatisfactory, even if less annoyingly complacent.
What I hope to do in this book, is to highlight both how global struc-
tures of power systemically produce environmental change, but avoid
the determinism and fatalism outlined above. An understanding of
vii
viii Preface
the structural constraints facing agents should not be understood to

foreclose possibilities for action; rather it should precisely help to iden-
tify the possibilities for advancing social change. It is my hope that this
book helps in such a project.
Acknowledgements
As usual, I owe many debts incurred in the production of this book.

Deborah Mantle and Dave Scrivener both read the entire manuscript
and provided invaluable feedback which substantially improved the
flow of the text. Various people read individual chapters. Hidemi
Suganami, Andrew Linklater, Debbie Lisle, and John Macmillan all read
earlier versions of Chapter 4. Martin Parker read Chapter 6. John
Macmillan, Simon Dalby and Cara Stewart also read Chapter 7. David
Mutimer commented on parts of Chapter 3. A version of Chapter 4, com-
bined with the general argument of the book, was given at seminars in
the politics departments at Sussex University, Nottingham University
and Staffordshire University, and the International Relations Department
at Keele University. A version of Chapter 5 was presented at a seminar at
Warwick University, at Carleton University, and at the British Interna-
tional Studies Association annual conference in 1998. A version of
Chapter 6 was presented to MA students on the MA in Environmental
Politics at Keele University. A version of Chapter 7 was presented at York
Center for International and Security Studies in Toronto, and Trent
University. I thank those present at these various seminars for helpful
and stimulating discussions of the ideas developed here.
Parts of Chapter 3 appeared earlier as ‘Green Politics’, in Scott Burchill
(ed.), Theories of International Relations (1996). I am grateful to Macmillan,
the publisher, for permission to reproduce this here. I am grateful to MIT
Press for their permission to reproduce the figure on page 28.
Some of the research for Chapter 4 was carried out at Eastbourne
Town Library. I am immensely grateful to the staff in the reference
library there who were extremely generous with their time in finding
many of the materials cited here. I am also grateful to Eastbourne
Friends of the Earth and UK Friends of the Earth for letting me look at
their files on their campaign on this question, and to those whom
I interviewed: Peter Padgett, Eastbourne Borough Council Senior
Engineer; Simon Counsell; Janet Grist and Mrs M. Pooley, Eastbourne
Borough Council Environment Committee.
The Department of International Relations at Keele University has
provided an extremely congenial and stimulating atmosphere in which
to work, and I am grateful to all my colleagues for this. Dave Scrivener
again merits particular notice for his timetabling genius, which makes
ix
x Acknowledgements
it possible to make fairly heavy teaching commitments manageable.

It is also important to recognise that my working in this way is ulti-
mately parasitic on the labour of many women. The women at Kings
Heath Grange Nursery who look after my daughter Freya during the
day on low pay deserve mention – in particular Donna, Janet, Jo,
Sarah, Rachel, Sonja, Annette, Laura, Lucy and Zoe. Linda and now
Donna who clean up the mess after me, my partner, and Freya also
make the life of a middle-class Western (male) academic less frenetic in
a way which should not be left unacknowledged.
Finally, Underworld, Orbital (again), mix CDs from the Ministry of
Sound and Cream, and Deep Dish have, among others, provided a
soundscape within which I have immersed myself while writing this
book. I have again been convinced that good dance-music is a great aid
to writing.
1
Introduction: Understanding
Global Environmental Politics
What does it mean to understand global environmental politics (GEP)?

This question is deceptively simple. Behind it lies a set of thorny nor-
mative, theoretical and empirical problems. Increasingly, many people
are challenging the ways of understanding GEP which have so far been
dominant. These challenges from alternative perspectives disrupt what
was previously a stable set of assumptions about what studying global
environmental change within International Relations (IR) involved.
Such stability however was not necessarily desirable, masking as it did
the problems behind dominant perspectives.
To take perhaps an obvious question: what is it that we study when
we study GEP? Clearly, an answer to this question is at least implicit in
any understanding of such politics. It is customary, even ubiquitous, to
begin books such as this with a discussion of the United Nations
Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED), held in 1992
in Rio de Janeiro.1 The discussion offers an evaluation of UNCED’s out-
come, and that of the process since then, and effectively sets up the
debate in terms of how we explain the success or failure of the largest
conference in human history.
Yet whether UNCED is interpreted as a failure (The Ecologist, 1993)
or even as a step backward (Chatterjee and Finger, 1994), or with much
greater optimism (Keohane, Haas and Levy, 1993), this construction of
what the subject matter of GEP is, is already tendentious. It suggests
that the question which students of GEP should ask is: what affects the
possibility of states collaborating successfully to resolve particular
transnational environmental problems? The understandings of GEP it
offers are immediately a vision of the anarchic world of sovereign
states, drawn into patterns of cooperation (and conflict) with each
other over transnational problems. The fundamental logic of GEP is
1
2 Understanding Global Environmental Politics
one of collective action. Specific research questions then flow from this
which abound in the literature: the relative/absolute gains debate; the
role of international institutions; the value of concentrations of power;
the role of various groups (policy entrepreneurs, NGOs, scientists, and
so on) in affecting the possibilities of cooperation. The immediate
focus on UNCED has the effect of narrowing the terms of debate in
ways which, I hope to show, are politically dangerous. As Doran (1993)
quotes Guy Debord in opening his analysis of UNCED: ‘The spectacle
is the guardian of sleep.’ To focus attention on the world’s largest-ever
diplomatic gathering is to focus on the spectacular, thus dulling the
senses of observers to the political problems and dynamics such an
event in name exists to discuss.
The last in this list of research questions, on the role of NGOs, could
be seen to broaden the discussion away from a state-centric perspec-
tive. Certainly, in the work of some, it does (for instance, Princen and
Finger, 1994; Wapner, 1996). But such groups are only usually consid-
ered in relation to the way they affect interstate collaboration (for
example, Conca, 1995). The fundamental (yet largely unacknowledged,
and certainly unexamined) commitments in this understanding of GEP
are of an interstate understanding of global politics, of a liberal under-
standing of political economy, of the neutrality of science. So both
social movements and their transformative potential, and transnational
capital and its structural power, are reduced to ‘NGOs’ and their impacts
on governments in particular contexts. Similarly, science, perhaps the
ultimate rationalising discursive force of modernity, is reduced to the
activities of scientists and research managers, ‘epistemic communities’,
in relation to discrete problems of environmental change.
Not only is this way of framing what GEP is and how we should
understand it very narrow in its construction, it also sets up the ques-
tion in such a way so that only certain answers are permitted. If we ask
how states collaborate to resolve environmental problems, then we are
effectively precluded from answering that states are themselves (or
alternatively, the states system is itself, through generating certain
practices on the part of states) prime environmental destroyers. There
is no space for such a view to be held. There are, however, many work-
ing within this tradition who do suggest that states are environmental
degraders. But the contradiction between this view and the focus on
interstate cooperation to resolve environmental degradation is not
followed through.
Fundamentally, this framing is an attempt to depoliticise GEP. By con-
structing GEP in the language of collective action, it invokes a set of
Introduction 3
debates and literature (that is, rational choice and game theory) which
represent political phenomena as technical ones (Paterson, 1995). It is
depoliticising in the sense that it abstracts from questions of power,
and it attempts (though it fails, as such attempts necessarily do) to
exclude normative questions from the field of study.
From the point of view of the argument I develop in this book, per-
haps the core failing of this way of framing GEP is to exclude the ques-
tion of why global environmental change occurs in the first place.
There is an implicit (and occasionally explicit) answer to this question.
This answer is that global environmental change occurs as a result
either of the ‘tragedy of the commons [sic]’, or of simply a set of dis-
parate and discrete trends (which therefore require no explanation), as
I show in detail in Chapter 2.
Yet an answer to this question is clearly logically prior to the question
of how societies respond to such change. Only if it can be established
that the central dynamic underlying global environmental change is in
fact an interstate version of the tragedy of the commons, does it make
sense to start asking how states attempt to mitigate this tragedy.
I would argue that there are three primary questions which should
be taken as central to the study of GEP.2 These questions concern:
the production of environmental problems (why do they occur?)

the differential effects of environmental problems by a variety of
categories (class, nationality, race, gender)
responses to these problems (what should we do?).
Any understanding of GEP contains implicit or explicit answers to

these questions. Figure 1 shows, in extremely simplified form, the vari-
ety of answers which are discussed throughout this book, and which I
take to be the main ones existing. It is clearly intended only as a very
rough guide to the sets of positions which exist.
The first two columns in Fig. 1.1 represent the arguments which
dominate debates about global environmental change in International
Relations. The third column represents debates which date primarily to
the ‘first wave environmentalism’ of the late 1960s and early 1970s.
I will not discuss such a position in great detail in this book, partly
because for political reasons it does not constitute much of a target – it
is a bit of a ‘straw person’ – but mostly because in many cases in prac-
tice it offers a simple negation of realist and liberal institutionalist
arguments. As such, the arguments which apply to those writers apply
also to the eco-authoritarians.
Position Liberal institutionalism realism eco-authoritarianism eco-socialism social ecology deep ecology
Green politics
Ecofeminism
What are the interstate tragedy discrete trends capital systems of domination of
causes of GEC? of the commons (e.g. population, technology) accumulation domination nature
Winners and losers? Ad hoc. No resource conflicts, The poor swamp the highly unequal non-human
systematic pattern depends on power rich – ‘overpopulation’ nature loses
struggle
Due to unequal because elites
exchange/economic are able to shield
exploitation themselves
What responses? Build international Environmental world government overthrow capitalism grassroots resistance to create
institutions security or ‘lifeboat ethics’ decentralised egalitarian self-reliant
communities
Key writers Keohane, Young, Haas Homer-Dixon Ophuls, Hardin, Heilbroner Trainer, Gorz Bookchin, Shiva, Mellor Naess
Figure 1.1 Understanding of global environmental politics

Introduction 5
The bulk of the book is then intended to help develop the

approaches on the right-hand side of Fig. 1.1. By contrast to the other
positions, these are still largely uncharted territory for students of
International Relations. In Chapter 3 in particular I introduce the ideas
of these positions from the point of view of IR/global politics.
However, I will also take these positions at a more generic level, and try
to develop, through a small number of interpretive analyses, themes
common to them all. These analyses are designed first of all to show
that the answer to the first of my questions is not that global environ-
mental change originates in interstate collective action problems, nor
in a set of ad hoc trends, but in the internal dynamics of both systems
of accumulation and exploitation, and systems of domination (both of
humans by other humans, and of ‘nature’ by humans).
Collectively, therefore, the chapters which follow amount to an
attempt to think through and develop existing critical approaches to
GEP. There is now an emerging literature on GEP within International
Relations which starts from such a critical perspective.3 This literature,
in differing ways, is critical of liberal and realist approaches to the study
of environmental change within International Relations. The main
intention of most of this literature is to disrupt the notion that interna-
tional power structures are neutral with respect to environmental
change. The liberal institutionalists who dominate the study of environ-
mental change within IR assume such neutrality as they simply analyse
the responses of states collectively to such change. Implicit (and occa-
sionally explicit) is an assumption that the interstate system can in prin-
ciple respond effectively to environmental change. Critical writers aim to
challenge this assumption. Many of them (although not all) also wish to
challenge the assumption that the states system is the only power struc-
ture on which it is relevant for students of IR to focus their attention.
However, the tendency in this literature is simply to argue that the
international power structures are inconsistent with principles of sus-
tainability, in the sense that they provide insuperable obstacles to
achieving that goal. This could be, for example, because of the spatial
mismatch between state sovereignty and the global scale of environ-
mental change, or that the commitment to a deregulated globalising
economy overrides attempts to regulate economies to pursue sustain-
ability (for example, Elliott, 1998, p. 4).4
A stronger critical argument would be based on establishing that
these power structures systemically produce environmental change in
the first place, rather than simply preventing successful responses to
that change. This would establish a stronger case for critical approaches
than simply to argue that (for example) states cannot effectively

respond to the environmental crisis because of the problem of the spa-
tial mismatch. It also allows us to engage in interpretive analysis
grounded in concrete processes and experiences, and suggests lines of
enquiry which would enable us to develop more nuanced arguments
about precisely what it is about capitalism (for example) that is unsus-
tainable, and therefore what the necessary features of a sustainable
political economy would be.
Julian Saurin (1994, 1996) is one writer who has tried to develop
such an argument. Saurin suggests that rather than analyse how states
‘have responded to the impact of environmental change – where the
change is taken as given and relatively unproblematic – a thorough
analysis of causes and of the diffused processes which engender envi-
ronmental change’ should be developed (1996, p. 79).
Saurin’s argument here has two consequences. Firstly, it suggests that
investigating such causes and diffused processes leads us to challenge
the implicit assumption underlying the arguments of regime analysts,
and in many ways also of writers such as Elliott, that environmental
change is a ‘consequence of accidents, errors or misunderstandings’.
Rather, we should talk of the ‘production of environmental degradation’
(Saurin, 1996, p. 81). This leads us to discuss the material practices
which produce such change. ‘Attention paid to globalised reiterated
practices reveals incomparably more about the organisation and
administration of degradation than does a focus on the ad hoc and
tangential witnessed in inter-state environmental negotiations’.5
Secondly, his argument leads us away from discussing environmental
‘issues’. As Saurin suggests in his critique of Steve Smith’s provoca-
tive article about why the environment is ‘on the periphery’ of
International Relations, this marginalisation stems at least in part from
its conceptualisation as a set of discrete ‘issues’ – climate change, toxic
waste, species extinction, and so on – which serve to marginalise the
study within the discipline (Smith, 1993; Saurin, 1996, p. 78). But
reducing ‘global environmental change’ to ‘environmental issues’ also
serves to make each ‘issue’ appear discrete and by inference manage-
able, more amenable to technological fixes. This therefore abstracts
from the systemic production of such change.
Later in the book, I develop this argument by examining social prac-
tices surrounding the car, and also meat-eating. Car production and use
and meat-consumption clearly generate environmental change across a
range of ‘issues’. Simultaneously, both the car and meat-consumption
have increasingly, albeit in some countries more than others, come
Introduction 7
under attack. There therefore exist practices of resistance to car culture,

road building, or intensive meat-eating.
This book tries therefore to go beyond a critique of regime theory,
and to provide an empirical analysis consistent with the basic princi-
ples of a Green position in IR. I take as my point of departure Saurin’s
core question, ‘If degrading practices occur as a matter of routine, how
do we account for this?’ (1996, p. 90). I therefore ask the question How
are the power structures of global politics implicated in the way that
environmental change is generated? To answer this, I examine a set of
social practices which systemically generate environmental change,
and the way these practices are structured politically.
What I want to show in these later chapters is that both cars and
meat are deeply embedded in the reproduction of global power struc-
tures. These daily consumptive practices and experiences simultane-
ously both systemically produce environmental degradation on global
and local scales and also help to reproduce capitalist, statist and patri-
archal identities and structures. I argue that such structures are deeply
implicated in the production of environmental degradation. I organise
this discussion around four themes: the relationship between the emer-
gence of the car and the pursuit of capital accumulation; the promo-
tion of the car by states; the role of the car in the reproduction of a
variety of social inequalities; and the symbolic politics of identity
whereby both cars and meat-eating are valorised as supremely modern
(and rhetorically at least, therefore irresistible) commodities.
The following two chapters draw out in detail the different under-
standings of GEP illustrated in Fig. 1.1. Chapter 2 discusses realist and
liberal institutionalist arguments. The intention is to establish that
both realist and liberal approaches suffer from the shortcomings I have
already alluded to. Specifically, they start from a position, derived from
a particular (and rather narrow) conception of what International
Relations is, where the relevant question is only what patterns of inter-
state responses to global environmental change can be observed,
expected, and explained. At the inevitable risk of oversimplification,
liberals focus on patterns of cooperation – the emergence of ‘inter-
national regimes’ to respond collaboratively to global environmental
change, while realists generate the research agenda associated with the
study of ‘environmental security’ – an approach which emphasises the
potential of global environmental change to produce interstate conflict.
Both approaches therefore effectively assume that the first of
my three questions (concerning the origins of global environmental
change), and to a lesser extent the second (concerning the inequalities
produced by global environmental change), are not relevant questions

for students of IR to ask. Nevertheless, as Chapter 2 shows in more
detail, they both have implicit assumptions about an answer to the
first of these. In general, they assume that global environmental
change occurs either because of an interstate ‘tragedy of the commons’,
or as a result of a discrete set of what Keohane refers to as ‘secular
trends’ (1993), such as increased consumption, population growth,
technological change. However, such trends are not conceptualised
explicitly, and thus the ways in which they might be systematically
produced by global systems of domination and accumulation are
missed. They are effectively conceptualised as accidents.
Chapter 2 also shows, however, that there were interesting develop-
ments within liberal IR theory during the 1990s, mostly associated
with a shift from a conception of ‘international regimes’, firmly
grounded in state-centrism, towards ‘global governance’, which is
broader in scope. This trend is simply noted at this point; it is revisited
in more detail in Chapter 7. Much of the literature associated with this
shift still leaves my first question unaddressed, and while I suggest that
the arguments advanced in favour of a notion of global governance
can be thought of as more consistent with my argument concerning
the causes of global environmental change, they should still be consid-
ered after an examination of such causes has been carried out.
Chapter 3 introduces ideas from the variety of positions on the right-
hand side of Fig. 1.1 (as mentioned earlier, the ‘ecoauthoritarians’ will
not be discussed). All positions discussed in Chapter 3 have a more
explicit understanding of the origins of global environmental change.
All effectively conceptualise such origins in structural terms. By this I
mean that they think of global environmental change as the product
of a systematically produced and integrated set of practices, rather than
as a set of discrete trends. They will differ in their emphasis on particu-
lar structures, with, for example (again at the risk of oversimplification),
ecofeminists emphasising patriarchy, deep ecologists emphasising the
ideological structure of modern scientific knowledge predicated on the
‘domination of nature’, social ecologists emphasising political/social
structures of domination, or ecosocialists emphasising the structural
nature of capital accumulation.
Chapters 4 –6 then attempt to illustrate the conceptual argument of
Chapters 2 and 3 through three case-studies. It may seem odd, even
indefensible, to base the book on cases drawn exclusively from the UK.
Clearly, there are always problems in generalising from such analyses. In
defence, I would answer primarily that quite apart from the pragmatic
Introduction 9
aspects of ease of organising the research, such a focus is consistent

with the argument I make throughout the book, empirically and theo-
retically. I suggest that we should begin by focusing on the practices
which produce global environmental change, which are necessarily
‘local’. Normatively, since I argue, with many others, for a scaling-
down of economic and political activity, a local focus is again legitimate.
Finally, however, it is also the case that while the instances I discuss
are drawn from the UK, the process of globalisation means that such
practices and institutions (sea defences, cars, McDonalds) are ‘local
everywhere’, to borrow from the discourse of global managers.
Through an analysis of the politics of sea defences, Chapter 4 shows
how political decisions concerning global environmental change
are deeply embedded in the broader reproduction of state, political-
economic, scientific-technological and patriarchal power structures.
The neutrality of political decision-making cannot be presumed, and
thus liberal institutionalist positions which assume such neutrality are
disrupted. Chapter 4 effectively starts from a focus generated by liberal
institutionalist theoretical assumptions (albeit in perhaps an idiosyn-
cratic fashion), and then proceeds to challenge the analyses produced
by such theoretical lenses.
Chapters 5 and 6 then move to the question of the causation of
global environmental change. Chapter 5 examines a set of social prac-
tices which generate such change, the practices surrounding the car.
Likewise, Chapter 6 examines the ecological consequences both of the
emergence of a fast-food culture, and of intensive meat-consumption.
They show how those practices simultaneously produce global envi-
ronmental change in a systematic fashion, and also help to reproduce
the major power structures of world politics. Chapter 6 in particular
also returns to questions of political agency, but in a vein more consis-
tent with the argument of Chapter 5. It examines practices of ecologi-
cal resistance to the systems of power of world politics, focusing on the
McLibel case. I use this case to show how attempts to alleviate the social-
ecological consequences of modern societies are necessarily bound up
with attempts to radically alter the organisation of those societies.
In Chapter 7, I conclude by engaging with debates concerning politi-
cal responses to global environmental change. It takes as its point of
departure the emerging literature on global environmental governance
(for instance, Lipschutz, 1997; Wapner, 1997), primarily because such
literature does not restrict itself to questions of interstate collaboration.
I suggest, however, that since the positions of Wapner and Lipschutz
emerged conceptually out of the pluralism of the 1970s, they pay
insufficient attention to how such emerging practices of governance

are resistive to dominant forces in global politics. Chapter 7 therefore
reorients these arguments in the light of the previous chapters, suggest-
ing that political agency concerning global environmental change is
necessarily about resisting globalising capitalism and building small-
scale societies based on egalitarian social principles and a steady state
economy.
2
Realism, Liberalism and
the Origins of Global
Environmental Change
Introduction
This chapter examines the research agenda of liberal and realist IR the-
orists in studying global environmental change. My first aim here
is simply to outline the analyses they make of, on the one hand, inter-
national environmental regimes and, on the other, environmental
security. I return to the question of political responses in particular
in Chapter 7 where I will revisit these arguments and assess their
value given my argument about the origins of global environmental
change. In this chapter my concerns are more modest: to provide an
account of the questions asked, assumptions made and themes devel-
oped by the majority of writers in IR who investigate global environ-
mental change.
After such an exegesis, I attempt to show how mainstream
approaches within IR to global environmental change exclude ques-
tions concerning the causes of global environmental change. This is
not a huge claim, since most writers in these traditions would perhaps
explicitly suggest that such questions are not part of their domain. But
it remains nevertheless an important part of my task in the book as a
whole. My aim is effectively to show that while they exclude this ques-
tion from their field of enquiry they necessarily have an implicit
assumption about what the causes of global environmental change are.
In later chapters I argue that the implicit assumptions they hold con-
cerning these causes are implausible. Here I merely wish to establish
what their assumptions are. I suggest that they assume that the origins
of global environmental change are in either (a) an interstate ‘tragedy
of the commons’, and/or (b) a set of secular trends which are treated as
exogenous to any conceptual or theoretical enquiry.
11
The realist and liberal global environmental

change research agenda
Liberal institutionalism
The liberal institutionalist research agenda concerning global environ-
mental change has focused primarily on accounting for the emergence
of international environmental regimes. This focus has been the prod-
uct of a shift in liberal thought in International Relations from the end
of the 1970s onwards from the pluralist focus on a multiplicity of
actors in world politics, the decreasing utility of physical force, and so
on, back towards a state-centric analysis of global politics. This vision is
thus much closer to the position of realism, especially given the more
or less simultaneous structural turn taken by some realists, associated
in particular with Waltz’s Theory of International Politics (1979). As a
consequence of this theoretical shift, the ‘problem’ for liberal institu-
tionalists in terms of transnational problems is almost necessarily a
question of explaining collective action. Since global politics is under-
stood as international relations, as a realm of sovereign states interacting
in an anarchic setting, any social or political problems which transcend
state boundaries are necessarily understood as collective action prob-
lems, or alternatively, as problems concerning the provision of public
goods. Such goods, characterised in technical language by ‘jointness of
supply’ (so that, for example, no country can single-handedly provide
a stable climate globally) and ‘non-excludability of benefits’ (no coun-
try can insulate itself from the impacts of climate change, or make sure
that only it benefits from a stable climate), must be resolved through
collaboration. International regimes have been the descriptive device
on which explanations of such collaboration have been centred.
The literature on international regimes, however, did not emerge pri-
marily in order to explain international environmental politics from a
liberal institutionalist position. Mostly, it emerged to explain patterns
of interstate interaction on the global economy (see, for instance, many
of the chapters in Krasner, 1983). Occasionally it was used to explain
security regimes (for example, Jervis, 1983). Krasner’s definition of an
international regime has become ubiquitous, but is perhaps worth
repeating here. Krasner defines a regime as a ‘set of explicit or implicit
principles, norms, rules, and decision-making procedures around which
actors’ expectations converge in a given area of international relations’
(1983a, p. 2). Thus the first point to note about regime analysis is that
regimes are not the same as specific agreements; nor are they synony-
mous with particular organisations. Regimes are usually regarded as a
Realism, Liberalism and the Origins 13
subset of institutions – while the latter are broad in scope and content,
regimes are narrower, confined to particular issues (‘a given area of
international relations’) (Young, 1989, p. 13). Thus it is possible to
have regimes where there are no written agreements through which
they can be defined, yet ‘principles, norms, rules, and decision-making
procedures’ can be identified which make up the regime. And as insti-
tutions, they are not to be treated as the same thing as organisations
(Young, 1989, p. 32; 1994, p. 2).
Stokke suggests that the focus of regime analysis has been on four
sets of questions (1997, pp. 32–5). The first of these concerns how
regimes are maintained. Struck by the resilience of regimes even after
the conditions which led to their establishment have waned (the clas-
sic example in the literature being the Bretton Woods regime), regimes
scholars have investigated the reasons for such durability. The second
concerns how regimes are formed, the various factors which might
influence the possibility of establishing regimes (such factors as are, for
example, emphasised by Young, or Hahn and Richards: see below). The
third question concerns the consequences of particular regimes. Stokke
is not entirely explicit about what he takes this to mean, but it appears
to be about ‘the ability of states to coordinate behavior in mutually
beneficial ways’ (1997, p. 33). This is perhaps only slightly different
from his fourth question, whether regimes are effective. This final cate-
gory of questions is for Stokke the most complex, as effectiveness
proves rather difficult to define. It can be taken to mean the resolution
of the problem for which the regime was established. Alternatively, it
can be interpreted in terms of its effects on actors’ behaviour, an inter-
pretation which again has a number of ways of being put into practice.
Each of these approaches has problems, primarily of a methodological
nature (for example, how does one judge whether a state’s behaviour
has changed because of the operation of a particular regime?). It also
raises perhaps deeper political questions concerning the way in which
‘effectiveness’ in the literature defers to natural scientists as definers of
environmental quality, and to states as the only institutions capable of
delivering environmental quality (Paterson, 1995, pp. 213–14).1
Stokke also suggests, following a distinction made originally by
Keohane (1989, ch. 7), that each of these questions has been
approached from broadly two perspectives – what Stokke calls ‘individ-
ualist’ and ‘sociological’ respectively, although Keohane referred to
them as ‘rationalist’ and ‘reflectivist’. The first of these suggests that
regimes can best be analysed in terms of the strategic interaction of
instrumentally calculating agents. It is thus amenable to analysis using
game theory, the branch of rational choice theory devoted to situations

involving strategic action (i.e. where outcomes for A are dependent on
actions by B, C, etc.). In this perspective, regimes ‘matter’ because of
the ways in which they alter incentives facing states, change the pat-
terns of information available to them, thus changing their behaviour.
The second position suggests, by contrast, that the (re)production of
social meaning is a driving force behind behaviour, that ‘people act
toward objects, including other actors, on the basis of the meanings
that the objects have for them’ (Wendt, 1992, pp. 396–7). In this per-
spective, institutions, including regimes, play a deeper role than that
conceived by rationalists in structuring state identities and thus negoti-
ating positions.
An alternative typology of regime analysis is provided by Young,
who suggests that concepts of ‘power’, ‘interests’ and ‘ideas’ are central
to most analyses of regimes, although Young himself is critical of these
approaches (1994, pp. 84 –98).2 In this typology, ‘power’ is understood
in interstate terms, with much focus on hegemonic stability theory, on
the capacity of dominant states to secure cooperation from others, and
on the necessity (or otherwise) of the existence of a hegemonic state in
order to generate or sustain regimes. The ‘interests’ model is basically
the same as the rationalist model identified (and advocated) by
Keohane. Those focusing on ‘ideas’, or developing a ‘cognitive model’,
argue that the driving force behind environmental regime-formation is
the generation of new knowledge which transforms states’ perceptions
of their interests. Haas’s epistemic community approach (1989; 1990a;
1990b; 1992) in which transnational scientific communities drive for-
ward cooperation on environmental problems, is the most prominent
form of cognitive model.
At a more micro level of analysis, another set of literature focuses on
particular ‘factors’ which influence regime success (for instance, Hahn
and Richards, 1989; Young, 1994, pp. 98–115; Sand, 1990). Hahn and
Richards, for example, suggest that the likelihood of regime formation
and effectiveness increases with (a) greater scientific consensus, (b)
increased public concern, (c) perceptions of fairness by negotiating
partners, (d) increased short-term political payoffs, and (e) the exis-
tence of previous, related agreements. It decreases with (a) the increas-
ing costs of action, and (b) the increasing number of participants
(1989, pp. 433–7).
Using regime analysis, a number of authors have tried to explain
how interstate collaboration to respond to specific global environmen-
tal problems has emerged and developed. Examples include Haas’s
work on the Mediterranean Action Plan and on ozone depletion (1989;

1990a; 1990b), chapters by Parson on ozone depletion, Levy on acid
rain, Haas on the Baltic and North Seas, Mitchell on oil pollution, and
Peterson on fisheries management in Haas, Keohane and Levy’s
Institutions for the Earth (1993), Vogler’s (1995) analysis of oceans,
Antarctica, outer space, ozone depletion, and climate change, applica-
tions by Young of his approach to climate change (1994, ch. 2), fish-
eries and seabed mining (1989, ch. 5), nuclear accidents (1989, ch. 6)
and various aspects of environmental politics in the Arctic (1989, ch. 7;
1994, ch. 3; Young and Osherenko, 1993), Rowlands (1995) and myself
(1996) to climate change.
Regime theory is usually couched in the value-neutral language of
positivist social science. The intention is that norms only influence the
choice of object of study (for example, Keohane, 1989, p. 21). However,
regime analysts are usually in practice committed to the idea that
regimes are (a) benign, and (b) can in principle provide adequate resolu-
tions of global environmental change. I have offered two different cri-
tiques of regime theory elsewhere which I summarise here (1995; 1996;
1996a). One is empirical in nature, the other theoretical and political.
Empirically, the assumptions held by regime theorists are untenable.
Drawing on Keohane’s rationalist/reflectivist distinction (which is itself
problematic) the rational choice version of regime theory is simply
empirically implausible. In climate change negotiations, for example,
states do not behave rationally in the sense understood by rational
choice theorists. Leaving aside the problem of ascribing the characteris-
tics of an individual to organisations like states, states have simply not
had clearly articulated, consistently ordered preferences with regard to
climate change, which they have generated autonomously, and which
they have rationally pursued. Their practices can be more plausibly
interpreted as searching collectively, that is, intersubjectively, for
new norms to help generate actions to respond to climate change (for
more details of this argument and evidence, see Paterson, 1996, ch. 6;
1996a). To be sure, they have had various other state goals which have
infringed on the development of such norms, such as promoting
growth, economic deregulation, etc., but these goals have themselves
been disrupted by (and are perhaps undergoing some sort of transfor-
mation because of) global warming, and it is by no means clear what
state interests are with respect to global warming. This observation can
be generalised to other facets of global environmental change.
This argument is akin to what Keohane terms ‘reflectivist’ positions
on international institutions (1989, ch. 7). But this position is itself
also unstable. Partly this instability is because Keohane lumped

together a number of writers and perspectives into one, conflating for
convenience what in practice are widely diverging perspectives. But
even if a coherent position, which has perhaps come to be known
more commonly as ‘constructivism’ (e.g. Adler, 1997), and associated
most prominently with the work of Wendt (1987; 1992) can be identi-
fied, it still remains problematic. For me, this is primarily because such
work still identifies the international system solely as an interstate sys-
tem, and ignores other aspects of global politics, such as capitalism or
patriarchy (Paterson, 1996, p. 180; also Samhat, 1997, p. 359), but also
because the focus on norms and the reproduction of social meaning
tends to undermine the positivist epistemological basis of IR theory to
which Wendt, for example, remains committed (Paterson, 1996a;
Kratochwil and Ruggie, 1986).
Theoretically and politically, regime analysis still suffers principally
from being bound to three problematic characteristics (Paterson, 1995).
It is committed to an overly restrictive notion of what constitutes
international relations – the interactions of sovereign states in an anar-
chic environment. This limits the relevant questions which can be
asked, primarily by focusing always on consequences for the interna-
tional system, rather than on a diverse range of questions in which
structures of global power are implicated, such as environmental ones.
Related to this, it tends to have an (implicitly) liberal notion of politi-
cal economy – that states and capital/markets are fundamentally sepa-
rate spheres of social life, which interact contingently rather than in a
systemic fashion. Thirdly, it is committed to a positivist notion of the
purposes of social science, which again narrows the range of questions
which can be asked, in ways effectively criticised by Cox in his account
of ‘problem-solving’ theory (Cox, 1986; Paterson, 1995).
To summarise, the liberal institutionalist research agenda of global
environmental change has to date been concerned only with identify-
ing the conditions under which states in an anarchic international sys-
tem can cooperate over global environmental change. Regimes are the
descriptive device which has come to be used to characterise such
cooperative efforts.
More recently, a literature developing a broader notion of ‘global
governance’ has started to emerge from the liberal IR tradition. This
notion is clearly broader than that of international regimes. Specifically,
a notion of global governance is at least implicitly less state-centric
than that of international regimes. It is used to invoke the possibility
of broader shifts in global politics away from a world which can use-
fully be characterised as one of interstate anarchy, towards a situation

where there are a greater multiplicity of actors, many of whom operate
transnationally. This literature explicitly echoes the ‘world society’ plu-
ralist perspectives of the 1970s (Burton, 1972; Banks, 1984; Keohane
and Nye, 1977). In part it has emerged out of the regimes literature, in
that it is still concerned with the question of how order is produced
and maintained in a world without government, but increasingly the
possibility is being taken seriously that sovereign states are not the
only entities capable of fulfilling governance functions (Rosenau, 1990;
Rosenau and Czempiel, 1992; Young, 1997; Wapner, 1996; 1997;
Lipschutz, 1997; Newell, forthcoming 1999).
Some scholars have been developing such notions in relation to
questions of global environmental change (Young, 1997). Paul
Wapner’s work on environmental NGOs is a good example of such a
theme. Drawing on his own research on organisations like Greenpeace,
Friends of the Earth and the WorldWide Fund for Nature, Wapner
(1996) develops this idea in Young’s (1997) edited volume Global
Governance: Drawing Insights from the Environmental Experience (Wapner,
1997). Wapner develops the notion of a ‘global civil society’ (also
Wapner, 1996; Lipschutz and Mayer, 1996; Lipschutz, 1997), which
suggests that the functions of a civil society in mediating between state
and citizen are evolving globally, through the practices in particular of
such NGOs and social movements. The increasing interstate organisa-
tion of political life globally provides some sort of analogy to the state
domestically, while the integrated world market means that the domes-
tic–international distinction breaks down in that sphere (Wapner,
1997, pp. 72–7). These two developments provide the basis for the pos-
sibility of a global civil society emerging, but it is the practices of NGOs
which constitute such a society. Wapner suggests that increasingly,
the development of such networks are starting to fulfil some regula-
tive/governance functions, either unintentionally (through the ways
that organisations necessarily help to diffuse norms which regulate
social life, see p. 79) or deliberately, by on the one hand affecting pat-
terns of interstate governance, or by themselves setting up governance
systems. He gives the CERES principles developed by Friends of the
Earth and others as an example. These principles are a code of conduct
through which the practices of multinationals can be monitored and
audited, with the intended regulative effect occurring both through con-
sumer and shareholder pressure (ibid., also Wapner, 1996, pp. 129–31).3
Questions remain within this literature concerning the extent of
such governance functions being fulfilled by non-state actors. Young in
particular is sceptical (in his concluding chapter in 1997b). I will return

to this debate in Chapter 7. For the present, I will move on to discuss a
realist agenda concerning global environmental change.
Realism and environmental security

From the same basic ontology of interstate anarchy, realists in IR gener-
ate a rather different research agenda from that of liberals. From a
small number of subtle, but important and fundamentally different
assumptions, realists generate a research agenda which focuses on the
potential for global environmental change to produce interstate con-
flict. Baldwin (1993, pp. 4 –11) suggests that there are six focal points
which divide contemporary realist and liberal IR theory. The first of
these is the nature and consequences of anarchy, with realists suggest-
ing that anarchy requires states to be concerned primarily with their
survival, while liberals argue that the threats to states’ survival are usu-
ally not acute enough to allow this to dominate policy-making. The
second concerns the prospects for international cooperation, with real-
ists suggesting it is ‘harder to achieve, more difficult to maintain, and
more dependent on state power’ than liberals (Baldwin, 1993, p. 5,
quoting Grieco, 1993). Thirdly, realists and liberals diverge over what
motivates state concerns – the ‘relative–absolute gains’ debate. Realists
tend to suggest that states are concerned primarily with the gains they
make from (for example) cooperative ventures relative to those of other
states, while liberals tend to assume that states are concerned only or
primarily with absolute gains made by themselves. Fourthly, realists
tend to focus on national security, implying this is the most important
state goal, while liberals tend to focus on questions of political econ-
omy. Fifthly, realists tend to suggest that it is not state intentions that
matter in determining outcomes, but rather the distribution of power
resources or capabilities between states. Liberals, by contrast, place more
emphasis on the intentions of state decision-makers. Finally, the two
schools differ over the degree to which international institutions and
regimes affect outcomes in international politics. Realists suggest that
they are epiphenomenal, while liberals argue they have become impor-
tant in affecting patterns of international cooperation and conflict.
My own view is that it is the relative–absolute gains debate which is
crucial in accounting for the different theoretical positions of neoreal-
ists and liberal institutionalists. As a consequence of the nature of
international anarchy, realists argue that states must always be con-
cerned primarily with their own security, and thus of the ways in which
other states, even current allies, may in future be able to threaten
that security. As a result, the focus on relative gains makes achieving

cooperation much more difficult, as is well established within the
game-theoretic literature (for instance, Snidal, 1991; Axelrod, 1984). So
the possibilities of cooperation, the priority given to security in state
goals, the importance of institutions and regimes, and to a lesser extent
the relative importance of intentions or capabilities, all depend on this
assumption concerning the motivation of states derived from the
assumption concerning the implications of anarchy. A preoccupation
with relative gains therefore makes it more difficult to get cooperation
going than liberals tend to assume, and renders international institu-
tions epiphenomenal to the production of outcomes in international
negotiations.
While realists have focused much less attention on global environ-
mental change than have liberal IR theorists, the perspective produces
two sorts of research questions, flowing from its differences from lib-
eral institutionalism outlined above. The first is simply a concern to
suggest that liberals are overly optimistic concerning the possibilities of
securing adequate levels of international cooperation on global envi-
ronmental change, as in other areas. But there has been little focus on
this argument, partly because liberals have bent over backwards to
accommodate this criticism. This they have done primarily by making
their analyses highly conditional (if x, y, z conditions hold, then we
can expect cooperation to be easier to achieve than if they don’t)
(Keohane, 1993).
The second focus from a realist perspective can be seen in what has
come to be known as the ‘environmental security debate’. The immedi-
ate origins of this concept seem to lie more in attempts by environmen-
talists to move environmental problems up the political agenda. Yet
such attempts have inevitably drawn them into contact with preexist-
ing notions of security, which derive in great part from realist and
geopolitical traditions ingrained in the practices of policy-makers. Much
of the tale of environmental security discourse has concerned the ten-
sions produced by this engagement. Some traditional policy-makers and
military elites have tried to use ‘environmental security’ to bolster their
power base in a post-Cold War world, while others have suggested that
the link dangerously weakens the traditional focus of national security.
On the other hand, some environmentalists reject the link as politically
dangerous as it would lead to a militarisation of environmental policy,
while many others, aware of this possibility of cooption and militarisa-
tion, have nevertheless attempted to extend the traditional conception
of security to embrace questions of global environmental change.4
It is in its realist variant, however (although the term realist is rarely

used), that the discussion of environmental security has perhaps had
its strongest political impact. This is precisely because the term res-
onates with the interests of many in state elites, particularly within
the military (concerned with their role and their resources after the
collapse of their traditional enemy), and with dominant discourses
concerning the priorities of state decision-makers.
In a realist mode, environmental security is simply an additional
component to preexisting notions of security. The referent of security
(what is to be secured) remains the same – the nation-state – while
only the causes of insecurity have changed (from military enemies to
environmental degradation). Some of these ‘new’ threats are old ones
dressed up as environmental conflicts – the struggle between states for
access to strategic resources. But in general the novelty is found in the
potential for new conflicts over renewable resources (water, croplands,
forests and fisheries are often identified), whereas the old conflicts
were over non-renewable resources (oil, for example) (e.g. Porter, 1998,
p. 217). By and large, however, the means of achieving security have in
this discourse also remained largely the same, despite the shift in focus
concerning the origins of insecurity. The institutions of the military are
conceptualised as useful in responding to environmental change (for
instance, Butts, 1994; Oswald, 1993). This is either because such change
precipitates political conflicts of a conventional type, meaning that
military force is required, or more commonly that the military has the
technology, skills, and so on, to help ameliorate environmental prob-
lems (by helping with monitoring, for example).
There are two senses in which this discourse suggests that environmen-
tal change threatens security. The first is the claim that environmental
change can lead to interstate war. Water is perhaps the most commonly
cited resource over which wars could be fought. The predominant image
in this literature is one where conflicts arise because two or more coun-
tries share a resource, for example a river basin, and one country is able
to prevent others from getting access to the water on which they depend,
and interstate conflict ensues. River basins such as the Nile, the Jordan,
and the Tigris-Euphrates are all often cited as potential sites of such con-
flict, although the likelihood of conflict, and in the case of the Jordan
the role of water conflicts in producing wars which have already hap-
pened, is heavily contested (see, for example, Bulloch and Darwish, 1996;
Kliot, 1994; Hillel, 1995; Thomas and Howlett, 1993; Shaheen, 1997).
The second sense, emphasised in particular by the work of Homer-
Dixon and colleagues (e.g. 1998; 1994) is that while interstate war may
be an unlikely result of environmental changes, internal instability of

states because of such changes is highly plausible. The starkest and
highly popularised version of this argument is in Kaplan’s rather apoc-
alyptic vision (1994). Kaplan portrays a vision of a future based on an
account of West Africa’s present. He suggests that the root of the threat
is ‘nature unchecked’ (1994, p. 190, his italics). He continues:
It is time to understand ‘the environment’ for what it is: the

national security issue of the early twenty-first century. The political
and strategic impact of surging populations, spreading disease,
deforestation and soil erosion, water depletion, air pollution and,
possibly, rising sea levels in critical, overcrowded regions such as the
Nile Delta and Bangladesh – developments that will prompt mass
migrations and, in turn, incite group conflicts – will be the core for-
eign policy challenge. …
(1994, p. 190)
While he does go on to suggest that wars could result from environ-

mental degradation, the primary images of state insecurity he invokes
are of internal decay and collapse, and of the decline in the relevance
of borders, what he calls the ‘lies of mapmakers’. Environmental degra-
dation combined with (and also caused by: see more below on this)
population growth produces rapid unplanned urbanisation, spread-
ing disease and the breakdown of social order as states are unable to
contain such developments.
Kaplan cites the work of Homer-Dixon (1991) as evidence for his the-
sis. Homer-Dixon’s claims are rather more circumspect. Homer-Dixon,
contrary to Kaplan’s usage of his work, does not suggest that environ-
mental degradation will cause or has caused wars (1998, p. 207)
although he suggests a myriad of mechanisms by which such conflict
might occur (e.g. 1991). In fact, he states that ‘there is virtually no evi-
dence that environmental scarcity causes major interstate war’ (1998,
p. 207). But in contrast, he suggests that there is much evidence that
environmental degradation has caused major social conflicts within
societies. He cites examples such as the Chiapas uprising in Mexico,
conflicts in ‘the Himalayas, the Sahel, Central America, Brazil,
Rajasthan, and Indonesia’ (1998, p. 206). Such conflicts are caused
either through resource capture, where powerful social groups provoke
conflict by ‘using their power to shift in their favor the regime govern-
ing resource access’ (1998, p. 205). Alternatively, they are caused by
ecological marginalisation, where the poor are driven into ecologically
marginal areas, which produces both greater ecological destruction and

social conflict. Homer-Dixon doesn’t go anywhere near as far as Kaplan
in projecting this forward as an image of total social collapse, however,
and in some places is relatively optimistic concerning the possibilities
of managing and preventing such conflicts (e.g. 1998, pp. 210 –11).
For this version of an environmental security agenda, then, the refer-
ent is clearly the nation-state. Environmental problems which do not
adversely affect national security are therefore not of concern – as
Elliott puts it, ‘The problem is not environmental degradation per se’
(1998, p. 220). In pieces like Kaplan’s, the realist subtext lies not so
much in a Waltzian certainty of the durability of the states system, but
rather the reverse. Indeed, while Waltz lays a wager in Theory of
International Politics (1979, p. 95) that the states in the world are almost
certain to be around in 10 years’ time, whereas the major multina-
tional corporations are not, Kaplan is confident that they could well
not be around in their current form, even in the case of states like the
US.5 But Kaplan’s is still a realist concern. It has more in common with
a (conservative) moralist version of realism which argues normatively
that states are desirable political forms, providing the basis for individ-
ual security, prosperity, freedom, and so on. Threats to the stability of
states should therefore be avoided.
But at the same time, the realist origins of environmental security
reveal clearly its problems. As Dalby points out (1996), Kaplan’s narra-
tive of environmental degradation producing social collapse, produc-
ing transnational flows (drugs, migration, and so on) which are
destabilising globally, masks the ways in which other transnational
flows (such as trade, finance) themselves help to produce both the
environmental degradation and social collapse which so worries
Kaplan in the first place. The complicity of the ‘West’ in producing
destabilisation in the ‘South’ is evaded.
Starting from basic assumptions similar to those of liberal institu-
tionalists, but with small yet fundamental differences, realists generate
a significantly different research agenda from that of liberals. They
could develop an agenda (although there has been little effort yet to do
so) which argued that liberal institutionalists writing about global envi-
ronmental change were overly optimistic concerning the consequences
of the plethora of international environmental regimes which have
emerged since the 1970s. On the other hand they could generate,
and in some ways have already done so, one version of the ‘environ-
mental security’ debate. I now turn to examine how these two research
agendas make assumptions (usually implicit) concerning the origins of

global environmental change.
The causes of global environmental change

in realist and liberal IR theory
The two clearest examples illustrating the assumptions of realist and

liberal IR theory concerning the origins of global environmental
change can perhaps be found in Vogler (1992) and in Litfin (1993). In
a single paragraph alluding to such questions (he, like others working
in the regime theory framework, states that the fundamental purpose is
to analyse ‘political responses’ to global commons problems [Vogler,
1992, p. 118]), Vogler suggests the following. Firstly he states that polit-
ical and economic problems to do with the commons ‘arise from their
rapid exploitation (made possible through the agency of technological
change) and overuse’ (ibid., p. 121). He then goes on in the same para-
graph to discuss Hardin’s ‘tragedy of the commons’ thesis explicitly.
The consequence of this combination of ad hoc (technological) change
and a collective action explanation of ‘the problem’ leads Vogler to for-
mulate the problem as one of ‘cooperative management’ (ibid., p. 118).
Litfin (1993, p. 105) suggests due to that the ‘post-WWII increase in
population and technological pressures, resources formerly perceived as
vast or even unlimited are now seen as scarce and endangered.
Consequently, the principles of open access and free use that formerly
governed the global commons … have proven themselves inadequate
to the point that “tragedy of the commons” has become virtually a
household term.’ This combination of a set of discrete trends and a
background condition – the ‘tragedy of the commons’, underlies many
discussions of environmental change in IR.
Tragedy of the commons

For many writers on global environmental change, the ‘tragedy of the
commons’ metaphor is a useful model explaining the underlying per-
missive cause of such change. Most writers eschew the apocalyptic lan-
guage of ‘tragedy’, but still invoke the notion of the commons as a
metaphor for many facets of global environmental change. Young, for
example (1989; 1994) suggests such a line of reasoning, citing the
many analyses which have refuted Hardin’s claim on empirical and
theoretical grounds (for instance, Berkes, 1989; Ostrom, 1990; McCay
and Acheson, 1987). The characterisation of global environmental
change as a problem of global commons is ubiquitous (for example,

Vogler, 1995; Rowlands, 1995, pp. 3– 4; Keohane, Haas and Levy, 1993,
p. 10; Soroos, 1997; Buck, 1998).
In this construction, the notion of the commons is used as a way of
describing the nature of global environmental problems. But usually,
the language of ‘tragedy’ is lost. They remain simply as problems
of collective action, concerning the provision of public goods.
Occasionally, Hardin’s language is deliberately invoked as a characteri-
sation of global environmental change (for instance, d’Anieri, 1995,
p. 153; Brenton, 1994, p. 4; Hempel, 1996, p. 84). But even where writ-
ers reject Hardin’s deterministic assumptions concerning the conse-
quences of leaving resources unowned, the premise of an open-access
resource with at least the potential to be overused remains; otherwise
there is nothing either to be explained or to worry about. In other
words, something of Hardin’s image remains.
But in a stronger, yet usually less clearly articulated sense, the
tragedy of the commons metaphor is taken as an explanation of the
causes of global environmental change. In this sense, it is the absence
of a global political authority, or, in the terms of a different yet related
debate, the spatial mismatch between sovereign states and the global
nature of environmental change (Conca, 1994), which acts as a permis-
sive cause of global environmental change. In Hardin’s original narra-
tive, it is not so much that the absence of any property rights in the
commons acts as an obstacle to cooperation, as focused on by Young
and others, but more that such an absence is what creates the incen-
tives for overgrazing in the first place, and therefore the need for coop-
eration. This is the meaning of Hardin’s phrase ‘freedom in a commons
brings ruin to all’ (1968, p. 1244). The herders overgraze because of the
absence of property rights.
Those using Hardin’s metaphor in relation to global environmental
change tend to focus on the way in which the property relations in an
open access resource (which Hardin erroneously called a commons;
see, for example, The Ecologist, 1993, pp. 12–13) create obstacles to
cooperation. Yet the causation of environmental change is an equally
important part of Hardin’s argument. This is a largely unacknowledged
part of the logic of realist and liberal arguments.
Hardin’s metaphor, and the notion of the commons as a cause of
environmental change more generally, does however creep into the
work of some authors. For Sandler (1997, pp. 11–12), environmental
degradation occurs as a result of problems in allocating property rights
(this is the standard formulation among environmental economists).
Such a market failure occurs when property rights are ‘undefined or

owned in common with unrestricted access’ (1997, p. 11). It is the
open access which is the problem here. Sandler’s argument follows a
now common modification of Hardin, rejecting his notion that all
common property leads to his tragedy (Sandler, like Young, cites
Ostrom, 1990). But he does argue that if a resource is to be owned in
common, then there must be restricted access and regulated use.
Similarly, Brenton (1994, p. 4) and Hempel (1996, pp. 84 –5) both also
mention the mixed empirical evidence for Hardin’s thesis. Miller
(1995, pp. 54 –5) cites Hardin’s metaphor both in terms of incentives to
overuse resources and in terms of constraints on cooperation; like the
others already cited, however, she departs from Hardin in suggesting
that collaboration is possible under such conditions.
Nevertheless, the primary image of the commons in writing in IR on
global environmental change is as a constraint to cooperation, and not
as a cause of environmental change. I would suggest that this is at least
in part because since Hardin’s original argument ended up advocating
authoritarian centralised solutions – ‘mutual coercion, mutually agreed
upon’ (Hardin, 1968, p. 1247) – with world government as the corol-
lary in global politics. Some writers do discuss Hardin’s work in this
context, discussing the tragedy as a model of the causes of environ-
mental change (e.g. Wapner, 1996, pp. 28–9). Realists have always been
sceptical concerning the possibility of achieving world government,
and liberals, at least in the ‘international regimes/global governance’
literature, have increasingly moved towards an explicit argument
concerning the possibility of ‘governance without government’.
Consequently, to emphasise the original logic of Hardin’s argument
would run the risk of directly contradicting their own normative argu-
ments. If you aren’t going to emphasise the way in which a system
defined by the absence of property/sovereignty rights at the global
level produces environmental change, then you have less of a problem
in arguing that such a system is compatible with resolving such collec-
tive action problems. The debate can turn on the game-theoretic argu-
ments concerning the possibility of ‘cooperation under anarchy’ (Oye,
1986; Axelrod, 1984; Taylor, 1987), already rehearsed above in relation
to general debates between realists and liberal institutionalists.
Yet perhaps this is a deep contradiction within liberal writings in par-
ticular. Realists have fewer problems with this conclusion; they can
simply argue that perhaps the logic of anarchy in international politics
means that no successful responses to global environmental change
will emerge. Whether this is pessimistic or not, they can refer to this as
one of the ‘realities’ of international relations. But liberals are rather

more optimistic in their assessment of the possibilities of such success-
ful responses. At the same time, they have, at least since the retreat
from the strong pluralist positions of the 1970s by Keohane, towards a
position where interstate anarchy is, as for realists, taken as the defining
feature of international politics (I take Keohane both to be an exemplar
of such a shift, and in some sense a power-broker in it). So while, to the
extent they relate the international system as they see it to causes of
global environmental change, they must do this in terms more or less
of a ‘tragedy’ metaphor. Perhaps this contradiction explains why such
writers tend to focus on particular discrete trends as the causes of global
environmental change, to the extent that they discuss them at all.
Discrete trends
Keohane, Haas and Levy give a set of ‘factors’ which produce environ-
mental degradation. ‘Many environmental threats are caused by such
factors as population pressures, unequal resource demands, and
reliance on fossil fuel and chemical products which degrade the envi-
ronment’ (1993, p. 7). In their conclusion to the same book, they again
give a similar list. ‘Each set of issues has been considered separately,
independently of possible underlying causes such as population
growth, patterns of consumer demand, and practices of modern indus-
trial production’ (Levy, Keohane and Haas, 1993, p. 423). Keohane, in a
more general piece on liberal institutionalist theory, explicitly suggests
that ‘increased economic and ecological interdependence’ are the
result of ‘secular trends’ (1993, p. 285). While the context of this point
is to provide a contrast with realist post-Cold War expectations con-
cerning the demise of institutions, in particular the EU, it also shows
how such things are regarded as having their origins outside the funda-
mental operation of the states system.
Lorraine Elliott gives a list couched in similar terms, albeit in less
‘value-free’ language. She writes, ‘Extensive and excessive resources use,
energy-inefficient lifestyles, industrialisation and the pursuit of eco-
nomic growth are inextricably linked to environmental degradation’
(1998, p. 1). In more generic language, Sandler writes that environ-
mental degradation is the result of ‘the actions of individuals to keep
warm, to feed themselves, and to produce goods and services’, which
will be exacerbated as a result of population growth in developing
countries (1997, p. 2).
Oran Young, despite his extensive writings on the subject, man-
ages to stay remarkably clear of explicit discussions of the causes of
environmental change. In his International Governance (1994), the clos-

est he gets is in stating that ‘human behaviour is a critical driving
force’ (p. 51) which is rather underspecific, to say the least. He then
complements this by saying such behaviour has its origins in the
notion of ‘nature as resource’, there for human instrumental use (ibid.,
citing Lynne White Jr, 1967). In International Cooperation (1989), he
suggests that cooperation will become more elusive concerning envi-
ronmental change ‘as growing human populations, enhanced capabili-
ties, and rising expectations generate more severe conflicts of interest
as well as greater demands on the earth’s natural systems’ (p. 4, see also
pp. 107–8). Some indications as to causes are perhaps implicit in his
threefold typology of environmental problems into commons
problems, shared resources problems, and transboundary externality
problems (1994, pp. 20 – 4; 1997, pp. 7–8). But they are not developed
in his work.
The most extensive treatment in this literature is in the first few
chapters of Nazli Choucri’s edited volume Global Accord: Environmental
Challenges and International Responses (1993). For Choucri, the causes of
environmental change are understood in profoundly individualist and
social-psychological terms. ‘The most fundamental unit … is the indi-
vidual human … who … responds to felt needs, wants, and desires, by
making demands and acting upon natural and social environments in
order to obtain the sustenance without which he/she cannot long sur-
vive’ (Choucri, 1993a, pp. 9–10). This is rather like Sandler’s account
given above, where the origins are in the meeting of human needs and
wants. But Choucri then builds on this to offer an account of why
environmental change has accelerated in the past century. She suggests
it is the ‘intended or unintended consequences to nature resulting
from human action taken in pursuit of narrowly defined human inter-
ests’ (ibid., p. 2). The specificity regarding modern environmental
problems is explained as a result of ‘human knowledge and skills (tech-
nology) interacting with population trends and demands for resources
(and derivatives thereof) [which] have generated environmental prob-
lems worldwide’ (ibid., p. 1). It is these three – population trends, tech-
nology, resource access – which Choucri fixes on as causes of
environmental change (ibid., p. 13).
In the context of an attempt to chart possible scenarios of environ-
mental change through to 2025, Thomas Homer-Dixon systematises
the relationship between these three into a diagram, reproduced as
Fig. 2.1 (Homer-Dixon, 1993, p. 44). Homer-Dixon suggests that the
factors at the top of the diagram (institutions, social relations, beliefs
Institutions
social relations,
beliefs, and
preferences
Population Use per capita of Environmental Social

× tech1...techn effects effects
Available Ecosystem
physical vulnerability
resources
Figure 2.1 Main variables and causal relationships

Source: Choucri, Nazli (ed.) Global Accord: Environmental Challenges and
International Responses, Cambridge MA: MIT Press (1993).
and preferences) are the most important in determining likely trajecto-

ries of social and environmental change. But he refers to these as
‘ideational factors’ (p. 45), He continues: ‘This social and psychological
context is immensely complex’, and then lists a series of such factors:
land distribution; wealth distribution; economic, legal and political
incentives for consumption (including property rights and markets);
family and community structures; patterns of trade; coercive power;
metaphysical beliefs about nature (ibid., p. 45). In what sense can most
of these be regarded sensibly as ideational factors? Surely, it makes
more sense to regard them as structural factors related to the way soci-
eties are organised? I will revisit this point later on.
Homer-Dixon then details particular trends which will be crucial
over the next few decades. He mixes in these particular environmental
trends (climate change, ozone depletion, loss of fisheries and agricul-
tural land, deforestation, reduction in water supply and quality, decline
in biodiversity) with trends in human society (population growth,
energy consumption). These are intended to be particular examples of
more generic phenomena described in the figure, but whether they are
intended to have any explanatory capability is unclear.
In the realist discussion of environmental security, the overriding
dynamic is often taken to be demographic. This can be seen in Kaplan
(1994) and Homer-Dixon (1998), for example. For the former, population
growth and migration are almost taken to be examples of environmental
change in themselves. For Homer-Dixon, population is taken formally to

be one of three sets of dynamics (alongside the physical vulnerability
of the resource in question, and the technological and consumptive
practices of the relevant populations), but it remains a highly empha-
sised theme. The focus on population clearly feeds into the political
problems of the realist environmental security agenda. There is much
in common with the old geopolitical imagery of the West being
‘swamped’ by the poor of the South and, as is often argued by those
critical of too heavy a focus on population growth, it tends to evade
the responsibility of the West, since the ‘problem’ appears to be
produced elsewhere, by someone else.
Towards a structural account of global

environmental change
One of the effects of operating with these two assumptions concerning

the origins of global environmental change is to take existing systems
of power for granted. Firstly, they do this by reducing all relevant forms
of power to the operations of the interstate system.
But this effect operates differently for each of the two forms of
assumption. Concerning the tragedy of the commons, the assumption
is that global environmental change is in part caused by the interstate
system – because it promotes overexploitation of open access resources –
but the interstate system is not put into question as a consequence
(except by ecoauthoritarians, who take the same assumption and fol-
low its logic through). The question becomes one of how international
regimes or patterns of global governance mitigate this competitive,
overexploitative dynamic. The tragedy of the commons is thus treated
either as a conditional consequence of the state system (one which
could or could not produce global environmental change, depending
on various factors), or as a necessary consequence of the system, but
where concerns about the environmental consequences of the state
system are not allowed to override the ontological or normative prior-
ity of that system.
For the second assumption, by contrast, the trends are presented as
ad hoc, not considered as consequences of power. This treatment is at
least in part because power is reduced to its interstate forms, although
many of the trends considered could be seen more as consequences of
other power systems, for example capitalism.
On occasion, this can be associated with the attempt to depoliticise
the analysis, as I suggested in Chapter 1. Oran Young (1997a) provides
much material to support such a claim. Young suggests, for example,

that one of the features of studies of international regimes and/or
global governance is that they attempt to be of direct ‘value to policy-
makers’ (ibid., p. 1). Immediately, the politics of environmental change
is defined as one of management, with ‘policymakers’ as neutral or
(potentially) benign managers. As Saurin suggests, this constitutes a
reduction of agency to policy, which is deeply politically problematic
(1996, p. 94). Later, Young offers a critique of Keohane and Nye’s
model of regime change (1977). He suggests there that ‘It overempha-
sized material conditions in contrast to shifting ideas and configura-
tions of interests; reflected a preoccupation with power, which is
common among students of politics but which is misplaced in the
study of international or transnational regimes’ (Young, 1997a, p. 18).
A clearer attempt to depoliticise the subject would perhaps be difficult
to find. The later chapters of this book will hopefully help to dispel the
notion that global environmental politics can ever be free from ques-
tions of power; here perhaps it will simply be noted that Young’s posi-
tion is in great danger of obscuring the deep political questions
concerning global environmental change through attempts to define it
in neutral terms.
On other occasions, writers in mainstream IR traditions do go some
way towards a structural understanding. Take the introductory chapter
of International Organizations and Environmental Policy, for example
(Bartlett, Kurian and Malik, 1995). Written by the editors (Kurian,
Bartlett and Malik, 1995), this chapter starts to move towards the argu-
ment I will be detailing later, but seems disciplined in a curious man-
ner by (North American) IR. This results in some heavily contradictory
arguments. They outline their understanding of ecological rationality,
which ‘is evident in decisions and actions that result in maintaining a
sustainable relationship between humans and the environment’
(ibid., p. 4). They then argue not that ecological rationality requires a
steady-state society, but that ‘ecological rationality necessarily needs to
take priority to attain some form of steady-state society’ (since it is
the condition of possibility of other sorts of rationality) (ibid.);
the need for a steady-state society comes from somewhere else, unex-
plained except for the first part of the sentence which places the
above quote in ‘the context of ecological scarcity’, citing Ophuls and
Boyan (1992).
The authors continue with arguments which are in many ways con-
sistent with the one developed in Chapter 3. There is a focus on eco-
nomic growth, and the way international organisations and states are
enmeshed in a ‘system that is linked by the imperative of economic

growth’ (ibid.). There is an implicit assumption that growth is environ-
mentally problematic, although the closest the authors get to trying to
argue this is in the use of a quote from Michael Redclift (1987, p. 56,
cited in Bartlett, Kurian and Malik, pp. 4 –5): ‘resource depletion and
unsustainable development are a direct consequence of growth itself’.
There is also a focus on the state and state system as environmentally
problematic (ibid., pp. 5–6); on science (10, 12), and on the contribu-
tion of feminist perspectives (15).
But what is important for the present purposes are two questions.
First is the question of what lies underneath particular identified
dynamics (growth, administrative rationality of the state, and so on).
To continue with the discussion of economic growth, the authors offer
ambiguous arguments concerning whether growth is a systemic imper-
ative or a simple goal which countries aim at. They write that ‘the pres-
sures of economic systems are such that, even in the unlikely event of
nations wishing to stay out of the scramble for growth, they cannot do
so; the coercive reality of survival and the interdependence of all
nations ensure the continuation of an environmentally destructive sys-
tem’ (ibid., p. 5, citing Walker, 1989; Redclift, 1987). But just prior to
the passage quoted it is argued that both ‘capitalist and socialist sys-
tems’ have ‘focused efforts on maximum exploitation of nature’, as a
consequence of ‘notions of resource abundance’. In other words, the
growth imperative is produced by ideologies of nature rather than
systemic pressures.
A second question is, however, how the focus of the whole book
ends up with an almost exclusive focus on international organisations,
after the intimations of something more critical in the opening chap-
ter. The contradiction between the opening focus on the problema-
tic nature of major systems of power with respect to environmental
problems, including statements such as ‘[governments] react to symp-
toms but seldom to causes which tend to be regarded with suspicion as
possibly leading to “subversive” changes’ (ibid., quoting King and
Schneider, 1991, p. 4), and the later focus on international organisa-
tions and the policies they pursue, is striking. It seems to be produced
by the intellectual and disciplinary orthodoxy of IR, especially in
North America. But if the arguments outlined at the book’s beginning
are taken seriously, and especially if the structural, systemic under-
standings in them are emphasised, then much of the rest of the book is
little more than irrelevant, since its basic assumptions have been
undermined.
Hempel (1996) also provides an example of an argument which almost

provides a structural account of environmental problems. Certainly his
aim seems to be to develop such an account:
Rather than attributing environmental destruction to the actions of

a relatively small number of thoughtless and careless individuals, or
to some passing phase of industrial recklessness that accompanies
an otherwise benign evolutionary process of economic develop-
ment, the destruction described here is attributed to driving forces
that are pervasive, persistent, and deeply ingrained in our values,
lifestyles, and institutions.
(Hempel, 1996, p. 52)
Hempel reviews the debate concerning underlying causes of environ-

mental degradation which is often expressed in the equation I:PAT
(ibid., pp. 58–60).6 He suggests that such a numerical model is
inevitably oversimplified, and proposes a qualitative model involving
what he calls eight driving forces. These forces are grouped into four
types, organised hierarchically. He begins with core values, which are
anthropocentrism and contempocentrism. His second set are ampli-
fiers, which are population and technology. The third set is consump-
tive behaviour, comprising poverty and affluence. Finally, there is
political economy, involving on the one hand market failure, and on
the other, the failure to have markets (ibid., pp. 60 –86).
While such a focus is systemic to a degree, in an important sense
Hempel’s analysis misses the point of a systemic or structural argu-
ment. His driving forces are all ultimately presented as if somebody
chose those core values, population levels, or whatever, and as if we
could simply choose different versions of the eight forces which are
consistent with ecological principles. The point which is missed is the
systemic logic which produces these forces in the first place. From this
perspective, it is not a historical accident that anthropocentric ethics
emerged at the point where (at least in north-west Europe) modern
scientific rationality was being developed, where patriarchy was being
reconsolidated, where modern nation-states were emerging, and where
capitalism was starting to take hold as the increasingly dominant
mode of production. The same could be said for many other of
Hempel’s forces.
Hempel’s failure to see the systemic logic underlying his forces pro-
duces particular contradictions. An important one concerns the connec-
tions between particular forces. In particular, the focus on market failure
and failure to have markets comes from a neoclassical perspective where

markets themselves are not problematic. He hints at a critical perspec-
tive when he states that ‘some environmental critics’ have concluded
that ‘the real economic driving force behind environmental destruc-
tion is neither market failure nor the failure to have markets, but rather
the presence of markets that are working too well’ (ibid., p. 83, empha-
sis in the original). But, in general, he follows a conventional line in
arguing that we need to make markets work better to alleviate environ-
mental problems (especially concerning applying markets to particular
resources to ‘price’ them).
However, the points about markets are seen as unconnected to the
points about poverty and affluence. From a structural perspective, the
important point is not to talk about markets in the abstract, but histor-
ically produced capitalist markets, which have engendered poverty and
affluence on a global scale, and the environmental degradation associ-
ated with them.
Similar allusions are made by Keohane, Haas and Levy (1993, p. 7)
and by Elliott (1998, p. 1). The former suggest that ‘while environmen-
tal degradation is ultimately the result of aggregated individual decisions
and choices, individual choices are responses to incentives and other
forms of guidance from governments and other national institutions via
laws, taxes, and even normative pronouncements’ (Keohane, Haas and
Levy, 1993, p. 7). This concedes some ground to a structural perspective,
but not a great deal. Couched in heavily rationalistic tones, it implies
that political structures produce individual decisions in a stimulus–
response manner – choices are ‘responses to incentives’. If structure is
conceived of as constitutive of identity, rather than merely as an exter-
nal constraint, then its consequences are significantly different.
Conclusion
This chapter has shown how the two dominant perspectives in IR gen-
erate particular research agendas for studying global environmental
change. Both start by asking how the international system responds to
such change. Both assume that the system is best characterised as sov-
ereign states interacting in a condition of anarchy, but have different
assumptions concerning the consequences of the assumption of anar-
chy. These different assumptions lead to different research agendas, lib-
eral institutionalists focusing on international environmental regimes,
while realists focus on the potential of global environmental change to
cause international conflict.
I have also tried to show that while they by and large eschew direct
discussion of the causes of environmental change, they nevertheless
contain in their work assumptions concerning such causes. These are
that environmental change is the result of the overexploitation of
commons, of resources owned by no one, and of a set of discrete trends
generating such change. In some formulations (Vogler, 1992; Litfin,
1993) these explanations are combined. The use of the former explana-
tion is often inconsistent, in that the way in which Hardin’s original
formulation emphasising that the lack of property rights over resources
is a cause of environmental change is ignored – the ‘tragedy of the
commons’ simply emerges as an explanation for why cooperation is
difficult to achieve. But ignoring this part of the implication of using a
‘commons’ metaphor creates an inconsistency. The second explanation
begs the question: what underlies trends such as population or techno-
logical change? In later chapters, I will try to illustrate how trends
which generate global environmental change are best understood as
integral to the reproduction of the major power structures of world
politics. In the following chapter I will outline a perspective on global
environmental politics which takes this argument seriously. Here I
have shown that while some authors have tried to develop such a
structural understanding (including Kurian, Bartlett and Malik, 1995;
Hempel, 1996; Elliott, 1998), they have only gone half-way, with
contradictory results.
3
The ‘normal and mundane
practices of modernity’:
Global Power Structures and
the Environment1
The previous chapter offered a critique of the major theories within IR

which address environmental problems and politics. One of the main
conclusions was that those theories have only an implicit explanation
of how environmental problems emerge, and that the implicit explana-
tion they have is dubious at best. This chapter tries to build a theore-
tical approach which explicitly incorporates an explanation of the
emergence of global environmental problems into the framework,
alongside an account of how societies do and should respond to those
problems. In the earlier sections, I confine my discussion to how the
positions I advance explain the emergence of global environmental
change. I discuss responses to such change in the concluding section to
this chapter; many of the points developed there are taken up again in
Chapter 7.2
Green politics and International Relations
Such an approach should perhaps be set in the context of the emerging

literature on Green political theory in IR. The focus of Green political
theory is usually on two themes: on the role of anthropocentric ethics
in reducing the non-human world to being merely of instrumental
value to humans; and on the question of limits to growth. Writers
in IR have started to engage with Green theory, but this literature is
still small.
There is now a well-developed literature on Green political theory
(GPT), which gives a useful base for Green ideas about IR. Three major
works suggest slightly different ideas about the defining characteristics
of Green politics. Eckersley (1992) suggests that the defining character-
istic is ecocentrism – the rejection of an anthropocentric world-view
35
which places moral value only on humans in favour of one which

places independent value also on ecosystems and all living beings.
Goodin (1992) also places ethics at the centre of the Green position,
suggesting that a ‘Green theory of value’ is at the core of Green politi-
cal theory. His formulation is that for a Green theory of value, the
source of value in things ‘is the fact that they have a history of having
been created by natural processes rather than by artificial human ones’
(ibid., p. 27).
Dobson (1990) is the one of these three to have two defining charac-
teristics of Green politics. One is the rejection of anthropocentrism, as
outlined by Eckersley. The other, however, is the ‘limits to growth’ argu-
ment about the nature of the environmental crisis. Greens suggest that it
is the exponential economic growth experienced during the last two
centuries which is the root cause of the current environmental crisis.
Thus it is not the belief in an environmental crisis which is defining, but
the particular (and unique) understanding which Greens have of the
nature of that crisis which makes them distinctive; it is this which, as
Dobson, distinguishes Greens from reformist environmentalists.
Dobson’s position is the most convincing, in my view. A reduction of
the Green position to an ethical stance towards non-human nature,
without a set of arguments about why the environment is being
destroyed by humans, seems to me to lose much of what is central to
Green beliefs and practices. In addition, Goodin’s formulation is highly
problematic, as he posits a notoriously dubious distinction between
things which are ‘natural’ and those which are ‘artificial’, which cannot
be even loosely sustained. Dobson’s two principles can be seen to under-
lie the four principles given in the often-cited Programme of the German
Green Party (1983; Mellor, 1992); ecology, non-violence, decentralisa-
tion and social justice. As formulated by Dobson, and I would agree, the
last three of these can be derived from the first, understood ethically as
ecocentrism and empirically as limits to growth (although of course the
principles could also be derived independently of these connections).3
Ecocentrism4
For Eckersley (1992) ecocentrism has a number of central features.
Firstly, it involves some empirical claims. These involve a view of the
world as composed of interrelations rather than individual entities
(1992, p. 49). All beings are fundamentally ‘embedded in ecological
relationships’ (p. 53). Consequently, there is no convincing criteria
which can be used to make hard and fast ethical distinctions between
humans and non-humans (pp. 49–51).
Secondly, it has an ethical base. Eckersley rejects anthropocentrism

on consequentialist grounds, suggesting that it leads to environmen-
tally devastating results (p. 52), but also argues for ecocentrism on
deontological grounds. Since there is no convincing reason to make
rigid distinctions between humans and the rest of nature, a broad
emancipatory project, to which she allies herself, ought to be extended
to non-human nature. Ecocentrism is about ‘emancipation writ large’
(p. 53). All entities are endowed with a relative autonomy, within the
ecological relationships in which they are embedded, and therefore
humans are not free to dominate the rest of nature.
Ecocentrism therefore has four central ethical features which collec-
tively distinguish it from other possible ethical positions towards the
environment.5 Firstly, it recognises the full range of human interests in
the non-human world, not simply the narrow interest in instrumental
use of particular parts of nature. Secondly, it recognises the interests of
the non-human community. Thirdly, it recognises the interests of
future generations of humans and non-humans. Finally it adopts a
holistic rather than an atomistic perspective – that is, it values popula-
tions, species, ecosystems and the ecosphere as a whole as well as indi-
vidual organisms (p. 46).
Limits to growth
Although the idea clearly has a long lineage, the immediate impetus for
arguments concerning limits to growth came from an influential, con-
troversial and very well-known book published in 1972, The Limits to
Growth (Meadows et al., 1972). The argument there was that exponen-
tial economic and population growth of human societies was producing
an interrelated series of crises. This exponential growth was producing a
situation where the world was rapidly running out of resources to feed
people or to provide raw material for continued industrial growth
(exceeding carrying capacity and productive capacity), and simultaneously
exceeding the absorptive capacity of the environment to assimilate the
waste products of industrial production (Dobson, 1990, p. 15; Meadows
et al., 1972). The team of researchers led by Donella Meadows produced
their arguments based on computer simulations of the trajectory of
industrial societies. They predicted that at current rates of growth,
many raw materials would rapidly run out, pollution would quickly
exceed the absorptive capacity of the environment, and human soci-
eties would experience ‘overshoot and collapse’ some time before 2100.
The details of their predictions have been fairly easily refuted.6
However, Greens have taken their central conclusion – that infinite
exponential growth is impossible in a finite system – to be a central

plank of their position.7 The fact that specific predictions concerning
the timescale within which ecological limits may be breached were
wrong does not prevent us believing in the existence of those limits.
Dobson (1990, pp. 74 –80) suggests there are three arguments which
are important here. Firstly, technological solutions will not work – they
may postpone the crisis but cannot prevent it occurring at some point.
Secondly, the exponential nature of growth means that ‘dangers stored
up over a relatively long period of time can very suddenly have a cata-
strophic effect’ (ibid., p. 74). Finally, the problems associated with
growth are all interrelated. Simply dealing with them issue by issue will
mean that there are important knock-on effects from issue to issue –
solving one pollution problem alone may simply change the medium
through which pollution is carried, not reduce pollution.
From this Greens derive their notions of sustainability. While envi-
ronmentalism concentrates on ‘sustainable development’,8 which pre-
sumes the compatibility of growth with responding to environmental
problems, Greens reject this. Sustainability explicitly requires stabilis-
ing, and in the industrialised countries almost certainly reducing,
throughputs of materials and energy (Lee, 1993). This requires whole-
sale reorganisation of economic systems. Of course many problems
exist with the notion of limits to growth. It is often pointed out that if
growth is measured by GNP, then this bears no necessary relationship
to resource use or pollution levels, since it only measures money flows
(for example, by Hayward, 1994, pp. 95–6). This particular critique
is perhaps a side-issue however; most ecological critiques of growth
focus on the physical flows underpinning the economy rather
than directly on GNP. However, it would seem reasonable to assume
that were there a serious attempt to minimise resource use and pollu-
tion, then this would ultimately have consequences for GNP growth.
I develop a discussion of growth again further below, in relation to
capitalism.
Green politics and IR theory

It is only recently that a number of writers within International
Relations have started to take up the themes developed in Green
political theory. Most have simply tried to outline Green political
thought for the purposes of people working in International Relations,
and in particular to attempt to relate the concerns raised by Greens
to those raised within existing perspectives. For example, Hovden
(1998), Laferriere (1996), Laferriere and Stoett (1999), Mantle (1999),
and Paterson (1996c) all engage in comparisons between Green theory

and existing strands of IR theory. Laferriere (1996), for example,
contrasts an ecological approach to IR to those of realists and ‘critical
IR’ theories. He makes emancipation the connection between the
diverse strands of critical IR theory, and suggests that ecology can
provide a ‘distinct voice’ (p. 73) within critical IR. There are three
aspects to the distinctiveness of ecology for Laferriere (p. 74). Firstly, it
connects the domination of ‘nature’ to forms of domination within
human societies. Secondly, it provides ways out of the debate in critical
theory about foundationalism by remaining critical of the arrogance
of the ‘certainty associated with the modern project’ (p. 74), while
retaining assumptions about nature that provide a basis for redirect-
ing human societies. Thirdly, ecology is able to connect peace to
emancipation (pp. 74 –5). Laferriere and Stoett (1999) develop the con-
nections made by Laferriere between Green thought and the three
strands of IR theory in much greater detail. Hovden (1998) develops
similar arguments, but is more careful to distinguish between
critical theory (that is, the Frankfurt School) and poststructural IR
theory, and argues more forcefully that Green theory has more in
common with the former than the latter. Mantle (1999) corrects
the absences of feminism from the discussions of Hovden and of
Laferriere and Stoett, and persuasively argues that the closest connec-
tions which Green theory has to other approaches in IR are to femi-
nism. Helleiner (1996), contrasts a Green perspective with those
of liberals, Marxists and economic nationalists in IPE. All suggest
that Green IR theory could develop into a distinctive perspective
within IR, although most also discuss connections with existing theo-
retical perspectives, particularly Marxian, critical-theoretic, feminist,
and poststructuralist.
The purposes of Kuehls (1996), Doran (1995), Dalby (1998b) and
Stewart (1997) are slightly different. They all advance arguments from
poststructuralist positions which are also all, at least at a fairly funda-
mental level, consistent (in their eyes at least) with a Green position.
Kuehls’ intention is to interrogate Green (or ‘ecopolitical’) theory as
much as that of IR; to argue (among other things) that Green theorists,
like IR theorists, remain committed to models of politics based on sov-
ereign notions of political space (see the final section to this chapter).
In a similar vein, Dalby (1998b) also questions Green commitments to
localism, suggesting instead non-territorial notions of political space,
based on networks, like Kuehls’ use of the ‘rhizomes’ of Deleuze and
Guattari (see also Chapter 7).
Global power structures and global environmental politics
There is clearly an explanation in the literature on Green political the-

ory and on Green politics and International Relations, of the origins of
global environmental change. For Laferriere and Stoett (1999), for
example, such causes are political. They are the result of material
growth, the use and development of state power, and Newtonian sci-
ence (1999, p. 4, p. 72). They summarise the ecological crisis
as a crisis of ‘domination and exploitation’ (p. 98). Kuehls similarly
locates the origins of global environmental change in accumulation
and practices of ‘governmentality’ (Kuehls, 1996, p. 83; passim).
But the weakness of such arguments is that, as with those of Hempel
or Choucri discussed in Chapter 2, they are not structuralist enough.
There is a need to understand the structures which produce these
ethics and social imperatives. Anthropocentrism does not exist in a
social and historical vacuum; rather it has emerged as part of an ideo-
logical system underpinning the emergence of modern science, of cap-
italism, of the modern state, and of specifically modern forms of
patriarchy. Likewise, notions of limits to growth need to be supple-
mented with an understanding that growth is a systemic imperative for
capitalist economies, and has been systematically promoted by states
both because of their relationship to capitalism, and because of the
dynamic of interstate competition and state-building. I am perhaps
overemphasising the extent to which this is not part of the under-
standing of many Green theorists and their interpreters, but neverthe-
less I think the tendency exists.
My argument is that the politics of global environmental problems
should be understood as phenomena internal to the logics of four
main, interrelated, power structures of world politics: the state system;
capitalism; knowledge; and patriarchy. These power structures are cru-
cially implicated in the generation of environmental problems, and
cannot uncritically be used in responding to those problems. The polit-
ical implications of the global environmental crisis therefore lead to a
challenge to these structures themselves, and the normative claims of
studying global environmental politics are for a politics of resistance,
not of improving the way international treaties and institutions
operate. Such an argument, I would argue, is consistent with the
themes emphasised in Green political theory. If ecocentric ethics
understand the problem of anthropocentrism to be bound up with
broader dynamics of domination (patriarchal, statist, scientific) and
limits to growth are understood in terms of the political-economic
dynamics of capitalist accumulation through which such limits are

breached, then this is simply one way of specifying these two themes.
This argument is not entirely original. Within International Relations,
a similar argument has been made by Ken Conca (1993). His focus
is slightly different, in that it is on whether ‘global ecological inter-
dependence’ is something which may produce structural change in the
major structures of world politics (rather than the question of how
those structures generate environmental problems). He focuses on
capitalism, the states system (with a focus on sovereignty) and moder-
nity (taken to mean the hegemonic ideological form which dominates
contemporary societies). But his assumption is clearly that those struc-
tures are problematic from an environmental point of view. ‘The glob-
alization of sovereignty, capitalism, and modernity has not been
premised on principles of ecological sustainability’, he writes (Conca,
1993, p. 321).
Julian Saurin (1994) makes a similar argument. Drawing on Giddens,
he uses the concept of modernity (here meaning a broader complex of
practices than simply knowledge and ideology as identified by Conca)
to refer to the broad set of social structures and practices emerging
originally in north-west Europe but gradually becoming globalised over
the last several centuries. He places ‘technical rationalism’ (1994, p. 49)
at the core of modernity, but it subsumes many of the features identi-
fied here, including capital, bureaucratic state practices and modern
scientific knowledge. ‘The core claim about modernity’, he writes, ‘is
that large-scale and systematic degradation occurs from its ordinary
and standard practices’ (1994, p. 46).9 While the practices producing
environmental problems are perhaps mundane, they are very much
the ‘normal and mundane practices of modernity’ (Saurin, 1994, p. 62).
However, these arguments are particularly poorly represented in
studies of environmental problems within IR. That field is dominated
by the work of writers in traditions discussed in Chapter 2. Arguments
such as those put forward by Conca, Saurin, or many feminists (such as
Seager, 1993) are still marginal within the study of global environmen-
tal politics. In what follows I focus primarily on how the structures I
identify systemically generate global environmental change. I turn
later to questions of political responses.
It should hopefully be reasonably clear that when I use the term
structure I do not intend this to mean that such structures are
immutable, inexorable. I regard such structures as conceptual contructs
which help us understand the complexities of the social world. I regard
them as historically evolving, and as undergoing transformations.
Nevertheless, it is useful to regard them as structures in the sense that

they tend to reproduce their basic principles through the practices of
actors operating within them, and thus tend to reproduce the way in
which they confer power on actors differentially. They thus act on a
variety of actors (individuals, firms, states, a variety of collectivities)
both in terms of constraints on action, and also in terms of producing
identities and thus practices. Understanding the dynamics of these
structures is therefore of key importance in establishing the possibili-
ties for agency in responding to global environmental change.
Robert Cox gives a good account of how I understand the usage of
the term structure, and is worth quoting at length:
Some authors have used ‘structure’ to mean innate ideas or patterns

of relationship that exist independently of people; they think of
people as merely bearers of structures. No such meaning is intended
here. There is, of course, a sense in which structures are prior to
individuals in that children are born into societies replete with estab-
lished and accepted social practices. However these practices,
whether taking the forms of language, legal systems, production
organization, or political institutions, are the creation of collective
human activity. Historical structures, as the term is used in this book,
mean persistent social practices made by collective human activity
and transformed by collective human activity.
(Cox, 1987, p. 4)
Cox focuses primarily on the production relations of capitalism while

I try to cast the net more broadly. But the understanding of struc-
ture remains broadly the same as that adopted by Cox and other
neo-Gramscians (for instance, Gill, 1993).
The states system

There is of course a minefield involved in defining the states system (or
the other structures I discuss) and I will inevitably privilege some views
over others. Nevertheless, some specification of that system is necessary.
As it has emerged historically, I would characterise the modern
states system in terms of the consolidation of institutional complexes
of power around territorially defined states. Such consolidation has
involved state elites in concentrating control over ‘their’ territories,
and in producing both the land as territory and the people occupying
that land as citizens (see, for instance, Kuehls, 1996, chs 2 and 3). At the
same time it has engaged them in acts of legitimation, both internal
and external. Internally it has involved building constituencies of sup-

port for their rule, and identities which promote ‘national’ cohesion –
‘imagined communities’ (Anderson, 1983). Externally, it has involved
the construction of sets of rules by which separate states can interact
with each other in an orderly way. Perhaps the most fundamental of
these has become the institution of sovereignty, whereby states have
produced each other as formally independent, but it also involves
many other rules and conventions, as for example in Bull’s account
(1977, p. 74 and chs 5–9) of the institutions of international society:
the balance of power, international law, rules of diplomacy, war, and
the special position of great powers.10
In such a view, war-making has been a necessary component of state-
making (Tilly, 1985). It is not just that war has been a means for states
to increase their power vis-à-vis other states. It has also been a means
through which a population has been made into a ‘nation’; a disci-
plined group of people with a shared sense of identity. And this shared
sense of identity has been constructed through opposition to others.
Fighting others has been a means though which these national identi-
ties have been produced.
Such a view of the states system is by no means incompatible with a
view that international cooperation, such as over environmental
change, can be extensive. It is not simply saying that the international
system is inevitably conflictual. Rather, the point here is that this
system has certain internal dynamics which have helped to produce
environmental change. Although what follows is inevitably an over-
simplification, these dynamics can be summarised in this way.
Firstly, state-building, both to intensify control over territories inter-
nally, and to wage war against other states more effectively, has meant
that state elites have systematically promoted accumulation. They have
needed primarily to extract surplus from populations more efficiently,
in order to generate resources for such state-building. This has helped
both to create a surplus which has then been used in part for invest-
ment in order to promote further accumulation (the development of
military technology also involved here has had spin-offs for non-
military uses) and to create incentives to increase incomes in order to be
able to pay the new taxes without becoming worse off. This was in par-
ticular helped by shifts in forms of taxation from being in kind (tithes,
and so on) to being in cash (taxes), meaning that people had to partic-
ipate in a cash economy to be able to pay their taxes. Through this
means alone, states helped to expand the scope of a market-based econ-
omy. Accumulation, and particularly resource-intensive accumulation
(states having interests in heavy use of resources needed for warfare –

timber for ships, iron/steel, coal, etc.), has therefore been an integral
part of the operation of the states system. Finally, as populations were
increasingly mobilised to serve state requirements, states had to legit-
imise themselves to those populations. This is perhaps part of the
explanation of the origins of welfare states (Mann, 1986) but in partic-
ular it becomes an additional dynamic underpinning the accumulation
imperative for states – increased consumption becomes a way of
legitimising state rule. As the following section outlines in more detail,
states also promote accumulation due to their role in reproducing
capitalist social relations.
Secondly, the military competition which has been present through-
out the history of the states system has itself generated environmental
change. In part, this is because the environment has been an instru-
ment and a casualty of warfare itself, as strategists have used and
abused ecosystems to give themselves military advantage (Finger, 1991;
Westing, 1986). But, in addition, military-intensive development has
generated a particularly heavy use of highly toxic chemicals, explo-
sives, and so on, which themselves produce environmental degrada-
tion, even in peacetime (see Seager, 1993, pp. 14 –69 for example).
Thirdly, the states system has facilitated various acts of what might be
called environmental displacement. The existence of borders, combined
with a (globalising) capitalist economy has meant that environmental
degradation can be exported. International inequalities can be used so
that rich countries can exploit the desires of poorer countries for export
earnings or investment by exporting either pollution directly (as
in toxic wastes, see Puckett, 1992, 1994; Wynne, 1989; Clapp, 1994) or
dirty industries which then pollute elsewhere (see e.g. Seager, 1993,
pp. 154 –6). Displacement can also occur in responses to environmental
change, where the interstate system allows state elites to direct attention
and blame on to others for causing environmental change (Hay, 1994).
Finally, at a more philosophical level, the modern state both repre-
sents, and has sedimented in other areas of social life, abstracted
notions of hierarchy and domination in their purest forms. Bookchin
(1980; 1982), for example, suggests that the state is the ultimate hierar-
chical institution which consolidates all other hierarchical institutions.
Such institutions of domination simultaneously involve the domina-
tion of some humans by others and the domination of non-humans by
human societies. The political institutions of rule cannot therefore be
disconnected from the ‘domination of nature’. Furthermore, forms of
state rule under modernity have become progressively rationalised and
bureaucratised. Such abstract systems of rule rely on similarly abstract

forms of knowledge and ways of knowing, which feminists and many
ecologists suggest are deeply problematic in ecological terms. I will
return to this topic.
Through these dynamics, it is at least historically the case that states
and the states system have generated environmental change as a prod-
uct of their internal operation. Through the promotion of accumula-
tion, military competition, practices of ecological displacement, and
rationalised rule, states systemically produce environmental degrada-
tion. It is of course a stronger argument to say that they cannot be
reformed so that they do not produce such environmental change or
degradation in a systematic fashion. Much of this sort of a debate ends
up turning on a semantic discussion of when is a state (system) not
a state (system), which is not particularly useful. I turn to questions
of political change in Chapter 7. For present purposes, it is enough
perhaps to demonstrate that the operations of states have historically
produced environmental change, and that this cannot plausibly be
thought of as an ‘accident’.
Thus, for example, Litfin is mistaken when she writes:
The traditional goals of the modern state – ‘to defend borders and
promote industrial development’ [Princen, Finger and Manno, 1995,
p. 50] – are arguably in friction with the quest for ecological
integrity. But no a priori reason exists for saying that environmental
protection cannot become one of the state’s primary objectives, and
there is evidence that it is doing just that.
(1997, p. 195)
By contrast, there are very good a priori reasons for claiming that
‘environmental protection cannot become one of the state’s primary
objectives’, and to the extent that ‘it is doing just that’, such a goal is
in fundamental conflict with other state imperatives. Unlike those
imperatives, however, sustainability cannot become a structural require-
ment for the reproduction of state rule, and thus the system must be
transformed.
Capitalism
As with the states system, reaching a working definition of capitalism
is far from an uncontroversial exercise. I start however with what I take
to be a fairly conventional account derived from (although not used
exclusively by) Marxism. Capitalism is a social system which is based
primarily on the commodification of labour; that is, that human

labour is treated like any other commodity, and has a price which can
be traded freely in the market. It is the efficiency of this form of extrac-
tion of surplus value from labour which has generated the system’s
extraordinary productive potential (rather than the efficiency of a ‘free
market’ as argued by liberal economists).
The ways in which capitalism has been systemically ecologically
damaging can be outlined along (at least) four general dimensions.
Firstly, the productive potential of capitalist social relations (wage
labour) combined with the competition facing capitalists in the mar-
ketplace, and the technological dynamism produced by these two fea-
tures, mean that the capitalist economic system requires growth in
order to survive. Perhaps the simplest expression of this is that within
modern capitalist economies a lack of growth is the definition of crisis
(recession). Growth on the scale of the economy as a whole is the
corollary of the need for firms in a competitive situation to maximise
profits. As firms make those profits and recirculate them in terms of
investment or consumption, new investments mean greater productiv-
ity and further increases in production and consumption. If the system
as a whole were unable to grow, then individual firms would eventu-
ally run out of profitable investments.
In addition, because of the necessity of economic growth for capital-
ism to survive, those organising such growth, defined generally as cap-
ital, gain a great deal of power with respect to state decision-making. In
this context, therefore, the state’s fundamental purpose is to secure the
conditions under which capital accumulation (economic growth) can
proceed smoothly. This involves the state in securing collective goods
(such as defence and the rule of law) so that growth can occur, mediat-
ing social conflicts produced by class relations, appearing as neutral so
that class domination is obscured. (This is in addition to any growth
dynamic identified earlier with regard to the states system.) Therefore,
those who own the means of production gain a structurally powerful
position within states. They come to have veto power in relation to
state policies.
As a consequence, even if one were unpersuaded by the abstract
limits-to-growth argument, then whenever the formulation of environ-
mental policies hurt the capacity for businesses to make adequate
profits, these policies will come up against opposition from the most
powerful group in society. The growth dynamic of capitalism provides
a powerful constraint against responding effectively to environmental
change. This means that states face inevitable legitimation crises in
the face of environmental crises; crises imposed by a contradiction

between the structural necessity to promote capital accumulation, and
the necessity to legitimate state practices, which often requires making
some attempt to resolve environmental problems (Hay, 1994).
The limits-to-growth argument should be understood in this context.
Most Greens tend simply to assert the existence of such limits, and
argue that we need a change of social attitudes, voluntary simplicity,
and so on. The analysis here suggests that basic structural constraints
affect the prospects for moving towards such goals, and the latter
require much more than simply changes in lifestyles and government
policies. Such a goal requires changing the basic forms of social rela-
tions, away from those which systemically generate and require
growth. This should not, however, be taken as an argument wholly for
an ecosocialist position on the question of ‘industrialism vs capitalism’.
Atkinson (1991, p. 5) has a resolution of this I find persuasive: ‘In prac-
tice there is no fundamental contradiction between these views. If we
are to de-escalate our ecological crisis then it will be necessary to
restructure productive industry along the lines envisaged by the
Greens. But it is also true that any headway in this direction will be
made over the dead body of capitalism; the very soul of capitalism is
the requirement for economic growth … ’.
A second ecologically damaging dynamic of capitalism concerns the
notion of commodification. One of the main secular trends of capital-
ism has been to commodify increasing amounts of the world. In other
words, more and more things become commodities, things produced
for sale in markets. One ecological consequence of this, as has often
been pointed out, is that ‘nature’ has become ‘natural resources’.
Capitalist development has involved humans breaking down the
complex wholes of ecosystems, and so on, into their constituent
parts in search of economically profitable resources for production.
Commodification thereby renders the world as both an object, and
more precisely as a set of objects which are treated independently of
each other. Thus the interactions between different parts of ecosys-
tems, necessary for the continued functioning of the biosphere,
are obscured from view by the rationalising imperative of capitalist
production.
Thirdly, capitalism necessarily generates environmental problems
because of the way in which firms must subordinate all other concerns
to the primary goal of profit-maximisation. Profit-maximisation is
particular to the nature of capitalist markets (as opposed to, for
example, guild-organised markets which were prevalent in medieval
Europe) because of the way in which restrictions on competition were

progressively stripped away as capitalism emerged; firms face sufficient
insecurity (no regulations exist to guarantee their existence) and there-
fore they need to maximise profits in order simply to maximise their
chance of continued existence. As a result, other concerns, such as
the sustainability of their practices, have to be subordinated to profit
maximisation.11
This argument is in many ways consistent with a focus on externali-
ties as generators of environmental problems. For liberal economists,
the ultimate origin of any environmental problem is the lack of prop-
erty rights assigned to the resource, ecosystem, etc., which is degraded.
A consequence of this is that goods traded in markets do not have the
value of such resources included in them – the value of (for example) a
stable climate is an externality in relation to the price of coal. But for
this critical reading, the fact that firms do not have to take environ-
mental costs into account is still a large part of the explanation of
why environmental problems emerge. However, this perspective might
also suggest that in practice firms are likely to resist attempts to incor-
porate those environmental costs, as this could affect their competitive-
ness.12 This would be especially the case since the emergence of a
genuinely global economy, whereby accelerated and deregulated capital
movements enhance the exit options and hence structural power of
those firms resisting the development of environmental regulations.
A final ecologically damaging feature of capitalism concerns inequal-
ity. Many (not only Marxists) would suggest that capitalism necessarily
generates increasing inequality, particularly on a global scale. This
would be the position adopted, for example, by most Marxist writers
on global politics, as well as dependency theorists and many Greens.
Historically, the practices of imperialist states have very clearly impov-
erished large parts of the world. But this argument is slightly stronger,
that the continuation of capitalist economies depends on the creation
of inequality. Marx’s explanation for economic crises in capitalism cen-
tred on an ‘underconsumption’ hypothesis – that the tendency for
individual capitalists to pay workers only subsistence wages meant that
the capacity of capitalists collectively to realise value was compromised
since there would not be enough effective demand for the goods pro-
duced. This is also part of his explanation for why capitalism could not
survive as a social system. One common explanation for the inaccuracy
of his predictions of capitalism’s demise is the emergence of the welfare
state which cushioned the ‘immiseration of the masses’, but perhaps
more importantly the emergence of employers who strategically raised
wages to try to get round this problem. Henry Ford’s five-dollar day is
often cited as important here.
But perhaps this inequality was simply displaced to global levels. The
industrialisation of the West was made possible by the extraction of
cheap raw materials using cheap labour from colonies, and the contin-
ued growth of the world economy is still dependent on the ability to
have sharply differing standards of living across the globe (and
arguably within particular societies as well), for example, to be able to
exploit cheap labour for particular parts of production.
Such global inequalities have clearly produced ecological conse-
quences. The clearest examples of these concern the relationship
between the debt crisis, structural adjustment, and deforestation. The
export dependence of many developing countries has meant that once
they incurred large debts to fund industrialisation programmes in the
late 1970s, and were unable to repay them following the oil price-hike
of 1979 and the interest-rate rises of the early 1980s, they turned to
increasing exports of their natural resources to increase their earnings
to pay off these debts. Such a process was intensified by IMF- and
World Bank-imposed policy changes known collectively as structural
adjustment. Even without the debt crisis and its political responses,
however, the organisation of the global economy has meant that many
countries depend heavily on using their natural resources to be able to
earn foreign currency and participate in the global economy. A particu-
larly stark example of this concerns toxic wastes, where what Lawrence
Summers, a World Bank (and later Clinton administration) official,
termed the ‘underpolluted’ nature of many developing countries in
economic terms has meant that their poverty has induced them to take
in dangerous wastes which richer countries export. Within capitalism,
such a development is not just inevitable, but rational. As Summers
pointed out, ‘The economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic
waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable’ (as cited in Karliner,
1997, p. 148).
Combined, such arguments suggest that a capitalist society necessar-
ily generates global environmental change. Its basic productive drive
leads it to generate an ever-intensified throughput of resources. It also
continually must increase the range of things brought into the realm
of market exchanges in order to generate new sources of accumulation,
and treats such things as commodities, as objects for human instrumen-
tal use. As firms are forced into ‘cut-throat’, ‘grow or die’ strategies,
profit margins become the ultimate source of value and all other values,
including ecological ones, must be subordinated to that imperative.
Moreover, the accumulation process depends on exploiting and intensi-

fying global differentials in income, generating incentives for the poor
to rely on particularly resource-intensive forms of development in an
attempt to ‘catch up’.
Knowledge and power

The third structure is that surrounding the production and distribution
of knowledge. Mainstream IR views focus on how scientific knowledge,
and ‘rational management’, are essential for successful responses to
global environmental problems. This would be in line with ‘common-
sense’ arguments that good scientific knowledge is necessary both to
be able to identify environmental problems, but also to provide the
tools to respond effectively to them. Thus a prevalent argument is that
international cooperation on environmental problems depends on suf-
ficient availability of scientific information to be able to assess the
rationality and effectiveness of various strategies, but also on the exis-
tence of an epistemic consensus among the relevant scientific experts
(see, for example, Andresen and Ostreng, 1989; in its ‘epistemic
communities’ variant, see Haas, 1990a).
Again, however, many critics interpret modern scientific rationality
and scientific institutions as underlying structural causes of environ-
mental problems. There are two aspects to this argument. Firstly, mod-
ern science was founded on the dualistic assumption of human
separation from and domination over the rest of the natural world,
and in fact for many scientists its purpose has been precisely to further
this separation and domination. Many writers suggest that this has led
to anti-ecological attitudes and practices. This is because the rest of the
natural world has been reduced to an object for human instrumental
use, whereas conceiving it as an end in itself would probably produce
less ecologically damaging behaviour. It is also because of the way in
which science (or at least, dominant traditions within science) has
adopted a reductionist methodology, where phenomena are reduced to
their constituent parts, and analysed as individuals. Science has there-
fore been less well focused (perhaps only until recently) on the interac-
tions between things; yet it is primarily in these interactions that
environmental problems emerge. This account is developed by, for
example, Plumwood (1993), Merchant (1980) White Jr (1967) and Smith
(1996). On the emergence of more ecological, holistic, approaches
within science, see in particular Worster (1994).
As scientific endeavour has expanded with modern societies, the
nature of the hazards created by modern technologies is such that the
experimental logic which could be used to generate ‘proof’ of environ-

mental degradation (as assumed by those advocating science as the
solution to the environmental crisis) fails to achieve its potential (Beck,
1995). It is this which Beck terms ‘organized irresponsibility’; the sys-
temic production of large-scale technological hazards occurs in a man-
ner which makes clear connections of causality, responsibility and
proof impossible to ascertain (ibid.).
The second aspect is that the emergence of science, particularly in
combination with the emergence of capitalism and the modern state
(which have gone alongside each other), and the transformation of
patriarchy produced in part by modern science, has transferred legiti-
macy concerning knowledge about environmental problems to particu-
lar elites, whereas without science they would have been more evenly
distributed. Science has become a way in which control over environ-
ments has been taken away from individuals or communities and
given to experts, who increasingly live away from the environments
which they are charged with ‘managing’, and thus have no personal
interest in whether the management of those environments is sustain-
able, or whether it meets the needs of those who do depend on it. But
if successful responses to environmental problems rely on those who
depend on resources being able to control how they are used, then at
the very least the particular organisation of modern science (being elit-
ist rather than democratic) is problematic from an environmental
point of view (Ecologist, 1993, pp. 67–9, 183–6; Banuri and Apffel-
Marglin, 1993; Beck, 1995, ch. 7; Gorz, 1994).13
Patriarchy
The fourth structure is that of patriarchal power. Here, the argument is
slightly different, since no one (explicitly) argues that patriarchy is
good for the environment. It is more that mainstream views would be
blind to the impact of patriarchal forms of power on global environ-
mental problems. However, a full understanding of the politics of these
problems must recognise the gendered distribution of power, resources
and identity.
This distribution both generates global environmental problems and
constrains the ability of proposals to respond to environmental prob-
lems. Three strands (at least) to an argument connecting patriarchy to
the generation of environmental change can perhaps be identified.
Firstly, central to modern masculine identity is individualism – the
notion that humans are fundamentally independent individuals, and
should strive to avoid dependence on others. Modern political ideas of
freedom are heavily dependent on this form of identity. Feminists have

shown how this idea has in modern times applied only to men, but is
in any case false empirically. The independence of men depends in
fact on the subordination of women, that women are doing the ‘repro-
ductive labour’ of providing food and clothing and looking after
the home, as well as reproducing, and bringing up children. As
Plumwood refers to it, such dependence and the work of women in
producing the basis for mens’ ‘independent’ lives is ‘backgrounded’
(Plumwood, 1993).
The effect, however, of individualist ideology on environmental
problems has been that as individual freedom has been made para-
mount, it has become more difficult to question the knock-on effects
of people’s actions (in economist’s terms the ‘externalities’). Therefore
proposals to solve environmental problems, which involve curbing
this individual freedom, are more difficult to promote. Feminists sug-
gest that a marginalised rationality, which is not individual but com-
munal, and which has traditionally been associated throughout
patriarchy with women, is more appropriate for dealing with environ-
mental problems.
Secondly, and of course linked to masculinist individualism, is the
notion of instrumental rationality. Feminists have shown how the
emergence of modern science in the sixteenth century can be impli-
cated in producing environmental problems. Carolyn Merchant in par-
ticular shows this in The Death of Nature (1980). The emergence of
modern science, with people like Francis Bacon, involved a shift from
thinking about the natural world as something on which humans
depended, which may at times be difficult, but something over which
humans had little control, towards an idea that nature was something
which humans could and should ‘master’ or dominate. Francis Bacon
was very explicit about this. What emerged was the idea that nature
only really exists for human use. This instrumental rationality – that it
is rational and right to use things as and when they are useful to you –
has as its consequence that there should be no moral constraints
on this instrumental use. But this has arguably meant that it has
become much easier to pollute the rest of the world, and to overexploit
nature, since it is now seen merely as ‘natural resources’ (just there
for human use).
This emergence of instrumental rationality was also highly gendered.
Women in Bacon’s language were not fully rational, and therefore were
considered as part of nature, not part of humanity. They were therefore
to be used (and abused) by men just like animals, plants and rocks.
This is very explicit in his writings, and is a prevalent idea in Western

thought – which identifies men with culture, and women with nature.
It is this, perhaps more than anything, which is at the root of claims by
feminists that the domination of women by men and the domination
of nature by humans are closely linked. Indeed, for some, the domina-
tion of women by men is often regarded as having been one of the ear-
liest forms of human domination, and one which enabled later forms
of domination to emerge, in particular the domination of (the rest of)
nature by humans (e.g. Bookchin, 1982).
The route out, for feminists (as also for many environmentalists), is
to stop thinking about nature as simply ‘natural resources’, simply
something there for human use. Also, this involves rethinking science,
moving away from ‘reductionist’ and ‘dualist’ science (see earlier), and
towards ‘holistic’ science, which sees the world as a whole rather than
merely the sum of its parts. Then, it is claimed, it will be easier to iden-
tify the connections between species, ecosystems, etc., and therefore
the effects which human interventions in the environment might have.
The interaction of these two features of (modern) patriarchal societies
can be used to analyse Hardin’s (in)famous ‘tragedy of the commons’,
already mentioned in different contexts. In this context, it is clear that
the herdsmen are following individualist, and instrumental rationality. By
thinking only about themselves, and aiming merely to use the commons
rather than preserve it, they overgraze. While it is of course simplistic to
suggest that if they had been herdswomen, these rationalities would have
been less likely to prevail and overgrazing to occur, the point that the
modes of rationality which prevail in Hardin’s metaphor are masculin-
ist and specific to (modern, capitalist) patriarchal societies remains (see
Mellor, 1992, pp. 232–3, for a feminist critique of Hardin’s thesis).
The third plank of a feminist argument about the environment is a
power-based one. It suggests that male domination over women means
that the effects of actions which damage the environment can be
divided up so that the polluters (mostly white, affluent, Western men)
do not suffer the consequences – these are felt primarily by women, non-
Westerners, and ethnic minorities in the West.14 While one effect of this
power is to facilitate the generation of environmental change, it can
most clearly be seen in the way that patriarchal power remains a signifi-
cant obstacle to responding successfully to environmental problems.
Male power in many societies still means that men are able to displace
the effects of environmental problems. For example, it is well docu-
mented that within agriculture in many developing countries, men
arrogate commercial agriculture to themselves, making sure that they
work on the most fertile land, and that they can participate in the cash
economy. Women are predominantly left with responsibility for subsis-
tence agriculture, on the poorer land, as well as with responsibility for
other subsistence activities such as collection of water and wood. Thus
they bear the brunt of environmental problems such as desertification
and deforestation, having to travel progressively longer distances to meet
subsistence needs (Sontheimer, 1991; Dankelman and Davidson, 1988).
The operation of modern patriarchy is, of course, inextricably bound
up with the emergence of modern science, capitalism and the state sys-
tem. Modern science, at its inception with people such as Bacon and
Descartes, had the defining of women as nature and therefore as objects,
as one of its core projects (e.g. Merchant, 1980; Plumwood, 1993). The
emergence of the contract as one of the legal foundations of capitalism
and the state in the seventeenth century also had redefining the subor-
dination of women as one of its core aims (Pateman, 1988). Capitalism
continues to be dependent on super-exploitation of women’s labour in
reproducing the labour power of male workers, as well as in child-rearing
(Mellor, 1992, pp. 208–12; Henderson, 1978; Mies, 1986; Waring, 1988).
Development and the production of global

environmental change
These structures and their effects clearly interact with each other. Some
interactions were intimated above, although these connections have
not been developed. The argument here is that these structures interact
primarily in mutually supportive ways. They reinforce each other in
ways which mean that those with power within them are able to main-
tain their power, and also in ways which exacerbate the effect of each
on global environmental politics. Indeed, in a pure sense, it is perhaps
misleading to say that they interact with each other, since it would be
more accurate to say that they are mutually constitutive of each other –
they are each other’s condition of possibility. In other words, it is an
abstraction to talk of the states system without reference to its patriar-
chal, capitalist, scientised form. However, it is a necessary abstraction
which for our purposes here we have to live with.
The closest conception to the interpretation advanced here is the
position developed by Alan Carter (1993). Carter outlines an ‘environ-
mentally hazardous dynamic’. This is one where:
a centralised, pseudo-representative, quasi-democratic state stabi-

lizes competitive, inegalitarian economic relations that develop
‘non-convivial’, environmentally damaging ‘hard’ technologies,

whose productivity supports the (nationalistic and militaristic) coer-
cive forces that empower the state.
(Carter, 1993, p. 45)
This scenario necessarily produces a high degree of production of

military weapons, which is environmentally problematic, but it also
‘demands ever-increasing productivity, entailing a high consumption of
resources and an equally high output of pollution’ (Carter, 1993, p. 46).
In other words, it is the network of various power structures which
are mutually supportive of each other, and which necessarily produce
environmental crises through their interaction.15 Similar arguments
have been made by a whole host of Green writers, as well as by many
feminists and some Marxists.16 Carter’s formulation does not specify
the patriarchal nature of these power structures, but remains a useful
starting-point for analysis.
However, a good case can be made that patriarchy should be treated
as the core power structure. Historically speaking, the other three are
specifically modern structures, whereas patriarchy has a longer history.
It is also clear that the projects which produced science, the state and
capitalism were specifically masculinist and patriarchal in character. As
Mellor emphasises, we should ‘see the primary role of patriarchy in cre-
ating the modern scientific, industrial and military systems that are
threatening the planet’ (1992, p. 53).
A useful way of seeing their interaction is through the lenses of those
critical writers on environmental politics who have focused on devel-
opment as a central problematic. Development as they understand it
can, in the light of the argument outlined above, be seen as a discourse
through which these power structures are reproduced. It also can help
to show empirically how they interact to produce their ecologically
and socially problematic outcomes.
Against development17
Writers such as Wolfgang Sachs do not believe the term development
can be retrieved.18 They are highly critical of the term ‘sustainable
development’, in widespread use in environmentalist circles, suggest-
ing that this merely serves to make it easier for ruling elites to coopt
environmentalism. Sachs writes, illustrating this argument well:
The walls of the Tokyo subway used to be plastered with advertising

posters. The authorities, aware of Japan’s shortage of wood pulp,
searched for ways to reduce this wastage of paper. They quickly

found an ‘environmental solution’; they mounted video screens on
the walls and these now continuously bombard passengers with
commercials – paper problem solved.
(Sachs, 1993a, p. 3)
In other words, elites manage to deal with environmental problems

discreetly, while in practice ongoing development undermines any
ameliorative effect which a particular response, such as changing the
medium of advertising on the underground, may have.
One of the reasons why the ‘global ecology’ writers object to devel-
opment is a belief in limits to growth arguments that were abandoned
by much of the environmental movement during the 1980s, largely for
tactical reasons, in favour of ‘sustainable development’ or ‘ecological
modernisation’. Implicit throughout their work is a need to accept the
limits imposed by a finite planet, an acceptance which is ignored by
the planet’s managers and mainstream environmentalists. ‘In the eyes
of the developmentalists, the ‘limits to growth’ did not call for aban-
doning the race, but for changing the running technique’, writes Sachs
(1993a, p. 10). They are also sceptical of the idea that it is possible to
decouple the concept of development from that of growth. While
many environmentalists (e.g. Daly, 1990; Ekins, 1993) try to distin-
guish the two by stating, in Daly’s words, that ‘growth is quantitative
increase in physical scale while development is qualitative improve-
ment or unfolding of potentialities’ (Daly, 1990, in Ekins, 1993, p. 94),
others would suggest that in practice it is impossible to make such neat
distinctions. For the practitioners of sustainable development, ‘sustain-
able development’ and ‘sustainable growth’ have usually been conflated,
and certainly the Brundtland Commission regarded a new era of eco-
nomic growth as essential for sustainable development (WCED, 1987).19
However, there are a number of more nuanced arguments which
‘global ecology’ writers make. While accepting limits in principle, they
would be critical of the scientistic fashion in which Meadows et al.
demonstrated limits – that the computer modelling approach would
itself lead easily to a ‘global environmental management’ form of
response which entrenched the power of elites. This was of course one
critique of the Limits to Growth in the 1970s, that it was too techno-
cratic. They would also agree with another significant criticism of the
Limits to Growth, for example by Cole et al. (1973), that their models
had no social content. The social effects of growth, and the social con-
text of developing sustainable societies, are crucial for these writers.
The Ecologist (1993) suggests that one of the central features of devel-
opment is enclosure, or the turning of common spaces into private
property. This was central to modernising agriculture in England before
the industrial revolution, and they suggest it is a central part of devel-
opment practice throughout the world at the present. It is important to
development because it is an act of appropriation which makes com-
modity production possible. Commons were organised largely (but not
exclusively) outside the market, making efficient accumulation diffi-
cult. Enclosure makes this possible. However, one effect of enclosure is
to take decision-making away from those who depend on local
resources, which in turn makes environmental degradation more likely,
as well as being socially divisive. This argument is closely tied to the
argument in favour of the commons, explored below.
As a consequence of enclosure, access to resources is denied, which
concentrates resources and power in the hands of fewer people.
Development is thus necessarily inegalitarian, since it depends on con-
tinuous appropriation. Inequality has been one of the central ideologi-
cal arguments governments have often made for economic growth;
that under conditions of inequality, growth enables the worst-off to get
better-off even while inequality is not reduced.20 An anti-ecological
dynamic is therefore built into development. This also illustrates how
the global-ecology writers make close links between the damaging
human effects of development and the damaging ecological effects of
development.
Development therefore entrenches the power of the already power-
ful. This can be seen on the global level – in the global economy in
which the North dominates – and can insulate itself from (many)
socio-ecological effects of development, such as through exporting
dirty industries to developing countries. It can also be seen at the
micro-level, for example in the ‘Green revolution’ in the 1970s, which
concentrated power and land in the hands of the rich farmers, at the
expense of the poor who could not afford the fertilisers and pesticides
to support the new strains of crops (e.g. Trainer, 1985, pp. 139– 41;
George, 1977).
A central part of this concentration of power is to do with knowl-
edge. The appropriation of spaces previously held in common empowers
‘experts’ and denies indigenous knowledges as it transforms those spaces
into objects for commodity production. This means that the tech-
niques involved in attempts to manage those spaces are turned over
to scientists, and other development experts (The Ecologist, 1993,
pp. 67–70; see also Gorz, 1994).
This involves privileging Western technology and knowledge over

non-Western knowledges. Thus ‘technology transfer’ becomes central
to solving environmental problems – the idea that ‘advanced’ Western
technology is needed to help developing countries develop in an ‘envi-
ronmentally friendly’ way. McCully (1991) provides a compelling cri-
tique of technology transfer regarding climate change, showing how
past attempts at technology transfer, through development aid, have
reproduced the problems associated with development outlined above.
As mentioned above, development necessarily creates commodity
production where previously it had not prevailed. This is closely linked
to the emergence of instrumental rationality and individualism, which,
as mentioned above, has turned ‘nature’ into ‘natural resources’, to be
plundered by humans (also Shiva, 1988). Development therefore brings
about an ideological shift of world-view, a major part of which is
towards seeing the environment purely in human-instrumental terms.
Closely allied to this is the idea that development progressively ‘ratio-
nalises’ the natural world. It turns it into a set of countable species,
some of which are useful (to be preserved) some of which are not (to
be destroyed if in the way of progress). This way of seeing nature has
historically reduced biological diversity, and arguably must do so.
The global ecology writers therefore present a powerful set of argu-
ments as to how development is inherently anti-ecological. This is not
only because of abstract arguments concerning limits to growth, but
because they show in a more subtle fashion how development actually
undermines sustainable practices. It takes control over resources away
from those living sustainably in order to organise commodity produc-
tion, it empowers experts with knowledges based on instrumental rea-
son, it increases inequality which produces social conflicts, and so on.
At the same time as it is anti-ecological, development as understood by
Sachs and others also brings about capital accumulation, intensifica-
tion of state power with respect to local communities, ‘scientifically
rational management’, and the reorganisation of patriarchal forms of
power.
Conclusions
If it is the case that the structures and forms of power prevalent in

modern society are anti-ecological, then what sorts of political
responses are consistent with this argument? This question can be bro-
ken down into two. Firstly, what sorts of political structures might not
systematically produce global environmental change? Secondly, how
might we envisage transitions from present systems to such sustainable

ones? Who might be the agents of such social and political change,
and what should they do? I will offer some responses to these ques-
tions, although the second will be treated more fully in Chapter 7.
It is perhaps worth starting with the arguments in Green political
theory concerning what sorts of political responses are required by the
ecological crisis. Drawing only on the ecocentric aspect of a Green
position, Eckersley develops a political argument which is statist in ori-
entation. Although she does not adopt the position of the ‘eco-author-
itarians’ such as Ophuls (1977), Hardin (1974) or Heilbroner (1974),
she suggests, in direct contradiction to the ecoanarchism which is
prevalent in Green political thought, that the modern state is a neces-
sary political institution from a Green point of view. She suggests that
ecocentrism requires that we both decentralise power down within the
state, but also centralise power up to the regional and global levels.
For Eckersley, then, new forms of global political structures are
required from an ecocentric point of view. This is necessary in order to
protect nature. Arguing against the anarchist interpretation of Green
politics (see below) she maintains that a ‘multitiered’ political system,
with dispersal of power both down to local communities and up to the
regional and global levels is the approach which is most consistent
with ecocentrism (1992, p. 144, 175, 178). If all power is decentralised,
she suggests, there will be no mechanisms to coordinate responses to
regional or global environmental problems, or to redistribute resources
from rich to poor regions of the world.21 Her argument is premised on
ecocentric ethics and the priority to protect the rest of nature, the
social justice consequences of ecocentrism, and the urgency of the
ecological crisis. Arguing against ecoanarchists, she suggests that:
in view of the urgency and ubiquity of the ecological crisis, ulti-

mately only a supraregional perspective and multilateral action by
nation States can bring about the kind of dramatic changes neces-
sary to save the ‘global commons’ … .
(Eckersley, 1992, p. 174)
Her arguments elsewhere are also premised on the urgency of the

ecological crisis. ‘Indeed, the urgency of the ecological crisis is such
that we cannot afford not to “march through” and reform the institu-
tions of liberal parliamentary democracy … and employ the resources …
of the State to promote national and international action’ (ibid.,
p. 154).
This position could be developed within a conventional perspective

on IR (such as liberal institutionalism), to look at the character of a
wide variety of interstate treaties and practices. The most obvious
would be those regarding biodiversity, acid rain or climate change. But
it could also be developed for global economic institutions such as the
World Bank, or the military practices of states. A broad critique of the
major global institutions from an ecocentric position could fairly easily
be established, especially considering the very different ethical basis
underlying this position in contrast to that which informs interna-
tional treaties and other international practices. This critique would
show how the main international practices are based on an anthro-
pocentric ethic which puts human material interests first, and disre-
gards that of ecosystems or other species. This is even the case for
environmental treaties. For example, while ostensibly about protect-
ing biodiversity, the substance of the Biodiversity Convention signed
in 1992 is primarily couched in terms of protecting the gene pool
for the biotechnology industry (Chatterjee and Finger, 1994, pp. 41–3;
Kothari, 1992). And the objective of the Climate Change Convention,
also signed in 1992, while stating that the aim is to ‘prevent dangerous
anthropogenic interference with the climate system’, which could have
an ecocentric interpretation, quickly goes on to say that this is ‘to
ensure that food production is not threatened and to enable economic
development to proceed in a sustainable manner’ (United Nations,
1992, Article 2). As a consequence the implications of ecocentric ethics
are limited to a critique of the content of international practices, rather
than the structure of international relations.
But this interpretation of ecocentrism advanced by Eckersley is
challengeable. Ecocentrism is in itself politically indeterminate. It can
have many variants, ranging from anarchist to authoritarian, with
Eckersley’s social democratic version in the middle of the continuum.
The predominant alternative interpretation within Green thought
suggests that it is the emergence of modern modes of thought which is
the problem from an ecocentric point of view. The rationality inherent
in modern Western science is an instrumental one, where the domina-
tion of the rest of nature (and of women by men) and its use for
human instrumental purposes have historically at least been integral to
the scientific project on which industrial capitalism and the modern
state are built. In this reading, environmental ethics are given a histor-
ical specificity and material base – the emergence of modern forms
of anthropocentrism are located in the emergence of modernity in all
its aspects.
This interpretation argues therefore that since modern science is

inextricably bound up with other modern institutions such as capital-
ism, the nation-state and modern forms of patriarchy, it is inappropri-
ate to respond by developing those institutions further, centralising
power through the development of global and regional institutions.
Such a response will further entrench instrumental rationality which
will undermine the possibility for developing an ecocentric ethic. An
ecocentric position therefore leads to arguments for scaling down
human communities, and in particular for challenging trends towards
globalisation and homogenisation, since it is only by celebrating diver-
sity that it will be possible to create spaces for ecocentric ethics
to emerge. This argument is developed by the ‘global ecology’ writers
outlined above.
The implications for global politics of an acceptance of limits to
growth are clearly considerable. O’Riordan (1981, pp. 303–7; also
Dobson, 1990, pp. 82–3) presents a useful typology of positions which
emerge from the limits-to-growth version of sustainability which
Greens adopt. The first is very similar to that outlined by Eckersley
above – that the nation-state is both too big and too small to deal
effectively with sustainability, and new regional and global structures
(alongside decentralisation within the state) are needed to coordinate
effective responses.
A second interpretation, prevalent in the 1970s but virtually absent
from discussions in the 1980s, is what O’Riordan calls ‘centralised
authoritarianism’. This generally follows the logic of Garrett Hardin’s
‘tragedy of the commons’ (1968) which suggested that resources held
in common would be overused. This metaphor led to the argument
that centralised global political structures would be needed to force
changes in behaviour to reach sustainability.22 In some versions, this
involved the adoption of what were called ‘lifeboat ethics’ (Hardin,
1974). The idea was that the scarcity outlined by Meadows et al. meant
that rich countries would have to practise triage on a global scale – to
‘pull up the ladder behind it’. This argument has however been
rejected by Greens, with a few exceptions.
The third position is similar to the above in that it suggests authori-
tarianism may be required, but rejects the idea that this can be on a
global scale. The vision here is for small-scale, tightly knit communities
run on hierarchical, conservative lines with self-sufficiency in their use
of resources (e.g. Heilbroner, 1974; The Ecologist, 1972). It shares with
the above position the idea that it is freedom and egoism which have
caused the environmental crisis, and these tendencies need to be
curbed to produce sustainable societies. In some versions, these

communes would be inward-looking and explicitly xenophobic (e.g.
Hunt, n.d.).
The final position which O’Riordan outlines is termed by him the
‘anarchist solution’. This has become the position adopted by Greens
as the best interpretation of the implications of limits to growth. The
term ‘anarchist’ is used in this typology loosely. It means that Greens
envisage global networks of self-reliant communities.23 This position
would, for example, be associated with people like E.F. Schumacher
(1976), as well as bioregionalists such as Kirkpatrick Sale (1980).24 It
shares the focus on small-scale communities with the previous posi-
tion, but has two crucial differences. Firstly, relations within communi-
ties would be libertarian, egalitarian and participatory. This reflects a
very different set of assumptions about the origins of the environmen-
tal crisis; rather than being about the ‘tragedy of the commons’ (which
naturalises human greed), it is seen to be about the emergence of
hierarchical social relations (Bookchin, 1982), and the channelling
of human energies into productivism and consumerism. Participatory
societies should provide means for human fulfilment which do not
depend on high levels of material consumption. Secondly, these
communities, while self-reliant, are seen to be internationalist in orien-
tation. They are not cut off from other communities, but in many
ways conceived of as embedded in networks of relations of obligations,
cultural exchanges, and so on.25
Greens also often object to the state for anarchist reasons. For exam-
ple, Spretnak and Capra (1985, p. 177) suggest that the features identi-
fied by Weber as central to statehood are often the problem from a
Green point of view. Bookchin (1980; 1982) gives similar arguments,
suggesting that the state is the ultimate hierarchical institution which
consolidates all other hierarchical institutions. Carter (1993) suggests
that the state is part of the dynamic of modern society which has
caused the present environmental crisis, as outlined earlier in this
chapter.26 Thus the state is not only unnecessary from a Green point of
view, it is positively undesirable.27
Whether or not we term the result ‘anarchist’ (which often ends up
as a simple terminological dispute about what we mean by the ‘state’),
the dominant political prescription within Green politics is for a great
deal of decentralisation of political power to communities much smaller
in scale than nation-states, and for those communities to be embedded
in networks of communication and obligation across the globe (that is,
for them to be non-sovereign). Such political decentralisation would be
accompanied by a scaling-down of economic activity, with a much

greater proportion of needs being met locally, and global economic
exchanges being correspondingly curtailed and left to those which
either are necessary for global cultural connections to be maintained
(so that communities do not become parochial) or for things which
can only be produced outside a particular region and where living
without them would significantly impair quality of life. Greens are
often unclear, however, on whether such economic decentralisation
also entails significant change in production relations (although by
their practices they reveal a clear interest in communal, cooperative
work relations). Greens also suggest that revitalising small-scale com-
munities creates the possibility of moving away from social ontologies
based on domination, for ‘cutting off the King’s head’. One of the rea-
sons Dryzek gives in support of his arguments in favour of decentralisa-
tion is that (1987, p. 219) such small communities are more likely to
develop a social ontology which undermines purely instrumental ways
of dealing with the rest of nature (because their dependence on local
resources is so immediately obvious to them).28 This move away from
modes of domination would also be possible with regard to relations
between people, challenging entrenched patriarchal modes.
One specific form of such an argument for decentralised, egalitarian,
non-sovereign communities can again be seen in writers like the
Ecologist, in their focus on ‘reclaiming the commons’ (Ecologist,
1993).29 The argument is essentially that common spaces are sites of
the most sustainable practices currently operating. They are under
threat from development which continuously tries to enclose them in
order to turn them into commodities. Therefore a central part of Green
politics is resistance to this enclosure. But it is also a (re)constructive
project – creating commons where they do not exist.
Commons regimes are difficult to define, as The Ecologist suggests.
In fact they suggest that precise definitions are impossible, as the vari-
ety of commons around the world defy clear description in language.
The first point of definition is a negative one, however. The commons
is not the commons as referred to by Garrett Hardin (1968). His
‘tragedy of the commons’, where the archetypical English medieval
common gets overgrazed as each herder tries to maximise the number
of sheep grazed on it, is in practice not a commons, but an ‘open
access’ resource (The Ecologist, 1993, p. 13).
Commons, therefore, are not anarchic in the sense of having no rules
governing them. They are spaces whose use is closely governed, often by
informally defined rules, by the communities which depend on them.
They depend for their successful operation on a rough equality between

the members of the community, as sharp imbalances in power would
make some able to ignore the rules of the community. They also depend
on particular social and cultural norms prevailing; for example, the pri-
ority of common safety over accumulation, or distinctions between
members and non-members (although not necessarily in a hostile
sense, or one which is rigid and unchanging over time) (ibid., p. 9).
Commons are therefore clearly different from private property sys-
tems. However, commons are also not ‘public’ spaces in the modern
sense. Public connotes open access under control by the state, while
commons are often not open to all, and the rules governing them do
not depend on the hierarchy and formality of state institutions. A fur-
ther difference from ‘modern’ institutions is that they are typically
organised for the production of use values rather than exchange val-
ues, i.e. they are not geared to commodity production. This makes
them not susceptible to the pressures for accumulation or growth
inherent in capitalist market systems.
Commons are therefore held to produce sustainable practices for a
number of reasons. First, the rough equality in income and power
means that none can usurp or dominate the system. ‘Woods and
streams feeding local irrigation systems remained intact because any-
one degrading them had to brave the wrath of neighbours deprived of
their livelihood, and no one was powerful enough to do so’ (The
Ecologist, 1993, p. 5). Second, the local scale at which they work
means that the patterns of mutual dependence make cooperation
easier to achieve.30 Third, this also means that the culture of recognis-
ing one’s dependence on others and therefore having obligations, is
easily entrenched. Finally, commons make practices based on accumu-
lation difficult to adopt, usufruct being more likely.
One of the great strengths of The Ecologist’s work is the way in
which the argument is richly illustrated. I will give just a few examples
here. At a general level, they highlight how many people throughout
the world are dependent on commons, despite the globalisation of cap-
italism. For example, 90 per cent of the world’s fishers depend on small
inshore marine commons, catching over half of all the fish eaten (The
Ecologist, 1993, p. 7; Ostrom, 1990, p. 27).
In the Philippines, Java and Laos, irrigations systems are run
by villages communally, with water rights decided at the village level.
Even in the North, they suggest, communities still exist which manage
resources communally – for example, lobster harvesters in Maine
(The Ecologist, 1993, p. 7). In parts of India, villages based on
Gandhian principles, known as gramdam villages, enable sustainable

practices to flourish. In these villages, all land within the village
boundary is controlled by the gram sabha, composed of all the adults in
the village (ibid., p. 190). They quote Agarwal and Narain on how one
such village, Seed near Udaipur, operates:
The common land has been divided into two categories – one
category consists of lands on which both grazing and leaf collection
is banned and the second category consists of lands on which graz-
ing is permitted but leaf collection or harming trees is banned. The
first category of land is lush green and full of grass which villagers
can cut only once a year. … Even during the unprecedented drought
of 1987, Seed was able to harvest 80 bullock cartloads of grass
from this parch. The grass was distributed equitably amongst all
households.
(Ibid., pp. 190 –1; see also Agarwal and Narain, 1989, p. 23)
The idea of the commons is clearly very consistent with the arguments
from Green political theory about the necessity of decentralisation of
power, and grassroots democracy. It shows how small-scale democratic
communities are the most likely to produce sustainable practices
within the limits set by a finite planet.
Simultaneously, however, the focus on the commons helps to start
thinking about the second question outlined at the beginning of this
section. It suggests, along with other arguments presented here, that
the sites where global environmental politics can be pursued are less in
the halls of the UN in Geneva or New York than at the sites where
commons regimes, and more broadly small-scale local communities,
are being destroyed by development or being consciously brought into
being. Such a politics is therefore necessarily one of resistance, where
resistance is understood as simultaneously reconstructive (not simply
preventing ‘bad’ things happening, but active attempts to produce a
‘better’ future). I will revisit and develop this theme in Chapter 7. Now
I turn to some empirical cases where I try to illustrate the argument
developed so far. The next three chapters hope to show firstly that the
global power structures outlined in this chapter systematically produce
global environmental change; secondly, that the ways in which partic-
ular political institutions are embedded in broader structures compli-
cates their efforts to respond to such change; and thirdly, that
the sites of global environmental politics should be understood as sites
of resistance.
4
Space, Domination, Development:
Sea Defences and the Structuring of
Environmental Decision-Making
I fear that to many members of this society the subject of

Coast Erosion will appear one of those which, though impor-
tant enough to make it a matter of satisfaction that a paper
should be read on it, yet it is hardly interesting enough for
them to take the trouble to come and hear the paper.
(Bourdillon, 1886, p. 1)
What this chapter tries to show is that particular decisions concerning

global environmental change are deeply conditioned by the power
structures I discussed in the previous chapter. I develop these argu-
ments through an analysis of the history and contemporary politics of
sea defences in Eastbourne (a medium-sized town on the UK’s south
coast) in particular, and the UK more generally. I discuss below the
particularities of the decisions surrounding the replacement of
Eastbourne’s sea defences in 1994 –97. I try to show how the particular
decisions were structured by a variety of political, economic and dis-
cursive constraints on both Eastbourne’s local government bodies and
on the producers of the timber in Guyana. I will give a summary of
those arguments later in this chapter. Before that, however, I want to
develop more general points concerning the way that sea defences are
themselves embedded in the specifically modern twin projects of the
human domination of nature and of some humans by others, and in
the dynamics of capital accumulation, or ‘economic development’.
Projects of domination
If the government can’t protect its own coastline, we need a change of

government.
(Voxpop interview on Channel 4 News, 28 August 1996)
66
Space, Domination, Development: Sea Defences 67
The image of sea defences is perhaps one of the clearest images of the
human domination of nature. The physical control of one of nature’s
most powerful forces, water, exemplifies the project of mastery in sym-
bolic terms as much as anything. In the Anglo-Saxon world, the story
of Canute, King of England in 1016–35, who (at least in popular
mythology) tried to force the sea to recede by virtue of his monarchical
authority and literal command, has also served as a metaphor for the
ways that defences against the sea have symbolically been bound up
with twin projects of domination: of nature by humans, and of space
by increasingly territorially defined political units, culminating in mod-
ern nation-states. These discourses are also closely interconnected with
processes of economic development and capital accumulation. Often,
as I will show regarding Eastbourne, the direct impetus for building the
first sea defences was protection of property. But the need to protect
property in this way was produced by development as it pushed people
closer to the shore. In Eastbourne’s case this was because of the devel-
opment of an urban elite in Victorian Britain which made possible the
thriving south-coast resorts, of which Eastbourne was one among
many, as those elites escaped London in the summer for fresh sea air.
However, the rhetoric of sea defences in Eastbourne remains bound up
with military metaphors where the sea is equated with human enemies.
And the modern concept of property which made possible the notion
that there was a thing to be defended (property being the thing itself,
rather than what one had in the thing), is directly related to territorial
and sovereign notions of the nation-state; both modern notions of pri-
vate property and state sovereignty coevolved as mutually reinforcing
concepts based on absolute, exclusionary rights (Burch, 1994).
The symbolic aspects of sea defences directly concern the twin projects
of the domination of nature and ongoing nation-building. In Eastbourne,
as elsewhere, sea defences show how these two projects are intertwined
with each other. The starkest aspect of this is in the use of military
metaphors. The very term ‘sea defences’ is of course fundamentally a
military construction, connoting defences against an enemy with agency.
Historical accounts of sea defences in Eastbourne are explicit in this
regard. For example:
The Second World War saw the erection of the most long lasting
and systematic set of defences against invasion by the enemy which
have ever been seen. Unfortunately, that other enemy, the sea, had
to be left to do its worst.
(East Sussex County Planning Department, 1977, p. 3)
Wright also invokes such metaphors. ‘The sea was regarded with some
distrust at the beginning of the second half of the last century’, he
writes (1902, p. 163). The ‘encroachments’ of the sea in this period
involved many instances where houses were ‘demolished by the
inroads of the invader’ (ibid.). The builder of much of the late nine-
teenth century defences, a Mr Berry, is regarded in heroic terms ‘as a
pioneer of sea-wall defence’ (ibid., p. 164). In more recent times, public
representation of the sea-defences question continues to be couched
in military terms, with headlines such as ‘Battle against the Sea’
(Eastbourne Gazette, 28 November 1984). Potent symbols, playing on
the historical role of the south coast in East Sussex in the last invasion
(by a human army) of England, are sometimes used. Consider this line
in the middle of a general discussion of the replacement of sea
defences east of Eastbourne: ‘When William the Conqueror set foot on
English soil in 1066, Pevensey was on a peninsula and the sea extended
as far inland as modern Hailsham’ (Bexhill Observer, 12 April 1996).
When the contemporary system in the UK for organising sea defences
was instituted, in the Coast Protection Act 1949, one of the intentions
was to enable the reclamation of land for agricultural purposes. It was
connected closely to the strategy of food self-sufficiency adopted during
and after the Second World War, to limit the UK’s vulnerability (as an
island) during wartime and thus contribute directly to the UK’s capacity
to wage war. The possibility of adopting a ‘managed realignment’ policy
(see below) has been premised on the ‘lessened need for agricultural
self-sufficiency’, as such understandings of the UK’s strategic needs have
waned (Agriculture Committee, 1998a, p. xxxviii).
Metaphors of military battle and nation-building are prevalent in
human attempts to deal with some of the problems caused by water.
The classic case is the Netherlands. Simon Schama (1987) shows
how the defence against the sea was intimately connected with the
construction of a nation. During the late medieval period, the
Netherlands experienced some of its biggest floods. And the processes
of national resistance against Spain and against the sea were closely
linked in the popular imagination during the struggle for indepen-
dence in the late sixteenth century (ibid., p. 37). After independence,
nation-building was associated with claiming new land from the sea.
Land reclamation was always, according to Schama, associated by the
Dutch with the construction of a national identity. Dutch identity was
formed by a ‘trial of faith by adversity’, in which saving land from
water was one of the central elements. Their faith in God was to be
tested by trials, in particular imposed by the sea, but on the other
hand, their capacity to reclaim land from the sea was given scriptural
significance, indicating a special favour with God. Schama cites
Andries Vierlingh, a sixteenth-century hydraulic engineer: ‘The mak-
ing of new land belongs to God alone … for he gives to some people
the wit and the strength to do it’ (Schama, 1987, p. 44). 1 Thus a
Christian nation could be legitimised and forged. In modern times,
such a linkage is still present. ‘“In many ways, our dikes are part of our
identity”, said Hans Scholten of the Dutch water authorities. “They’re
part of being a Dutchman – not just our salvation, but our pride”’
(Guardian, 2 February 1995, p. 9).
John McPhee’s (1989) account of the control of the Mississippi also
tells a dramatic story of how understandings of human dealings with
water are directly understood in military terms. His story focuses on
the controls upstream of New Orleans designed to prevent the main
course of the river from moving West, as it would if uncontrolled by
humans. The story is an epic tale of human domination of nature (one
of the people he talks to calls it the ‘third greatest arrogance’ of
humans in their dealings with nature [1989, p. 99]), in which nature is
directly understood as an enemy. It is also one where human dealings
with nature are directly militarised; responsibility for controlling the
course of the Mississippi along its length rests with the US Army Corps
of Engineers.2
‘Nature, in this place, had become an enemy of the state’, he
writes (ibid., p. 95). Much like East Sussex County Council Planning
Department (1977, see more below), the Army lockmaster in charge of
the river control schemes, understands the river as an enemy:
This nation has a large and powerful adversary. Our opponent could
cause the United States to lose nearly all her seaborne commerce …
We are fighting Mother Nature … It’s a battle we have to fight day by
day, year by year; the health of our economy depends on it.
(Rabalais, quoted in McPhee, 1989, p. 95)
If the river is the enemy, then the control structure, known as Old River
Control, is ‘a good soldier’, in the words of an Army promotion film (ibid.,
p. 100). And floods, which threaten to destroy the control structures,
must be the battles. ‘In 1983 came the third-greatest flood of the twenti-
eth century – a narrow but decisive victory for the Corps’ (ibid., p. 141).
The military metaphors central to understandings of sea defences are
best understood in terms of nation-building. The construction of a
nation under modernity has been a physical manifestation of national
sovereign power, as concrete expressions of a state’s capacity to defend

‘its’ territory. The territoriality involved here is specifically modern.
The emergence of mapmaking as an activity also helped generate these
practices, by solidifying the sense of where a nation’s shores began
and ended.
It is often noted in much contemporary IR theory that boundaries are
central to state-building. The boundary is the key site at which identity
is constituted through difference. In Devetak’s words, ‘the political
begins with the practices that inscribe and administer the boundary
which establishes the space for political institutions’ (1995, p. 30). But
nature, and perhaps particularly the sea, are important correlates here,
usually overlooked. Margin (another commonly used term for a bound-
ary, celebrated in poststructural IR theory), as Stilgoe points out (1994,
p. 9) derives from ‘marge’, an antiquated word for the coast or shore.
And the sea is directly analogous to the anarchy which is the external
correlate of sovereignty and order. The sea is the nature which cannot
be domesticated, tamed, farmed. So while ‘boundaries function to
divide an interior, singular, sovereign space, from an exterior, pluralistic,
anarchical space’ (Devetak, 1995, p. 30, citing Walker, 1990), the bound-
ary of the land and the sea is a double boundary – between ‘inside
and outside’ in political terms (Walker, 1993), and between a human-
dominated ‘nature’ and that ‘nature’ which humans cannot dominate.
So nation-building is simultaneously a part of the human domina-
tion of nature, of the imposition of human physical control over land
and water. An opposition between humans and nature is presupposed
in those involved in building such structures. In the Mississippi, the
General in charge of Old River Control states that:
had man not settled in southern Louisiana, what would it be today?

Under nature’s scenario, what would it be like? … If only nature were
here, people – except for some hunters and fishermen – couldn’t
exist here.
(quoted in McPhee, 1989, p. 145)
Nature must therefore be controlled in order to make a flourishing of

human life possible.
Sea defences (as is most obvious in the Netherlands) developed con-
currently with the development of the modern science of Bacon and
Descartes. In many ways, they provide a clear physical manifestation of
the ways in which modern scientific knowledge was connected to
discourses of the domination of nature – connections which Bacon
made explicit – and which as Merchant (1980) and others suggest,

was specifically gendered in the way that women became associated
with nature.
In this context, the portrayal of the sea as active in many of the
accounts given above is a surprisingly pre-modern notion of nature.
However, it provides the background against which the sea becomes
something to struggle with, and ultimately to dominate. In accounts
of sea defences, however, the sea, while it may in certain contexts
have been pacified, it has never become passive. This has produced
a particular version of the domination of nature which involves a
certain subtlety and art. Schama cites Vierlingh, a Dutch writer of
the mid-sixteenth century, as developing a ‘humanist philosophy of
hydraulics’:
Reason is preferred to force. If the waters are met by mere barriers,

they will repay that fortse with interest. Instead, the ‘persuasion’ of
streamlining and channel cutting can in effect civilize the waters.
(Schama, 1987, pp. 42–3)
Concerning Eastbourne, Wright quotes an article in the Eastbourne

Gazette which shows that Berry, his ‘pioneer of sea-wall defence’, had a
similar sensibility. He built a wall set at an angle from the vertical.
‘Instead, therefore, of the sea striking a dead perpendicular wall, it
expended its energy in running up the slope. His contention was
that the constant hammering of the sea against a perpendicular wall
must sooner or later shake it to pieces, and the only safe plan was to
humour it in the way he carried it out’ (Wright, 1902, p. 164, emphasis
added).
This particular history of the domination of nature in relation to sea
defences has a curious ongoing footnote. From the 1970s onwards, in
part in response to the emergence of environmentalism, council plan-
ners and others appropriated holistic notions derived from environ-
mentalism to discuss sea-defence planning. In 1977, East Sussex
County Planning Department wrote that ‘The lesson to remember is
that nature only tolerates a certain amount of opposition, so it is best
not to interfere too much or too long with the natural process, but
instead to make use of it. If this were done, we should not always think
of repelling waves but we would should think instead of using their
energy to generate power’ (1977, p. 130). During the 1990s, UK public
policy has not taken the latter piece of advice, but has begun to treat
sea defences in a manner involving holistic rhetoric.
Such rhetoric involves a recognition that sea-defence structures often

cause as many problems as they solve. One such set of problems con-
cerns the unintended consequences of projects further down the coast.
The draft Shoreline Management Plan for Beachy Head to South
Foreland (the stretch of coast including Eastbourne) states that ‘tradi-
tionally, coast and flood protection works have been implemented in a
piecemeal fashion. … The possibility that measures taken on one sec-
tion of the coast might affect adjoining areas was either not recognised,
or not considered in sufficient depth’ (BMT Limited, n.d.). There is a
particular piece of historical forgetting here. Bourdillon, in 1886, was
acutely aware of such effects along the coastline, referring to how a new
breakwater at Newhaven (substantially west of Eastbourne) had the
effect of moving shingle further along the coast and eroding land near
Eastbourne further (Bourdillon, 1886, p. 9). But such a ‘new’ holistic
awareness is substantially changing UK public policy on sea defences.
‘Managed retreat’, ‘managed realignment’ and occasionally ‘strategic
withdrawal’ have become watchwords in this discourse, with military
metaphors remaining, but the capacity of humans to win ‘wars’ against
the sea having been conceded. The Shoreline Management Plan already
referred to discusses ‘Setting Strategic Coastal Defence Options’, and
gives three such options: to maintain the status quo; to ‘develop new
defences seaward of an existing line’; or to ‘pull back from an estab-
lished line and construct new defences inland of existing defences’
(BMT Limited, n.d.). In many ways, however, this is perhaps a continu-
ation of the way that Vieringhe or Berry discussed dealing with the sea;
still a discourse of domination, but a subtler one than simply using
brute force.3
The House of Commons Agriculture Committee held hearings and
produced a report on Flood and Coastal Defence in 1998. The first
paragraph of their conclusions and recommendations is worth quoting
at length, recognising as it does the intertwining of militarism with sea
defences, while also reflecting how partially the discourse of managed
retreat has escaped this set of understandings:
Our nation’s history is one of continual intervention in coastal and

riverine processes, punctuated by occasional awesome reminders
of the power of the sea. It is not surprising that our lexicon for
describing the relationship between the land and the sea is domi-
nated by militaristic terminology: we speak of flood and coastal
‘defence’, or ‘reclaiming’ or ‘winning’ land from the sea – even
of the sea ‘invading’ the land. Hard-engineered defences remain
essential to protect many vital national assets, especially in urban

areas. But, overall, we believe it is time to declare an end to the cen-
turies-old war with the sea and to seek a peaceful accommodation
with our former enemy. It is far better to anticipate and plan a pol-
icy of managed realignment than to suffer the consequences of a
deluded belief that we can maintain indefinitely an unbreachable
Maginot Line of towering sea walls and flood defences.
(Agriculture Committee, 1998a, pp. xxxvii–xxxviii)
Such a move is therefore an attempt to move away from understand-

ing the relationship with the sea in military terms. In such a shift,
nature becomes ‘our’ friend rather than enemy – the focus is on
‘enhancing natural coastal defence’ (Agriculture Committee, 1998a,
p. vi) through promoting salt marshes and the like, which limit the
extend of flooding. The shift to managed realignment also perhaps
reflects other discursive shifts – from ‘hard’ to ‘soft’ engineered
defences, promoting ‘flexibility’ in the coastline (ibid., p. xxxii), both
being resonant with post-Fordist managerial discourses. Such a shift
also requires government to attempt to ‘overcome the widespread pub-
lic culture which is intolerant of the acceptance of naturally occurring
and unavoidable risk associated with flooding’ (ibid., p. vii), reflecting
shifts in understanding of national space as homogeneous to one
where people are being mobilised to be tolerant of difference. Now,
clearly it would be overambitious to make causal claims concerning the
importance of such phrases. But it does support the claim often made
by Andrew Ross (1991) and others that scientific projects are always
simultaneously as dependent on social context as they are on scientifi-
cally rational enquiry. So just because the militarism associated with
‘hard’ sea defences may be waning, its replacements will have as much
ideology embedded in them. These replacement discourses (‘soft’,
‘flexible’, ‘tolerant’, ‘holistic’ sea defences) are still about an ongoing
project of nation-building – but one which is less consistent with the
territorially preoccupied state than with the post-Fordist competition
state appropriate to the age of global capitalism, with a dose of multi-
culturalism thrown in.
Nation-building has produced a progressive centralisation of power
in national-level political institutions. The emergence of increasingly
centralised state systems over the last several centuries has left local
political units with very little control over their own affairs, and with
great incentives to operate in ways in which central governments dic-
tate. In Eastbourne (see below), well over half of the money for the sea
defences was to be provided by central government, through the

Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (MAFF). The MAFF also pro-
vided the criteria according to which the scheme should be judged,
and provided other constraints, such as the fact that they only fund
capital works, not renovation of existing defences (providing an incen-
tive to replace whole sea-defence arrangements rather than maintain
existing ones). That state centralisation, is often associated, for exam-
ple by many historical sociologists (e.g. Tilly, 1990; Mann, 1986) with
the emergence of a competitive states system. This has had the effect of
creating incentives for states to develop continuously more efficient
means of extracting resources from a territory and a population in
order to be able to engage in warfare. Writers such as Braudel have
highlighted the ecological consequences of this state-building (see, for
instance, Helleiner, 1996), but here the major point is how centralisa-
tion constrains the capacities of political units below the nation-state
level to respond to environmental problems themselves.
In the UK sea defences were effectively nationalised (in the sense of
the emergence of a nationally standardised system regulated by central
government rather than simply organised on an ad hoc basis by local
government) in 1949 by the Coast Protection Act of that year (Trafford
and Braybrooks, 1983). What is missed in Trafford and Braybrooks’
account, however, is that this coincided with a general centralisation of
British government as the postwar Labour government nationalised
various industries. This was as much a matter of taking industries from
local political units into central control as it was of moving industries
from the private to the public sector, and also involved the increasing
standardisation of many aspects of public life (including education and
health) across the country. It is likely then that the Coast Protection
Act was not purely a function of recognition of the ‘need’ for nation-
ally coordinated sea defences, but was also produced by more general
discursive shifts. The knock-on effects of this centralisation, however,
were one of the features of the debate in Eastbourne in the early 1990s.
Development and the origins of sea defences
Historically, the construction of sea defences appears to be bound up

primarily with local economic forces. There are no clear sources giving
the dates of the earliest sea defences in Eastbourne, but historians
of both sea defences and of Eastbourne suggest they began in the
early nineteenth century. (In general, while use of some sorts of sea
defences, such as land drainage, goes back further, use of groynes as sea
defences in Europe began in the seventeenth century – see Brampton

and Motyka, 1983).4 Tyhurst infers this from comparison with
Brighton, then a much bigger town further west along the coast. In
1705, after two very damaging storms, Brighton first considered build-
ing sea defences (Tyhurst, 1972, p. 2). These defences were later built
in 1723 (East Sussex County Planning Department, 1977, p. 2).
Chambers, writing in 1910, writes that ‘The construction of groynes [in
Eastbourne] appears to have begun some time in the early part of the
19th Century’ (1910, p. 212). Chambers also says that the first sea-wall
along part of Eastbourne’s sea-front was built in 1847– 48, and that
before that there were only a few groynes as defences against the sea.
Wright, writing at about the same time as Chambers, also says that by
1852 there was a small sea-wall and a number of groynes (1902,
p. 164). These groynes first appeared in maps of the town in the 1875
edition of the Ordnance Survey map of the area (Tyhurst, 1972, p. 2).
These defences were then rapidly expanded in the later nineteenth
century. By 1900, there were 63 groynes along the promenade at
Eastbourne, and a few more further east. A few more were built in the
early twentieth century. There was also a greatly expanded sea-wall,
made possible by an Act of Parliament of 1879 which gave the local
board the authority to build such a wall (Chambers, 1910, p. 215; also
Enser, 1976, p. 22).
The early constructions were to protect specific properties from dam-
age by the sea. Wright recounts a conversation with a ‘Miss Ingledew’
concerning the construction of the wall in 1847– 48. This was specifi-
cally to protect the houses opposite the Marine Parade (Wright, 1902,
p. 92). Chambers gives detailed accounts of the storms of 1876 and
1877, the latter of which ‘wasted away part of the Pier, flooded many
houses at the seaside, and caused a great devastation of property’
(1910, p. 215). These storms gave the impetus for expanding the sea
wall in the following years.5
But a purely functional interpretation of the construction of sea
defences in Eastbourne would be inadequate. Firstly, the function that
sea defences performed in protecting property was interconnected with
the meanings that property had come to have by the nineteenth cen-
tury, a meaning that had evolved noticeably since at least the seven-
teenth century. Property had ceased to be a particular right that a
person had in a thing (for example, a right to use particular resources
from a particular plot of land) and had become the thing in itself
(exclusive rights to the land in its entirety of uses) (Macpherson, 1975;
Reeve, 1986). This is what was involved in the commodification of
land associated with the emergence of capitalism. Thus, during this

period (around the seventeenth century), ‘states acted to establish
bourgeois property rights – to reduce multiple claims on the same
property, to enforce contracts, and to strengthen the principal owner’s
capacity to determine the property’s use’ (Tilly, 1990, p. 100). One of
the consequences of this shift was that people who owned land could
only meet certain needs through the land they owned, whereas they
might previously have been able to meet them through their diverse
properties in a wide area of land (The Ecologist, 1993, pp. 22– 4). It
meant they had a far greater dependence on particular plots of land
and thus a stake in protecting them.
Simultaneously, the nineteenth century saw a great expansion of
both population in general in Western Europe, stimulated by the
Industrial Revolution, among other things, but also of a bourgeois class
with significant leisure time, living in cities which were increasingly
unpleasant environments. Thus many coastal towns in the UK became
resorts for that class to retire to for substantial stretches of the summer,
both for recreational and therapeutic purposes. Thus the values of
properties along the coast rose, and along with them the stakes
involved in protecting them from the sea. So the functional aspects of
sea defences are closely interconnected with a historically specific
process of economic development or capital accumulation associated
with Eastbourne’s economy in the nineteenth century and with chang-
ing notions of property. In Brampton and Motyka’s terms, discussing
the rise in groyne construction in the mid–late nineteenth century, this
coincided ‘with the development of coastal resorts and seaside housing
in general’ (1983, p. 151).
As in Eastbourne, a direct link to processes of economic development
is also present in the tales of both Schama and McPhee. In the
Netherlands, land reclamation enabled Amsterdam capitalists to make
large amounts of money in land-speculation on the reclamation pro-
jects, and thus to stimulate the projects (for example by providing
money) in order to make money for themselves (Schama, 1987,
pp. 38–9). And on the Mississippi, much of the immediate impetus to
continue preventing the river course from changing is economic. The
stretch of the Mississippi between Baton Rouge and New Orleans used
to be known as ‘the American Ruhr’ because of the amount of heavy
industry located there – ‘B.F. Goodrich, E.I. du Pont, Union Carbide,
Reynolds Metal, Shell, Mobil, Texaco, Exxon, Monsanto, Uniroyal,
Georgia-Pacific, Hydrocarbon Industries, Vulcan Materials, Nalco
Chemical, Freeport Chemical, Dow Chemical, Allied Chemical, Staufer
Chemical, Hooker Chemicals, Rubicon Chemicals, American Petrofina’

(McPhee, 1989, p. 94). The industries were there because of the river
and the services it provided – water, transport, and so on. Those indus-
tries would be devastated without the steady flow of the Mississippi. In
McPhee’s words, for economic reasons, ‘for nature to take it course was
simply unthinkable. The Sixth World War would do less damage to
southern Louisiana’ (ibid., p. 95). Army geologists thought the major
purpose of the river control was economic (ibid., p. 180).
Structuring environmental decision-making
It is in this sort of context that we should understand political

decision-making concerning global environmental change. In the mid-
1990s in Eastbourne, there was a controversy over the way the local
Council planned to replace its sea defences.
The replacement of Eastbourne’s sea defences

In April 1995, a small news story in the UK media reported that
Eastbourne Borough Council was planning to import greenheart, a trop-
ical hardwood, from Guyana, to rebuild its sea defences. These defences
needed to be improved because of worries about global climate change,
especially its associated sea-level rise and the possible increased fre-
quency of stormy behaviour. The story focused on the inevitable irony
that while defending against a global environmental threat, the Council
was simultaneously contributing to causing that threat, through the
related problem of deforestation (Channel 4 News, 11 April 1995).
The immediate origins of the Council’s decision were in the heavy
storms which occurred in Southern England (and elsewhere) in the
winter of 1989–90. These storms caused much damage to the groynes
along the seafront at Eastbourne.6 There was also further storm damage
to the groynes later, especially during the winter of 1992–93, while the
plans for renovating or replacing the sea defences were being drawn
up. These later storms helped the Council to emphasise the need for
completely new structures to be built, rather than old ones repaired. In
1990, the Council appointed Posford Duvivier as its consulting engi-
neers to assess what possibilities there were in replacing the system of
defences. Posford Duvivier produced a number of reports for the
Council’s committees over the next three years, advising the Council
on the best course of action. These narrowed down the most desirable
options from an original list of six to a recommended three (timber,
rock or concrete groynes). Of these, the Council’s Strategic and
Economic Development sub-committee of its Policy and Resources

Committee rejected one immediately (an option of building concrete
groynes), and asked Posford Duvivier to work more on the remaining
two options. By early 1993, Posford Duvivier produced another report
recommending the construction of timber groynes. They were also by
now recommending the use of greenheart as the most appropriate tim-
ber from an engineering point of view. They were then asked to pro-
duce a scale model of the new structures and test it, to improve the
design, and reduce costs. This they did during 1993 and reported back
to the Council on the results of the modelling in early 1994. After the
modelling results were shown to the Council, the plans were sent to
the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (MAFF) for approval.7
At this point, the Council opened the plans to formal public consul-
tation. Quickly, the local Friends of the Earth (FoE) group and some
others got involved, to protest about the use of tropical hardwoods in
the project. Michael Le Page of the local FoE group, who organised
much of the campaign, managed also to involve Simon Counsell, then
Forest Campaigner for FoE UK in London. Their campaign (along with
the time taken to get MAFF approval) clearly slowed down the project;
the intended start of construction was pushed back from late 1994
to mid-1996.
There were a number of points of contention in the conflict between
FoE and the Council/Posford Duvivier. The main one concerned the
sustainability of the production of greenheart timber. The main two
points here in the public debate were the rates of regrowth of green-
heart trees, and the question of how ‘sustainability’ should be assessed.
The campaigners argued that only timber produced according to
Forestry Stewardship Council (FSC) standards should be used, as this
was the only independently verifiable certification of sustainability.
The Council and Posford Duvivier argued that the company they were
intending to buy the timber from, Demerara Timber Ltd, (DTL) had
their own Green Charter, independently verified by SGS Forestry (in
the sense that SGS said that DTL did actually do what it said in their
Charter).8 In addition, SGS Forestry were soon to be one of the compa-
nies approved by FSC to accredit timber operations as FSC accredited.
Nobody at this point explicitly claimed, however, that DTL’s Green
Charter was the same as FSC criteria.
The second main conflict was over the availability and suitability of
oak. Posford Duvivier claimed early on that ‘although it had originally
been thought that English oak could be used, there was currently insuf-
ficient available at economic cost for a scheme as large as that now
proposed for Eastbourne’ (Eastbourne Borough Council, 1993). Local

timber producers, supported by the local FoE group, and by East Sussex
County Council’s Environmental Planners (the County Council having
responsibility for forests in the area, including promoting the eco-
nomic use of those forests) contested this claim, and argued that they
were never given the opportunity to tender, since the consulting engi-
neers wrote the specifications in such a way that greenheart was advan-
taged from the outset. They also claimed that oak and greenheart were
never treated on a comparable basis; for example, claims by Posford
Duvivier that oak was not strong enough for long-lasting construction
were based on experience in using nine-inch square sections of timber,
whereas all the projections for using greenheart were on the basis of
using twelve-inch sections, and that previously relatively cheap-quality
oak had been used, whereas higher-grade oak timber could be supplied.
Furthermore, they claimed that the existing oak groynes needed replac-
ing not because the wood was inadequate: ‘the failure of the present
groynes is principally due to the corrosion of the metal ties which hold
the timbers together. They have rusted badly. The timber itself has not
failed … ’ (Ray Russell, quoted in Sussex Express, 6 January 1995).
The outcome was that Posford Duvivier and the Council’s engineers
got what had been their ‘preferred option’ since early 1993 approved
and used. Construction, using greenheart, commenced in mid–late
1996. Despite the protests, greenheart has been used throughout the
project, even without FSC certification. The engineers involved were
clearly keen to legitimise their project in the face of environmental
objections, but were also clearly more keen to use greenheart in any
case. In their eyes, the superiority of greenheart over oak from an engi-
neering point of view was the trump card. In Council meetings in
March 1993, January 1994 and June 1994, the engineers made signifi-
cant efforts (even before FoE began its campaign) to assure councillors
that the timber would come from sustainable sources, and spent effort
and money trying to find sources that could plausibly be shown to be
‘sustainable’. In June 1995, after extensive campaigning by FoE and
others, the Council agreed only to use timber which was FSC approved.
However, Posford Duvivier and the Council’s engineers then found
that there were at that time no sources of FSC-accredited greenheart
(or, for that matter, FSC-accredited oak), and none was likely to be
available by the time that construction was then scheduled to start
(early 1996). DTL had agreed to apply for FSC accreditation, but SGS
forestry was not yet accredited by the FSC to accredit timber as FSC
approved. Then DTL was taken over by a Singapore-based company
and this further delayed the process of getting their wood FSC
approved. So the engineers went back to the Council, who reversed
their commitment to use only FSC-approved timber, in meetings in
November 1995 and January 1996, arguing by now, however, that
DTL’s Green Charter was adequate.9
Structuring environmental decision-making

The ironic nature of this situation was lost on no one. While trying
to respond to ‘threats’ imposed by the environment, which were
increasingly being connected in people’s consciousness to large-scale
environmental change such as global warming, the Council was simul-
taneously helping to aggravate those very environmental changes in
the first place. Much of the force of campaigns by Friends of the Earth
(FoE) and others locally came from the recognition in people’s minds
and in public discourse of this ironic dilemma.
At the level of political decisions, this dilemma and dynamic runs
throughout global environmental politics. This dilemma is, however,
itself a product of the complexity of modern, globally organised politi-
cal, social and economic systems. The capacity of a Council to be
enmeshed in global networks which make its decisions and their rami-
fications so convoluted shows many of the features of such a globally
organised complex system.
This complexity could be understood in the terms outlined by Ulrich
Beck in his analysis of how risk works in modernity. For Beck, risk is a
pervasive feature of modern, large-scale technological systems. But what
risk in these systems does is obscure lines of causality, which in turn
make claims about responsibility for action difficult to sustain and easy
to avoid. For Beck, this can be described as ‘organised irresponsibility’.
In modern societies, risk is defined legalistically in order to try to assign
culpability for causing damage. But under conditions where the hazards
and risks are widespread, and caused by multifarious agents and forces:
the interpretation of the principle of causation in individual terms,

which is the legal foundation for hazard aversion, protects the per-
petrators it is supposed to bring to book … an ostensibly protective
judicial system, with all its laws and bureaucratic pretensions,
almost perfectly transforms collective guilt into general acquittal.
(Beck, 1995, p. 2)
In other words, in Goldblatt’s terms, organised irresponsibility ‘denotes

a concatenation of cultural and institutional mechanisms by which
political and economic elites effectively mask the origins and con-
sequences of the catastrophic risk and dangers of late industrialization’
(Goldblatt, 1996, p. 166).
One of the consequences of this is that much of the conflict over
political decisions with respect to the environment will concern
notions of responsibility and agency. One aspect of this can be seen in
representations of structure and agency in this regard. While Channel
4’s narrative was structural, prevalent stories in Eastbourne itself were
agency-oriented. From FoE, the dominant construction was that
Eastbourne Borough Council was destroying a rainforest; their leaflet
asking people to write to the Council protesting had the slogan ‘Visit
the Rainforest … come to Eastbourne’. Indeed, Simon Counsell, when
questioned on this, responded neatly that ‘if the Council’s hands really
were tied, it’s amazing to see the efforts they went to to tie their hands
up’ (interview, 29 November 1996).10 This is consistent with Beck’s
argument that what risk under complexity does is effectively make it
too difficult to attribute blame or causality, allowing agents to evade
responsibility for their actions.
But the dominant public discourse in the local media was also
agency-oriented, concerning the Council’s obligations both to pro-
tect Eastbourne from the sea, but also not to damage the global
environment. Engineers from the Council were perhaps more equivo-
cal in this regard; on the one hand, they ardently argued that they
had made the right decision and when asked about constraints produc-
ing their decision, denied there were any significant ones (apart
from the statutory obligation to provide sea defences), but on the
other hand, their arguments were clearly embedded in an engineering
discourse, such that the ‘logic’ of the engineering requirements for
the groynes predetermined a necessary outcome (involving the use
of greenheart). The structure determining their decision was what
the engineering required; their agency was that they were good
engineers.11
My concern here is to situate this particular, local political decision
within broader, globalised contexts. Such structural and discursive
contexts helped to produce this particular decision. Interpreting the
event in this way can therefore tell us much about the dynamics
of global environmental politics and the possibilities of understanding
such politics in terms which recognise the need for broad social
change, rather than ones which prescribe institutional and policy
change, as is currently hegemonic within academic debates surround-
ing global environmental politics.
Local economies
Eastbourne’s economy, and therefore the local state’s finances, are
characterised and structured by a heavy reliance on tourism. The
Council spent £2.8m in 1996–97 on tourism-related activities or 24.9
per cent of total spending, indicating the substantial importance which
tourism has for the Council (Eastbourne Borough Council, 1996–97).
Consideration of aesthetics and how the sea-defence structure would
affect the local tourist industry were therefore important in influencing
the Council’s decision.
Aesthetics were clearly important in the rejection of a number of
options originally put forward by Posford Duvivier. Three options
(rock groynes, simply improving the sea wall [and abandoning groynes
altogether], and concrete groynes) were rejected either directly, because
of ‘loss of beach for tourism’ (in the case of the improved sea-wall
option), or indirectly, because of ‘substantial visual impact’, which it is
reasonable to assume is a euphemism for worries about loss of tourist
revenue, not least since the seafront in the town centre is predomi-
nantly hotels (Eastbourne Borough Council, n.d, p. 3).12 In the
Council’s formal deliberations, of the three options outlined as most
favourable – timber, rock, or concrete groynes – the Council’s Strategic
and Economic Development Sub-committee rejected concrete as ‘it was
considered that option 4B, concrete bastion groynes, would detract
from the ambiance of Eastbourne seafront to an unacceptable degree’
(Eastbourne Borough Council, 1992, p. 365).
There was a certain amount of slippage here which helped the
Council and its contractors narrow down the options from rock or tim-
ber, to timber only. In formal documents, only concrete is eliminated
because of aesthetic or tourist-related reasons. Rock is later rejected for
‘technical and financial reasons’ (Eastbourne Borough Council, 1993,
p. 743).13 However, in other representations, both concrete and rock
are lumped together as being rejected for this reason. This occurs in the
Council’s information pack, cited above, where there is also a photo-
graph of rock groynes in Arun looking dingy and with a sign saying
‘Caution, keep off rocks, no climbing, no diving, no swimming’, and
a caption reading ‘Rock groynes in Eastbourne would be larger (than
wood or than Arun’s?) and subject to weed growth’ (Eastbourne
Borough Council, n.d, p. 3). It also occurred in the Channel 4 News
item, where it was suggested that one of the reasons why the Council
chose timber over stone or concrete was the fact that it was, in Channel
4’s words, ‘more attractive to tourists’ (Channel 4 News, 11 April
1995).
The most plausible interpretation of the effect of this slippage is that

it helped legitimise the use of the timber. The pervasive understanding
of the reliance on tourism in Eastbourne would mean that the Council
did not have to fully argue a case that a particular option would be
problematic from an aesthetic/tourist point of view; rhetoric such as
that in the information pack would suffice. The Council certainly
argued that the project as a whole was, in the words of Janet Grist,
chair of the Environment Committee, ‘vital for the protection of
Eastbourne and will also significantly improve leisure facilities and the
environment along the seafront for residents and visitors alike’ (quoted
in the Eastbourne Herald, 12 August 1995, p. 7). Objectors also occasion-
ally made similar points: ‘Groynes are the better, and more aestheti-
cally pleasing alternative to other engineering solutions, especially for
a town which relies on tourists who come to visit its beach’ (Russell,
n.d, p. 1).14 The tourism argument appeared to have been an implicit
trump card in deciding the materials to be used, legitimising the deci-
sion to use wood in such a way that technical, financial or environ-
mental arguments could not challenge its discursive force.
This discursive force is revealed in an editorial in the Eastbourne
Herald. The editorial starts by discussing the replacement of the
groynes, focusing on experts’ agreement over global warming,
Eastbourne’s particular vulnerabilities, the controversy over the groyne
timber coming from rainforests, and the need for the best possible sea
defences. Then suddenly, with no clear explanation of the link (none
was apparently necessary), the article switches to discussing tourism:
But while we are trying to protect Eastbourne as a resort, we also need

to provide the type of town people want to visit … Holiday bookings
are down and there is a genuine problem in attracting people to the
town in the light of cheaper foreign holidays and Eastbourne’s
national image of being a geriatric resort plagued by a polluted sea.15
(Eastbourne Herald, 25 March 1995, p. 18)
Such a shift only makes sense in the context of a pervasive local under-
standing of the importance of tourism to Eastbourne’s economy, and
an economistic understanding of what is important in determining
policy; that the Council’s policies should be determined primarily by
considerations of the local economy.16
Global economies
The episode was also economically a global one. At a perhaps banal
level, the emergence of a genuinely global economy makes using wood
imported from over 4000 miles away possible. Greenheart has been
used in sea-defence structures in the UK since the late nineteenth cen-
tury. Eastbourne’s previous groynes, however, were built of oak, of local
source. Wood has been imported into Britain from South America since
the early period of European colonisation, and a trade existed by the
early sixteenth century (see, for example, Dean, 1987). But the scale
and purposes of the trade were both much smaller and primarily for
luxury, aristocratic uses. It is only from the late nineteenth century and
into the twentieth century, with its progressive and radical reductions
in the costs of transportation, that a large-scale trade for such purposes
as sea defences becomes possible.
One of the specific characteristics of globalisation is that it is an
intensification of what Giddens refers to as one of the central features
of modernity; ‘time–space distanciation’ (Giddens, 1985; 1990), or what
Harvey (1990) refers to, evoking different imagery, as time–space
compression. Modernity ‘increasingly tears space away from place by
fostering relations between absent others, locationally distant from
any given situation of face-to-face interaction’ (Giddens, 1990, p. 19,
quoted in Saurin, 1994, p. 47). Saurin continues:
increasingly we produce what we do not consume, and we consume

what we do not produce. The separation of material production and
consumption also involves the removal and abstraction of knowl-
edge about that self-same relationship. Thus, neither a perfunctory
knowledge of the technical procedures of production nor the envi-
ronmental circumstances and costs of production are visible to the
distanced consumer.
(Saurin, 1994, p. 48)
In other words, globalisation makes it possible to make invisible the

effects of one’s actions on the environment and other societies,
because of such distanciation. This is paradoxical, since globalisation
simultaneously shrinks the globe culturally, in terms of making us
more conscious of events across the globe. Certainly, the inhabitants of
Eastbourne and the councillors and engineers involved were aware of
the global effects of their actions, and the national media in the UK
were able to draw on film-footage of forestry operations in Guyana
freely in their stories. Nevertheless, the nature of the experience of
deforestation in Guyana by people in Eastbourne is mediated in such a
way as to make claims about the sustainability or otherwise of the log-
ging operations opaque to their direct experience (whereas it might not
be if locally grown wood were used). They have thus had to rely on
evaluating the competing claims of environmentalists and the Council.
Council and Posford Duvivier engineers visited DTL’s operations in
Guyana and claimed to verify DTL’s claims at first sight (e.g. in Posford
Duvivier, 1994), but their capacity to experience directly other parts of
the globe was not available to all participants in the process. At the
public meeting in March 1995, Friends of the Earth also produced two
people who gave eyewitness accounts of destruction of rainforests in
Guyana, claiming to contradict directly the Council’s representatives’
first-hand experience of DTL’s operations, focusing in particular on
whether DTL was in fact practising the principles contained in its
Green Charter. Protestors also made much of the fact that the trip by
Posford Duvivier and Council engineers was paid for by DTL and by
Aitken and Howard, the company which would import the timber
from Guyana, and that all information produced by Posford Duvivier
concerning rates of regrowth of greenheart were themselves supplied to
Posford Duvivier by DTL itself, rather than by independent research.17
But even then, the public was left with a heavily mediated account of
processes of environmental change on the other side of the globe but
in which they were heavily implicated. They were left largely with a
choice of which first-hand account, which expert, to trust. And this
choice appears contradictory; we expect the ‘compression of the globe’
to make such distanced consequences more visible, but in practice they
become more distant.
At the other end of the commodity chain, the timber producers in
Guyana are inserted into similar global economic networks in different
ways, which structured their actions in ways which are perhaps more
familiar to students of international environmental politics. As
reported by Channel 4 News, there was a ‘dramatic increase in logging
in Guyana during the last five years’, as the Guyanan government
issued large concessions to timber companies in ‘desperate attempts to
pay its international debts’ (Channel 4 News, 11 April 1995).18 The
influence of the debt crisis on deforestation and other environmental
problems is well documented (e.g. George, 1992). George shows corre-
lations can be observed between those countries with high levels of
indebtedness and with high rates of deforestation. Debt and the struc-
tural adjustment programmes imposed by the World Bank and IMF to
respond to debt crises create a situation whereby countries become
increasingly desperate to find sources of export earnings, and thus cre-
ate significant incentives for companies and individuals to engage
either in logging or in forest-clearance for other land uses, mainly
agriculture (ibid.). Other researchers also report correlations between

debt and deforestation (e.g. Kahn and McDonald, 1994), although this
is disputed by others (e.g. Shafik, 1994).
The policy change is associated with some domestic forces. The year
1989 saw a major change in government in Guyana, as a twenty-year
socialist regime came to an end, and was replaced by two successive
regimes which pursued neoliberal policies designed to attract foreign
investment. Many of the logging companies (including, ultimately,
DTL) which were granted concessions to log Guyana’s forests were
South-East Asian, and the decisions to grant concessions were made by
a small body directly under the President’s office, whose members are
regarded by Colchester (1994) as directly corrupt. But in the back-
ground, global forces creating imperatives towards export-led economies
are clearly operating in Guyana (ibid.).
How we understand this global connection and dynamic is, however,
important. For the Council and its consulting engineers, the connec-
tion was seen very clearly in ‘problem-solving’ terms (Cox, 1986). The
underlying dynamics of capitalist globalisation are unproblematic, and
can be channelled towards achieving environmental goals. The neolib-
eral argument that forestry can actively be used to help conserve the
forest, to avoid the land it occupies being given over to other uses, is a
classic example of this. Posford Duvivier exemplified this argument:
It should also be remembered that to ban timber cutting in a devel-

oping country like Guyana could lead to the destruction of vast
areas because the local population would lose sight of the value of
it. If they can use the forests for their livelihoods, providing jobs,
shelter, fuel and food, they will preserve and care for it. If not,
highly destructive operations such as bauxite and gold mining
could step in, as has happened in large areas of Brazil.
(Posford Duvivier, 1994)
They go as far as to claim that ‘DTL not only needs to ensure the forest
is well managed to reassure Western countries, but also to ensure the
future livelihood of the local people. Hence it is not in Guyana’s or
DTL’s own interests to strip the forest for a short term profit’ (ibid.).
The Council’s engineers used a similar argument. In a report to the
Council’s Environment Committee, they quoted the Overseas Devel-
opment Administration’s Forestry Strategy thus:
refusing to use tropical timber is not an environmentally or devel-

opmentally sound option. It would reduce the long term economic
value of forests and increase the likelihood of their conversion to

other land uses. The best ways to help conserve the forests are to
work with forest countries to help them manage their forests sustain-
ably, and to maintain a long term market for sustainably produced
timber.
(Director of Environmental Services and
Chief Engineer, 1995, p. 4)
Consequently, ‘if the recommendations of this report are adopted

then … a positive step will have been taken to preserve the Guyanan
forests’ (ibid., p. 7). Environmental groups involved in principle also
agreed with such an approach. Tim Synnott of the FSC, writing in the
Eastbourne Herald (26 November 1994), suggested that banning the
import of tropical hardwoods was not a solution to deforestation, as
did Friends of the Earth participants in the debate.
However, there are good reasons to believe this misunderstands the
nature of deforestation. At the very least, Posford Duvivier’s argument
begs many questions. Why precisely does DTL not have an interest in
stripping the forest for short-term profit? Why do they have an interest
in ensuring ‘the future livelihood of the local people’? There is no
explanation of any particular characteristics (nor any in other docu-
ments produced by Posford Duvivier) of the case which means that
DTL does have such common interests either with local inhabitants or
in the long-term survival of the forest. It may be that they do have
such interests. But this would be arguably rather unusual in compari-
son with the general role and interests of timber companies operating
in tropical rainforests. One of the assertions made in this case by
Posford Duvivier to support their claim was that 50 per cent of the
income generated by the timber export stayed in Guyana. This claim,
however, came from information supplied directly by DTL and Aitken &
Howard, which Russell claims that Aitken & Howard could not confirm
(Russell, 1995) and which is much higher than the usual figure of
approximately 10 per cent given by the International Tropical Timber
Organisation, and as cited in communications with Eastbourne
Council by Simon Counsell (1995). Such claims would certainly be at
odds with the general impact of logging in Guyana. The most exten-
sive account of this is in Colchester (1994), where it is clear that
logging, including greenheart, is clearly unsustainable. Even where
commitments to some level of forestry which could be claimed to be
‘sustainable’ are present from the companies involved, there is no
government infrastructure to monitor whether such commitments are
being acted upon. Colchester also shows persuasively that the priority
of the government of Guyana is clearly to maximise logging to earn
foreign exchange.19
The general conclusion to be drawn from most literature on defor-
estation is that the scenario painted by Posford Duvivier and
Eastbourne Borough Council in relation to the impact of their scheme
on forests in Guyana is in theory possible, but in practice unlikely. The
patterns of forces underlying deforestation are too complex and convo-
luted to allow simple statements about the intentions of the company
involved, as the effects of these statements of intent will be mediated by
government policies (particularly concerning road-building and incen-
tives to convert land to agricultural uses), land ownership patterns,
global constraints on the country.20 All sorts of unintended conse-
quences can be expected which make the impact of logging operations
more widely felt than the benign picture painted in Eastbourne.
However, whether or not one accepts this critique of the neoliberal
argument concerning the causes of deforestation and appropriate
responses to it, it remains the case that such neoliberal arguments liter-
ally only make sense within a capitalist economy. The assumption that
unless the forest is ‘sustainably’ forested the land will be converted to
other uses assumes a set of capitalist imperatives underlying deforesta-
tion, along rational choice lines. People are assumed to be impelled
by motives of self-interest (defined in terms of increasing monetary
wealth). Alternative lifeworlds are simply assumed to be impossible
even to conceive.
Economies of science and sustainability

Sustainability is perhaps the major normative criteria justifying claims
about action in relation to environmental politics. Whether or not a
particular scheme, project, political or economic ideology is or is not
problematic from an environmental point of view, often becomes a
question of sustainability. In McManus’s terms (citing Blowers, 1993),
sustainability is the ultimate ‘mobilising concept’, the notion around
which policies and discourses can be developed regarding the environ-
ment (McManus, 1996). Yet the definition of sustainability is itself
open to debate. ‘Whose sustainability?’ is the question underlying this
section. Whose version of what sustainability meant in Eastbourne pre-
vailed and why? How did particular versions of what sustainability
means serve to legitimise particular courses of action?
A number of competing definitions of sustainability have been in
operation in Eastbourne. Coming from central government in the UK,
from the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (MAFF), is one

which is specifically about the direct effects of projects they fund, and
excludes considerations such as the sources of materials used in pro-
jects funded by the MAFF. As represented in the Shoreline Management
Plan for Eastbourne’s stretch of coast,21 MAFF’s definition of sustain-
ability regarding coastal defences is the following:
A sustainable coastal defence policy is one which provides adequate

protection against flooding and erosion in a manner that is techni-
cally, environmentally, and economically acceptable, both at the
time any associated measures are implemented, and in the future.
(BMT Limited, n.d.)
MAFF’s definition is extremely broad. MAFF guidelines for schemes

are based on three types of criteria: technical soundness; environ-
mental acceptability; and economic viability and cost-effectiveness.
Interestingly, sustainability is included in MAFF guidelines as a techni-
cal consideration, not an environmental one. ‘Schemes should be sus-
tainable. That is, they should take account of the interrelationships
with other defences, developments and processes within a coastal cell
or catchment area, and they should avoid as far as possible tying future
generations into inflexible and expensive options for defence’ (MAFF,
1993, p. 26). In other words sustainability is linked to the emerging
holistic discourse of coastal defences (discussed earlier) that projects
should take into account their effects further along the coast. But
sustainability for the MAFF does not include consideration of the
sources of materials used in projects. The considerations of ‘environ-
mental acceptability’ are also based primarily on local environmental
effects (on amenity, or on ecosystems), although there is one mention
of ‘international obligations’ (undefined) in that section (ibid.,
pp. 26–7). Given that MAFF funded the major part of the project, their
definition mattered.22
However, the definition of sustainability in public discourse in
Eastbourne was rather different. It focused much more closely on the
question of the sustainability of extraction of timber from greenheart
forests in Guyana. The information pack produced by the Council, for
example, engages with a debate over sustainability clearly on these
grounds. They state that greenheart is preferable to oak ‘on environ-
mental grounds’, because it lasts ‘up to twice as long as oak’, and there-
fore an additional 6000 m3 of wood would have to be used if oak were
the timber of choice (Eastbourne Borough Council, n.d, p. 5). In a
section explicitly entitled ‘Will Eastbourne’s proposals destroy a tropi-

cal rainforest?’, they discuss the need to get wood only from a ‘well-
managed’ source (see below for more on how slippage between
‘well-managed’ and ‘sustainable’ made Eastbourne’s proposals easier to
legitimise). They cite the neoliberal environmental economics argu-
ment already discussed, and invoke the authority of the World Bank
and Overseas Development Administration, to suggest that the best
way of protecting the forest is to promote ‘well-managed’ forestry, as
this gives the inhabitants of the forest an incentive to manage the for-
est well, rather than convert it, for example, to farmland (ibid., p. 6).
They cite SGS Forestry’s certification of DTL’s Green Charter and the
World Wide Fund for Nature as evidence of the ‘well-managed’ nature
of DTL’s operations in Guyana (ibid.).
This version of sustainability was also produced throughout local
and national media coverage of the case, and in environmentalist’s and
engineer’s accounts of sustainability. Local press coverage saw the ques-
tion of sustainability in this way.23 At the end of the Channel 4 News
story was a debate about whether the wood to be cut for Eastbourne’s
sea defences was coming from sustainable sources. This focused on the
question of the rates of regrowth of greenheart and whether it was pos-
sible to engage in timber production without damaging the ecosystem
of the forest as a whole. This became reduced to a question of the rate
of regrowth of greenheart. Here the deference to scientists was com-
plete. In the Eastbourne Herald (26 November 1994), a debate was
staged with protagonists (Posford Duvivier) and antagonists (Friends of
the Earth) presenting arguments directly, and the paper included an
‘expert’ opinion (as if the council’s engineers and FoE representatives
aren’t ‘experts’!) from Tim Synnott of the Forestry Stewardship Council
(FSC). The FSC is the major accreditor of the sustainability of forestry
schemes. The debate concerned whether the 20-year period left by DTL
in between cutting (in addition to only taking four trees per two acres
in each cutting cycle), and thus on the rates at which greenheart regen-
erated (defined in terms of m3 per year) was adequate.
As in relation to the evidence of whether DTL was implementing
its Green Charter, participation in this debate was limited to those with
the expertise and confidence to use scientific language. The debate was
essentially about which scientific evidence was the most persuasive.
On the one hand, critics of Posford Duvivier argued that their assess-
ment (that greenheart regenerates at a rate of 1 m3 per year) was based
on research from the 1930s and 1950s, and that more recent research
should be used. They also said that scientists employed by DTL to
evaluate their logging activities were prevented from communicating

their work freely. Opponents of the scheme were also able (unusually)
to cite a World Bank employee as arguing that a 20-year cutting cycle
was too short for greenheart (Russell, 1995). On the other hand,
Posford Duvivier and the Council’s engineers pointed out the limita-
tions of the research used by FoE and others (that a figure of 0.18 m3 is
more appropriate), that this research was carried out in an area of high
devastation of a forest, which would show different rates of regrowth
to those which would occur in a ‘well-managed’ forest.
My point here is not to argue about which of these assessments is
correct. Clearly, there could be variations in the rates of regrowth
depending on a huge number of conditions, and decision-makers have
(perhaps arbitrarily) to select a figure in order to make it possible to
make a decision. Rather, my purpose is to show two things.
Firstly, the focus on the rates of regrowth question reveals the scien-
tised nature of the discourse. The reduction of the issue of the permissi-
bility of using wood from a particular forest to a question of metres
cubed has the effect of excluding all sorts of considerations. Within a
scientific discourse, it can be seen as a reductionist act, excluding con-
siderations of the ecological consequences of cutting; the effect on
interactions between greenheart and other species in the forest. It also
excludes social considerations, of the dependence on the forest of peo-
ple who use it.24 In engaging in the debate in this way (rather than in
an explicitly ethical manner), the scientists involved arguably legit-
imised the use of greenheart. It thus serves as an instance of what Beck
suggests is the contradiction in science ‘between experimental logic
and large-scale technological hazards’ (1995, p. 161).
Perhaps in a more convoluted fashion, however, ‘even those scien-
tists who would be regarded as sympathetic to green interpretations
of environmental problems are deeply involved in reproducing the
domination of expert systems which are embodied in structures of
institutional control’ (Smith, 1996, p. 35). Such expert systems are an
inevitable part of the growth of an increasingly technologically domi-
nated capitalism, which empowers experts within corporate and state
decision-making systems (ibid., p. 30). In Beck’s terms, ‘protest must
accept the basic assumption it intends to contest before it can utter
a word’ (1995, p. 60). And thus the protestors help to reproduce
processes of rationalisation which, as Weber pointed out, are inevitably
about the ‘disenchantment of the world’, or the shift towards under-
standings of nature as devoid of meaning beyond human instrumental
control and use (ibid.). Elvin and Ninghu suggest that one of the
consequences of this approach is a ‘technological lock-in’, whereby the

initial intervention in biological processes creates the need continually
to intervene later, but the consequence of this is ‘not as it sometimes
is – overall – disaster, but something much subtler, – conservatism’
(1995, p. 48).
The second point, however, is that much of this is a question of
political economy. It is a question of the power of businesses to use sci-
entific definitions of sustainability and slippage between the precise
language of scientists and the looser language of public discourse to
justify actions it appears clear that they had always intended to take,
with or without expert opinion on the sustainability of the project.
Science served to legitimise deforestation. As debates are reduced to
questions of which expert to trust, those who become the primary
translators of scientific information for political decision-makers (in
this case, Posford Duvivier) are privileged in their interpretation or
appropriation of expert knowledge. The status quo is the evidence given
by Posford Duvivier, and objectors (FoE and others) have to disprove
such evidence. When the debate is reduced to the trading of scientific
papers, disproving such evidence becomes difficult, when both many
of the persuaders themselves are laypeople, or scientists coming from
other disciplines, and in particular those making final decisions (the
councillors) are laypeople.25
However, which scientific evidence was chosen seems not uncon-
nected to how that evidence supported other aspects of the interests of
the actors involved. The various actors can be seen to have used ver-
sions of sustainability which were consistent with economic interests,
or constructed alliances with economic groups in order to strengthen
their political hand in relation to how they wanted sustainability to be
constructed. There was a noticeable slippage in usage between the term
‘well-managed’, which was the precise term used fairly consistently
by SGS Forestry, Posford Duvivier, and the council’s engineers when
they were narrowly describing DTL’s logging activities, and the term
‘sustainability’, when the council (particularly councillors, although
also sometimes the engineers) and Posford Duvivier were making more
general statements of intent regarding timber extraction, or when the
local media were presenting the arguments in print. This slippage
helped Posford Duvivier and the Council’s engineers legitimise what
had been, since March 1993, the ‘preferred option’ (Eastbourne
Borough Council, 1993, p. 743).
This point is perhaps made more starkly by the relationship between
Posford Duvivier and the timber companies. The fact that Posford
Duvivier’s evidence about the sustainability of greenheart (in terms of

its rates of regrowth) came directly from DTL and Aitken & Howard
was much used by oppositional groups, suggesting that such evidence
cannot be regarded as ‘reliable’. Clearly, if it was the case, as FoE and
others alleged, that Posford Duvivier had decided on using greenheart
on engineering grounds (or as hinted at occasionally more strongly,
perhaps themselves had a vested interest in using greenheart), but
needed to legitimise its use, then using evidence of rates of growth con-
sistent with DTL’s logging practice would be more congenial to them
than using evidence which suggested that such logging was exceeding
the capacity of the forests to grow back. FoE and local timber compa-
nies alleged that the specifications for tendering had been written
in order to exclude oak from consideration, and that Posford Duvivier
had reported erroneously to the Council that there were insufficient
supplies of oak locally, without consulting potential suppliers.
However, the way that oppositional groups used sustainability also
had a political economy, albeit perhaps less direct. Michael Le Page, the
local Friends of the Earth activist most involved in its campaign, made
this explicit. ‘Chopping down virgin rainforest cannot be justified,
especially when it puts British jobs at risk’, he said, during the cam-
paign (quoted in Eastbourne Herald, 4 March 1995). FoE actively made
alliances with local timber firms, notably Timber Management Sawmills
Ltd, who claimed to be able to produce, sustainably, sufficient oak from
local sources, for the scheme, and helped to try to defend the interests
of those companies. They were supported in this by East Sussex County
Council, who later argued in evidence to the House of Commons
Agriculture Committee that there were over 750 000 tonnes of oak
which could be produced locally, at sustainable rates, from woods in
East Sussex (Agriculture Committee, 1998b, p. 73). Thus again, given
this background, FoE developed an interest in showing that DTL’s rates
of logging were unsustainable, and supplied this information to the
local timber firms who used it in their own evidence to the Council.
So while the politics of deforestation in Guyana was scientised, this
occurred in such a way as to benefit particular actors over others. Those
already legitimised by the Council to act on their behalf and advise
them became the legitimate providers of knowledge about, for exam-
ple, rates of regrowth of greenheart trees. While sometimes a scientisa-
tion of environmental problems may produce ideological resources to
oppose environmental destruction, in this case it clearly had the oppo-
site effect. Environmentalists were arguing that sustainability required
that the cutting cycles should be greatly increased, whereas the timber
countries and companies, the Council and its consultants, and the
Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food, were all happy that cutting
could continue until scientific evidence suggested otherwise. Science,
having reduced the world to a series of experiments, meant that such
experiments were legitimate until proved otherwise. Arguing on this
basis, environmentalists arguably had little chance of persuading deci-
sion-makers who depend heavily on their own officers for their pri-
mary source of advice, and necessarily build up relations of trust with
those officers. It is structurally difficult for outsiders to overturn deci-
sions essentially already taken. As Smith points out, when environ-
mentalists have to ‘play the game’, while they may contribute to
improving the environment in some ways, they inevitably ‘play’ by the
rules which ‘requires the representation of the issues within a form
that is acceptable, and understandable, within the structure of the deci-
sion-making process itself. This is presented primarily in terms of
expert knowledge … ’ (Smith, 1996, p. 37). Thus environmentalists help
to embed processes of rationalisation of the environment which, in
Smith’s terms, are ‘at the heart of the problem’ (ibid., p. 38).
Conclusions
This chapter has tried to show how decisions concerning the environ-
ment are always also about the reproduction of various forms of social
power. The decisions in Eastbourne reflect the way that various actors
are embedded in local and global economic systems which structure
their actions heavily. Broader discursive shifts concerning sea defences
do not undermine the way in which such projects have always been
about nation-building; rather, they reflect a shift in the content of the
nations being built. The scientised nature of environmental decision-
making acts to confer authority on certain actors and exclude or
marginalise others.
The cumulative effect of the structuring of environmental decision-
making is that political institutions should be regarded as fundamen-
tally ecologically problematic. Their overriding priorities are to engage
in practices which are unsustainable in ecological terms. This therefore
undermines the assumptions of liberal institutionalists that such insti-
tutions are neutral with respect to environmental change. I move now
to examine the dynamics of broader social practices which generate
such environmental change.
5
Car Trouble
Introduction
An advert for the Nissan Primera in 1996–97 has a man get up in the
morning, dress, leave the house, drive to work, get to work, which turns
out to be back at home. As Eagar puts it ‘A smug yuppy in bed says “I
think I’ll drive to work today, Mrs Jones.” His wife replies: “Fine,
Mr Jones.” … You see, they work from home, but he likes the car so
much, this Nissan Primera, that he still commutes’ (Eagar, 1997). The
punch line of the ad is ‘It’s a driver’s car, so drive it’. When asked the rea-
son for such a slogan, the writer of the ad, David Woods, said that ‘“We
were looking for an unnecessary reason to drive a car”’ (quoted in ibid.).
At the same time, British politics produced a most unlikely hero,
known as Swampy. For a few weeks in January and February of 1997,
Swampy was one of the most talked-about figures in British political
debate, and his popularity endured throughout early 1997. Swampy
was one of five protestors against a road-building scheme on the A30
in Devon who managed to get themselves down an extensive network
of tunnels they and others had constructed when their protest camp,
Fairmile, was evicted. Swampy was the last of the tunnelling protestors
to be pulled out of the ground by ‘rescuers’ employed by the bailiffs to
clear the way for the road, seven days after the five had gone under-
ground. Although a certain proportion of the media construction was
negative, portraying the protestors as ‘evil scum’, unemployed outsider
activists rejecting the values of ‘normal’ people,1 what was interesting
about this case was that in most of the British press and TV discourse,
the coverage was largely positive. The predominant image was
constructed though discourses of youthful active heroic idealism, and
the protestors were normalised through various means. This mostly
95
involved discourses of family, class, and nation, whereby the road

protestors (who in earlier episodes had been constructed as deviant
outsiders in the media) were now constructed as representative of the
values of ‘middle England’. ‘Beneath the encrusted grime and matted
hair beats a respectable suburban middle-class heart’, wrote the
(conservative) Daily Express about Swampy (3 February 1997, p. 10).2
The normalisation of those willing to break the law, not to say risk
their own lives, to prevent road-building and challenge car culture,
says much about how deep those challenges to car culture have gone.
The depth of such challenges in public discourse can perhaps be seen
when the conservative Spectator magazine has a column entitled ‘Not
Motoring’ (Independent, 27 January 1997, p. 20).3
In 1984, and republished in translation into English in 1992,
Wolfgang Sachs wrote perceptively that ‘The problem with the auto-
mobile today consists precisely in the fact that the automobile is not a
problem’ (1992a, p. vii). But the processes just briefly described con-
cern the way in which spaces where the car has become ‘a problem’
have been created. The car (and road-building, always to further auto-
mobility) has been undergoing particular challenges in the UK in the
1990s, involving a challenge to the presumption in favour of the
motorist in suggesting that driving should be only for necessity and
avoided if possible. It is therefore perhaps only reasonable for car man-
ufacturers, and the manufacturers of car culture, to hit back with an
advocacy of the virtue of driving simply for its own sake. It is at points
where hegemonic ideologies are under threat that they need to recon-
stitute their power where possible. Of course, there have always been
challenges to the car since its inception (see below), but what is inter-
esting about the contrast presented here is that it is at the juncture at
which mainstream acceptance of the points made by protestors and
(perhaps less so) the values they espouse is forthcoming that the value
of ads espousing ‘unnecessary’ driving becomes salient.
As car culture and Margaret Thatcher’s (in)famous ‘great car econ-
omy’ are under threat, advertisers and other manufacturers of car cul-
ture shift the discursive frame within which car culture has to be
reproduced. The Primera advert is one such strategic shift. This strategy
is one where car culture is brazenly espoused – the joy of driving for its
own sake is celebrated, as the problematisation of the car since the
mid-late 1980s is discursively erased. In a later version of the same
series of Primera ads, an environmental connection is at least implicit.
In this one, a Florida TV weatherman announces that a particular hur-
ricane has switched course and is headed for downtown Miami.
Car Trouble 97
He gives instructions so that people should under no conditions leave

where they presently are. The ad then cuts to him driving his Nissan
Primera down a Miami highway singing along to The Troggs’ ‘Wild
Thing’, with the ‘It’s a driver’s car, so drive it’ slogan rounding off the
ad. Here, the prevalent image of motoring being about the open road
without other car drivers present is simultaneously revalorised and
satirised – like the Nissan Almera ad (see below), a nostalgia for a past
where the car could be presented unproblematically is produced (per-
haps reinforced by the choice of music), knowing that it can no longer
be portrayed in such a fashion. Also, as in the case of Eastbourne’s sea
defences, the irony of promoting something which causes environ-
mental changes which can then be used to promote further consump-
tion of those products, is hinted at. Increases in severity and frequency
of hurricanes are among some of the secondary effects thought by
many scientists to result from global warming, itself caused by, among
other things, cars.4
Other strategies are, however, adopted by the promoters of car cul-
ture. For example, Baird (1998, pp. 152–3) suggests that images of the
open road are being dropped, as the advertisers recognise that people
mistrust such images as they are increasingly discordant with peoples’
everyday experiences of traffic jams. She cites ads such as one for the
Vauxhall Vectra, which is located in a traffic jam. Where other drivers
get furious with frustration, the driver in the Vectra is ‘cool and
relaxed’ (ibid., p. 152) because of the Vectra’s air-conditioning.
One predominant alternative strategy is to restructure the car’s legiti-
mating motifs to take into account challenges to the car’s dominance
from environmentalism. Two adverts running alongside the Primera
advert adopt such a strategy; that of the Ford Ka, and the Honda
Dream II, as do more recent ones, that of the Renault Laguna, and of
the Vauxhall Vectra.
In the first of these (actually a series of TV ads), the car’s body is in
places almost invisible. In the first of the series of ads, the car only
appears fleetingly at the end of the advert, being submerged in images
of ‘nature’. In others, it is presented through a particular configuration
of the themes of nature, technology and progress, where technology
and progress are presented in terms of harmony with nature (to the
point of literal invisibility within nature’s emblems, often trees in these
ads). The Honda ad is perhaps less subtle, certainly less surreal, in
portraying Honda’s prototype solar car as the car of the future, where
technology is again placed at the service of progress in addressing
questions of environmental change.
The ad for the Renault Laguna, running in 1998, has well known
(socio)biologist Steve Jones delivering a lecture on evolution and nat-
ural selection. In the background earlier models of Renault cars ‘evolve’
into the current Laguna model. Jones intones that evolution is ‘not just
a theory, it is going on all around us’. The appropriation of nature as
evolution serves to represent the car in question as being refined and
improved progressively, adapting to its environment as would an
organism (or gene). At the same time, this is a classic example of the
processes discussed by Haraway (1991) whereby social norms are read
on to nature, and then back on to society as naturalising justifications
for social practices. Discourses of evolution and natural selection read
modernist notions of competition, selection, adaptation and most
importantly progress on to nature, and then back, in this case, on to
car design. Such a move renders car-centred development ‘natural’, and
by implication irrational, if not literally impossible, to resist.
In a different vein, Vauxhall ran a TV ad as part of their campaign for
the Vectra in 1998, which had as its general slogan ‘for the corners of
the earth’, focusing on how well the Vectra takes corners while imply-
ing how the owner will want to drive everywhere in it. In one of this
series, the advert starts in a road protest which aims to prevent a forest
being cut down to make way for a road. The roadworks would have
straightened out a road which currently wound around the forest. The
protest succeeds in preventing the road being built and then one of the
protestors (conspicuously in short hair, chinos and polo shirt, as
opposed to dreadlocks, combat trousers, etc.) leaves the group and the
ad cuts to him driving around the forest on the old road, happy with
the winding road because of how well his Vectra ‘corners’. To top this
audacious appropriation of the road protests with a two fingered
salute, the driver passes one of his fellow ex-protestors who is now
hitchhiking, and shouts out of his window ‘Get a job’.
Wernick (1991) suggests that the direct dealing with ways in which
the car’s relationship with the environment has been problematic is
one of the two themes which have been central in the ways that car
advertising has changed since the early 1970s (the other concerns the
family, gender and patriarchy). Car ads have increasingly had to take
into account the environment and critiques of techno-optimism more
generally, and have tended to reappropriate nature for the purposes of
the car (Wernick, 1991, pp. 77–9).
One final point which Wernick makes is that another strategy in
dealing with these challenges to car culture is to use nostalgia, which
he suggests has become a prominent theme in car advertising. He
Car Trouble 99
discusses at length a (late 1980s) Vauxhall Cavalier advert in which a

stylised advert from the 1950s is shown, with Dan Dare/Buck Rogers
style futuristic cityscape, a nuclear family in its car with the father at
the wheel, unproblematically taking his family ‘for a spin’. The advert
shows all the features which cars in the future might have. On the
opposite page of the ad is a photograph of the Vauxhall Cavalier
against a backdrop of grass and trees, and some (unspecified) industrial
(but again futuristic in design) building in the background. There is no
family or people present, but nature is represented. The caption reads
‘Who said tomorrow never comes?’ The point of nostalgia is to con-
cede the ground that the car can no longer be conceived of unprob-
lematically, but to encourage people to hark back to an age when it
could be. In the Cavalier ad, ‘tomorrow’s-car-of-the-future-today is pre-
sented as fulfilling a technological dream which in crucial respects, the
promotion for it also disavows’ (ibid., p. 88).
In 1997, the ad for the Nissan Almera, another prominent advert,
also uses such a strategy. This is a pastiche of the 1970s action detective
series The Professionals,5 similar in format and style to the American
Starsky and Hutch. The advert involves much screeching of car-tyres,
driving through puddles and market barrows full of fruit, shouting,
and so on. The billboard version is shot in blue-black and white.
Although ‘nature’ or the environment is nowhere present in this
advert, it clearly fits with Wernick’s argument that nostalgia as a discur-
sive strategy responds to challenges to car culture (see also Baird, 1998,
pp. 141–2 on this ad).
Car culture, and a car-based economy, therefore do not simply exist
‘naturally’. They need to be reproduced and legitimised. They often
come under challenge and must therefore reinvent themselves to adapt
and take advantage of new discursive shifts. Nevertheless, the car is
now globally the dominant mode of transport. The world’s towns and
cities have been totally restructured to serve the need of car-centred
transport systems. Many people’s lives are now literally dependent
on cars for meeting basic needs. Freund and Martin (1993) term this
‘autohegemony’. How did we get here?
Autohegemony6
There is a naturalistic tendency in much writing on the rise of the car,

particularly among economists or business historians. This tendency
explains the rise of the car in terms of the natural advantages it has
over other forms of transport and the way it taps into powerful forces
in human psychology. Business studies writers Moxton and Wormald

come up with one of the more bizarrely psychologistic of such expla-
nations:
The truth is that our attachment to cars is profoundly rooted – not

only in the practical necessities of life but also in our emotions.
Research shows that there is a deep psychic connection between
freedom and movement. Babies achieve locomotion. Adults
re-experience it through the motor car. Waiting for a bus or a train
unleashes hidden, unconscious fears of abandonment in many.
(Moxton and Wormald, 1995, p. 33)
Overy also tends to naturalise the growth of the car, arguing that ‘the
reception and rapid evolution of the motor vehicle … needs little expla-
nation’ (1990, p. 57). The way writers often discuss the (usually
American) ‘love affair’ with the car reinforces such naturalistic notions
(e.g. Davies, 1975, p. 7; Flink, 1975, ch. 1).
These accounts of the rise of the car are misleading and highly
ahistorical. Much of the rise of the car can be explained in terms of
political-economic forces (narrowly understood). For example, cars
have widely been seen to have played a fundamental part in the pro-
motion of economic growth in the twentieth century. Proponents and
social critics alike argue that the car has been central to promoting
growth. This has been firstly because of the way in which investment
in the car industry directly stimulated a whole host of other industries
(petrochemicals, steel, engineering, road-building) and thus the econ-
omy as a whole. Secondly, cars enabled a faster and more flexible
means of distributing goods through the economy than previous
transport modes, thus accelerating growth. Finally, the car industry
innovated extensively in production techniques, producing the
broad political-economic shift known often as ‘Fordism’, which when
adopted throughout the economy, produced substantial increases in
industrial productivity. This has therefore been central in legitimising
the car’s expansion, enabling the car to become perhaps the symbol of
progress for most of the twentieth century.7
Given the state’s structural role in promoting accumulation, it is no
surprise that once the car’s potential in accelerating accumulation was
realised, states began to promote the car vigorously. The car industry
offered significant improvements in the capability to commodify
means of mobility, and at the same time accelerate the movement of
goods and people in the economy. Promoting the car through hidden
and not-so-hidden means has helped it to become the dominant force
Car Trouble 101
it has. Such state promotion of cars is perhaps best understood in terms

of the state’s structural role in capitalist societies, its general imperative
to support the conditions for capital accumulation (e.g. Jessop, 1990).
The promotion of the car economy by the state has had perhaps four
main facets. The first of these has been road-building (both within and
between urban areas), which has increasingly meant that, since road-
building is almost always paid for out of general taxation (while invest-
ment in other transport means is not), this is a subsidy to car-users not
given to other transport-users. The second is the progressive neglect
and downgrading of public transport and non-motorised forms of
transport (e.g. Wolf, 1996, pp. 75–81, 117–23). Thirdly, various fiscal
measures effectively subsidise car-use relative to other forms of trans-
port, such as tax relief on the provision of company cars. Athanasiou
estimates that the total annual value of subsidies to the car in the US
alone are approximately $400bn (1996, p. 264). Finally, states have
occasionally colluded with car manufacturers to remove competition
to the car, most famously in the case of National City Lines, a com-
pany established by General Motors, Standard Oil of California and
Firestone Tire Company, which, with the active consent of the city
governments concerned, systematically bought up and dismantled
tram lines throughout the US.8
Modernity, speed and identity

I focus on the international political economy of the car as briefly sum-
marised above in Paterson (forthcoming a). Here I want to focus on the
way in which the emergence of a car culture has been crucial to estab-
lishing the car’s prominence. It would be inadequate and misleading to
characterise the rise of the car simply as a story of economic manipula-
tion and political promotion. What Gorz (1980) called ‘the social ideol-
ogy of the motorcar’ is deeply entrenched in individual and collective
identities. Such an ideology has been able to become so deep-rooted
because of the way its manufacturers have been able to link it to perva-
sive ideologies and widely valorised themes. ‘The alliance of those
whose livelihood depends on a robust automobile-centred culture … also
feed on the culture symbolism of the automobile: freedom, individual-
ism, mobility, speed, power, and privacy’ (Tiles and Oberdiek, 1995, p.
137). Such symbolic connections are ubiquitous in the variety of cul-
tural arenas, from pop music, to film, to twentieth-century novels,
where cars are widely valorised (Baird, 1998, pp. 28–35).
Of these six themes of ‘freedom, individualism, mobility, speed,
power, and privacy’, I will focus on the notions of speed and mobility.
In many accounts, speed, and acceleration in particular, are taken as
perhaps the primary feature of twentieth-century modernity. In Freund

and Martin’s terms, ‘Speed is the premier cultural icon of modern soci-
eties’ (1993, p. 89). Berman makes this explicit in his account of
modernity. While for him the central general feature of modernity is
that ‘all that is solid melts into air’, in the twentieth century this con-
tinual change is effected through continuous acceleration brought
about by new transportation technologies, primarily the car. He quotes
Giedion, Le Corbusier’s most famous ‘disciple’ (Berman’s term) in
architecture and urban design, relating this to the car explicitly. ‘The
space–time feeling of our period can seldom be felt so keenly as when
driving’, Giedion wrote in 1938–39 (Giedion, 1949, quoted in Berman,
1982, p. 302). Berman also quotes Le Corbusier thus:
On that 1st of October, 1924, I was assisting in the titanic rebirth of a

new phenomenon … traffic. Cars, cars, fast, fast! One is seized , filled
with enthusiasm, with joy … the joy of power.
(Berman, 1982, p. 166)
The association is then one from modernity and modernisation, with

notions of progress built in (which are so valorised that they cannot be
resisted) with acceleration and increasing speed, and thus the car
becomes a primary symbol of modernity itself. The driving experience
becomes itself an end, not simply a means. As a US car ad in 1993 sug-
gests, ‘Illogical as it may seem, the simple act of motoring down the
boulevard, exhaust burbling, that’s what Viper ownership is all about.
Only behind the wheel does it all make perfect sense’ (quoted in
Freund and Martin, 1993, p. 3).
Speed has been one of the main motifs underlying popular construc-
tions of the car. At times, it has been a central part of advertising strate-
gies, with focus, for example, on the time taken to accelerate from
0 mph to 60 mph. In the UK at least, such a focus in adverts is now
against the Advertising Standards Authority’s (an industry self-regulat-
ing body) code of conduct because of safety concerns, but outside for-
mal advertising, speed is still highly valorised. A programme like Top
Gear, a highly popular TV programme about cars, focuses heavily on
speed in the way it portrays cars. Its most prominent recent presenter,
Jeremy Clarkson, is well known for glamourising the speed of cars
demonstrated in the programme. In one episode of Top Gear, he drove
a Jaguar XJR above 100 mph, proclaiming that it was ‘bonkers fast …
rockets from nought to 60 [mph] in five seconds’ (as quoted in Baird,
1998, p. 187).
Car Trouble 103
Thrift also makes speed a central feature in his account of changes

in contemporary societies (1996). Although he dislikes the term
‘modernity’, he groups together three themes – speed, light and power –
under the collective term ‘mobility’, to characterise such changes in
ways similar to Berman’s account of modernity. Thrift suggests that the
three ‘have been crystallised by considerations of a commonplace,
even banal, image; an urban landscape at night through which runs a
river of headlight’ (ibid., p. 257).
Like Berman, Thrift focuses on nineteenth- and twentieth-century
change in terms of the mobility produced by transport and communi-
cation technologies. In the nineteenth century, the consequences of
the adoption of such technologies (I pick up only on his accounts of
such consequences in terms of speed and transport here) were fourfold.
Firstly, they produced a ‘change in the consciousness of time and
space’, involving increased attention paid by people to smaller distinc-
tions in time (leading to the development of a market for watches), the
emergence of travelling to work as a social practice, and the increasing
experience of landscape from a moving rather than stationary vantage-
point (Thrift, 1996, p. 265). Secondly, there was the way that literary
texts paid attention to speed either in terms of celebration of machine-
driven acceleration or protests against the increasingly hurried nature
of life (ibid.). Thirdly, there was a change in the nature of subjectivity,
involving an ‘increasing sense of the body as an anonymised parcel of
flesh which is shunted from place to place’ (ibid., p. 266). Finally,
prevalent social metaphors emerged reflecting the preoccupation
with speed, notably ‘circulation’ and ‘progress’. Speed thus culturally
became understood as causally connected to progress. ‘Whatever was
part of circulation was regarded as healthy, progressive, constructive;
all that was detached from circulation, on the other hand, appeared,
diseased, medieval, subversive, threatening’ (Schivelsbusch, 1986,
p. 195, quoted in Thrift, 1996, p. 266). Travel thus became an end in
itself (Thrift, 1996, p. 267). By the late twentieth century, such a con-
ception became deeply embedded – ‘Travel is now thought to occupy
40 per cent of available “free time”’ (Urry, 1990, p. 6, as quoted in
Thrift, 1996, p. 280).
In the twentieth century, Thrift suggests that speed continued as a
predominant social theme, but that through at least to the 1960s, there
was little qualitatively different about the consciousness of space
and time from the nineteenth century (Thrift, 1996, p. 277). The car
emerged, however, as the ‘most important device’, the ‘avatar of mobil-
ity’ (ibid., p. 272), which has helped to entrench the notion of a society
where the ‘only truly profound pleasure [is] that of keeping on the
move’ (ibid., p. 273, quoting Baudrillard, 1988, pp. 52–3).
But the importance of the way cars could be linked to freedom
through notions of speed and mobility has also had a context in the
way that industrial societies have become increasingly regimented and
bureaucratised to serve the needs of industrial production. ‘More than
any other consumer good the motor car provided fantasies of status,
freedom and escape from the constraints of a highly disciplined urban,
industrial order’ (McShane, 1994, p. 148; also Ling, 1990, pp. 4 –5).
This fantasy was particularly important since even in the US, the most
motorised country in the world, no one was actually able to commute
or even, apart from a very tiny number, travel far (on holiday, for
instance), until after the Second World War (ibid., pp. 125–7).
The association of cars with speed, and with speed as their main
legitimising motif, is widely recognised in contemporary accounts
(e.g. Ross, 1995, p. 21; McShane, 1994, p. 114; Wolf, 1996, ch. 13). This
can perhaps be best seen in the way that many critiques of the car
focus on the notion of speed and mobility. They focus on the fact that
in many cities, average speeds are now often no faster than they were
before the car’s emergence, with London averaging 7 mph, Tokyo 12
mph, and Paris 17 mph in the rush hour (Wajcman, 1991, p. 127). The
critiques in popular accounts, such as Ben Elton’s Gridlock (1991) focus,
among other things, on the irony and frustration produced by the car.
The myth of the car is centred on speed and mobility, but since it
simultaneously produces congestion on a scale never previously seen,
it is simple (at least in Elton’s fictional account) for political elites to
manipulate this and produce a total Gridlock of London, in order to
justify further road-building.9
A classic critique of this is in Ivan Illich’s Energy and Equity (1974).
Illich calculated that:
the typical American male devotes more than 1,600 hours a year to
his car. He sits in it while it goes and while it stands idling. He parks
it and searches for it. He earns the money to put down on it and to
meet the monthly installments. He works to pay for petrol, tolls,
insurance, taxes, and tickets. He spends four of his sixteen waking
hours on the road or gathering his resources for it.
(ibid., p. 30)
On this basis, Wolf suggests that speed is a myth, not in the sense of an
organising social motif, but as something false and to be debunked. He
Car Trouble 105
calculates that taking all these factors which Illich discusses, the ‘real’
speed of car transport averages at approximately 20 kmh, about the
same speed travelled by a ‘very fit cyclist’ (1996, p. 187).
The modernisation of which the car was the ultimate expression is
therefore deeply embedded in individual identities. However, the way
this is embedded in those identities seems to me not best expressed in
Gorz’s terms. For Gorz (1980) ideology is used in the sense of some-
thing which masks reality. All that is required is to unmask this ideo-
logical cloak and social change becomes possible. Similarly, Wolf (1996)
and Gartman (1994) both treat the way that cars are embedded in iden-
tities as primarily a psychological reaction to alienation in the capitalist
labour process; a means by which capitalism displaces the alienation it
inevitably produces. The car for Wolf is then a ‘substitute satisfaction’
(ibid., p. 192), or for Gartman, an ‘ersatz satisfaction’ for the degrada-
tion of work under Fordist mass production (1994, p. 12). But the
notion of false consciousness which underlies these interpretations is
deeply problematic. While not wishing to dispute the ‘facts’ they pre-
sent (Gorz’s argument about the impossibility of everyone owning a
car, Wolf’s concerning the myth of speed, both drawing on Illich), it
seems to me more useful to take seriously the reality and depth of the
identities produced around the car. They should not be dismissed as
false consciousness, but should be understood as deeply embedded. As
Gartman argues, ‘rather than see the needs appealed to by consumer
goods as false needs engineered by the culture industry, my formula-
tion conceptualizes them as true needs for self-determining activity
channelled by class conflict into the only path compatible with capital-
ism – commodity consumption’ (1994, p. 11). However, Gartman still
relies on viewing mass consumption, notably of the car, as a displace-
ment from the alienation produced by capitalist mass production.
Berman again seems to me to understand the relationship and
contradiction here better;
This strategy [of the promoters of the ‘expressway world’] was effec-
tive because, in fact, the vast majority of modern men and women do
not want to resist modernity: they feel its excitement and believe in
its promise, even when they find themselves in its way.
(1982, p. 313)
As Berman quotes Allen Ginsberg, the forms of identity produced

in this process are not false, imposed purely to meet someone else’s
interests; they are more like ‘Moloch, who entered my soul early’
(1982, p. 291). The car is partly constitutive of who it is to be us, not

something externally imposed on us through deceit. Understanding
the relationship in terms of notions of the cyborg developed in general
by Haraway (1991), and invoked in relation to the car by Thrift (1996)
or Luke (1996), for example, gets closer to the complexities of the rela-
tionship between human identities and the machines through which
such identities are shaped. The transformation of those identities
cannot be achieved by simply showing their ‘false’ nature.
Cars and social inequalities

It should also be remembered that modern societies are highly
unequal, and arguably depend on such inequalities for their continued
reproduction. While the car’s success owes much to its symbolic reso-
nance with predominant themes in twentieth-century modernity (and
the capacity of its manufacturers and promoters both to present the car
in such a way, and to promote a particular form of modernity with
which the car is resonant), the impacts of the car are also highly
unequal. Access to cars is greatly affected by gender, race and class. The
socio-spatial consequences of car-centred development (most promi-
nently suburbanisation) have also helped to reproduce such social divi-
sions. Entrenched understanding of the identities surrounding cars
(and of the cars themselves), particularly in terms of gender, serve
to reproduce such inequalities at the deep level of individual and
collective identities.
While initially clearly a high-status object for the very affluent, very
early on the car was appropriated as something which could democra-
tise society and erase class barriers. Henry Ford was very clear that this
was the purpose of the Model T Ford, and that mass ownership of cars
was a direct substitute for class politics:
the time will not be far when our own workers will buy automobiles
from us. … I’m not saying our workers will … govern the state. No,
we can leave such ravings to the European socialists. But our work-
ers will buy automobiles.
(Quoted in Wolf, 1996, p. 72)
So the car has been sold as a democratising force. Of course, this was
also used by non-democratic political leaders. Hitler in particular pro-
moted the ideology of mass motorisation (no actual German civilians
drove Volksmobiles until after the Second World War [Wolf, 1996,
pp. 98–9]) and the first large-scale motorway construction projects. In
Car Trouble 107
Hitler’s case, it had distinctly military purposes lying behind it – the

design for the Volksmobile Beetle was such that it could be put to both
civilian and military uses, and the motorways were constructed to
make troop movement quicker and more flexible than could be
achieved by rail transport. But as an ideology, it was also designed, as it
was in Ford’s rhetoric, to help erase class differences and ‘to meld the
German people into unity’ (the very name ‘people’s car’ was part of
this) (Sachs, 1992a, p. 53; Wolf, 1996, pp. 97–101). The Nazis used the
metaphor of ‘circulation’ to promote motorisation, connecting car use
to the ideology of blood and soil (Sachs, 1992a, pp. 47–50).
This rhetoric of the car as a democratising force endures. Overy, dis-
cussing the democratic pretensions of Ford and other car manufactur-
ers, tends to reproduce their claims uncritically. ‘There is a very real
sense in which the democratization of motor-car ownership and motor
transport matched the corresponding political shifts towards mass pol-
itics and greater equality’ (1990, p. 62). But gender, racial and class
inequalities have been built into the promotion of cars, and perhaps
into their nature as a technology. A car-centred economy has helped to
reproduce such inequalities, themselves crucial in the reproduction of
capitalist societies.
Cars are gendered in a number of ways. The most commonly
observed is in the imagery of cars produced in adverts but also in the
design of cars itself (Wernick, 1991, pp. 72–5; Wolf, 1996, pp. 207–8;
Freund and Martin, 1993, pp. 90 –3; Wajcman, 1991; McShane, 1994,
pp. 132– 40). Cars are either produced as masculine, ‘figured as rocket,
bullet, or gun, that is as a sexual extension of the male’, or as
‘Woman … as flashy possession, mistress or wife’ (Wernick, 1991,
p. 74). Either way, prevailing patriarchal constructions of masculinity
as dominance (where the car simply becomes an extension of the man)
and femininity as submission (‘she handles really well’) are reinforced.
Wajcman (1991, p. 134) suggests the latter construction is dominant.
‘Manufacturers encourage the male user to perceive his machine as a
temperamental woman who needs to be regularly maintained and
pampered for high performance’ (Chambers, 1987, p. 308, cited in
ibid.). More prosaically, car ads are predominantly aimed at men
(although this is gradually shifting as the proportion of car-buyers who
are women increases) and use sex to sell cars (e.g. Baird, 1998,
pp. 147–8; Marsh and Collett, 1986). Even where cars are marketed
at women, sexist portrayals of women in them are still commonplace
(despite a common liberal narrative of progress in eliminating sexism
from public culture), as in the recent (1998) use in the UK of
‘supermodel’ Claudia Schiffer disrobing before getting in her Citroen

Xsara.
Occasionally, the car is presented as a liberator of women. In a
survey of the car, The Economist emphasises such a claim (25 January
1986; see Tiles and Oberdiek, 1995, p. 135). Virginia Scharff (1991)
gives the fullest account of the rise of the car in such terms. Analysing
women’s relationship to the car in early twentieth-century America,
she argues that the car made it possible for women to lead more inde-
pendent lives, engage in a broader variety of work, break down estab-
lished norms of femininity, as well as facilitating the organisation of
the suffrage movement in rural areas. Apart from the consequences of
the car for women (see below) against which such benefits have to be
weighed, a fatal weakness of Scharff’s account is that the women who
appear in her narrative are almost exclusively inordinately privileged.
They come from the ranks not even just of the (upper) middle classes,
but the extremely wealthy. Generalising on the basis of their experi-
ence seems particularly unwise.10
For most writers on the subject, cars have been important technolo-
gies in buttressing male power. Connell argues that cars have been cen-
tral technologies in tying working-class men to a notion of hegemonic
masculinity which maintains male power in technological capitalist
states, giving notions of masculinity tied to aggression, violence and
technology a mass base (1987, p. 109–10). ‘The gradual displacement
of other transport systems by this uniquely violent and environmen-
tally destructive technology is both a means and a measure of the tacit
alliance between the state and corporate elite and working-class hege-
monic masculinity’ (1987, p. 110). In a similar vein, McShane shows
how the emergence of the car occurred at a time when industrialisa-
tion was eroding traditional forms of masculinity, and that ‘the motor
car served as a battlefield in the wars over gender roles that were
so important in early-twentieth-century America’ (1994, p. 149; cf.
Scharff, 1991). In the US, the late nineteenth century experienced a
moral panic surrounding masculinity, as industrialisation meant many
men were no longer using their ‘brute strength’ in their daily lives, and
women were making important inroads into many occupations.
Masculinity was thus refigured to include notions of ‘mechanical abil-
ity’, in an attempt to maintain particular workspaces as male domains.
‘Mechanical ability was becoming an attribute of gender, not social
class’ (McShane, 1994, p. 153).
While cars have therefore been important symbolically and
materially in reproducing male power, they have also been directly
Car Trouble 109
instrumental in the way that public space has been (re)masculinised in

the twentieth century. While cities and towns have been progressively
more organised spatially to serve the needs of car-centred transport,
the diversity of uses of public space has declined. Simultaneously,
men have been able to make cars predominantly theirs. Wolf (1991,
pp. 204 –5) gives figures for Germany regarding differential access to
cars by men and women. There, 79 per cent of eligible men have a dri-
ving licence, while only 50 per cent of women have one. Forty-seven
per cent of German men have ‘continuous’ access to a car, while only
29 per cent of women do. Only 22 per cent of the cars registered in
Germany are owned by women.
Public spaces in central cities have been, therefore, increasingly
masculinised, and one of the predominant attitudes to city centres
expressed by women is now fear (Wolf, 1996, pp. 206–7; Wajcman,
1991, p. 131; Tiles and Oberdiek, 1995, p. 136). The process of subur-
banisation has in many cases involved direct decreases in the mobility
of women (at least those in ‘traditional’ nuclear families with male
breadwinners), moved out to homes in suburbs, away from friends,
shops, and so on. And even where distances remain walkable, women’s
mobility has often been hit by urban road-building as dual carriage-
ways and urban freeways make walking across urban areas more diffi-
cult, dangerous and/or time-consuming (Kramarae, 1988, p. 121, cited
in Tiles and Oberdiek, 1995, p. 136).11
Such spatial reorganisation has occurred predominantly using social
divisions around race and class. Suburbanisation was founded initially
on American rural anti-city ideology, precisely at a time when US cities
were becoming more concentrated and when the ethnic mix of the
cities was becoming more diverse. Suburbanisation allowed middle-
class white Americans the chance to revitalise a rural ideal and escape
from the working classes and those from other ethnic backgrounds to
maintain their privileged status (McShane, 1994, p. 123; Freund and
Martin, 1993, pp. 103– 4). Winner’s (1980) analysis of the New York
parkways built by Robert Moses is again instructive here. Moses was
explicit in creating white middle-class spaces in the parkways, by
engineering-out public transport predominantly used by black and
working-class Americans.
Class has operated in a more complex fashion, however, in relation
to the car. As shown already, an ideology of cars promoting a blurring
of class boundaries persists. But access to cars is highly differential. We
have already seen this regarding gender-based inequalities, but it also
applies to other forms of inequality. Just as one example, in the UK, in
the richest 10 per cent of the population, 90 per cent of households

have cars, while in the poorest 10 per cent, only 10 per cent have cars
(Hamer, 1987, p. 2). Moreover, the car-centred economy has reduced
mobility for many; those dependent on public transport or cyclists and
pedestrians, and those relocated by the suburbanisation produced by
the car, but without access to one.
Cars and environmental change
This argument implies that responding to environmental change and

moving towards a more sustainable society necessarily involves a shift
away from a car-based economy. It is perhaps worthwhile at this point
to discuss briefly the environmental impact of the car, in order to argue
this. Cars are widely acknowledged as a main cause of many aspects of
environmental degradation.12
They produce a range of pollutants, including carbon dioxide, which
is the main gas producing climate change, nitrogen oxides (NOx) and
volatile organic compounds (VOCs) which cause acid rain, a range of
gases which produce urban air pollution such as carbon monoxide,
VOCs, NOx, particulates, and others. This pollution causes system-wide
environmental change on a grand scale such as climate change, lead-
ing to temperature and rainfall changes, sea-level rise, and so on, down
to micro-level impacts such as a wide range of impacts on human, ani-
mal, and plant health. A point worth concluding here is that for most
of these gases, motor transport is the only source which is, in the
‘industrialised countries’ at least, still increasing.
The second major class of environmental problems which a car econ-
omy is heavily involved in producing is resource depletion. Cars con-
sume between 35 per cent of the oil in Japan and up to 63 per cent of
the oil used in the US, simply in their use. Oil is also a major resource
in asphalt and therefore road production. In the US, car production
consumes 13 per cent of all the steel, 16 per cent of the aluminium,
69 per cent of the lead, 36 per cent of the iron, 36 per cent of the plat-
inum, and 58 per cent of the rubber (both natural and synthetic)
(Freund and Martin, 1993, pp. 17–19).
Finally, a car-based society has radically altered space. Urban space in
particular has been systematically reconstructed to make allowance for
the space required to move people about in cars. Cars take up huge
amounts of space which could be used for other purposes. The highest
figure is for Los Angeles, where two-thirds of all land space is devoted
to car use – driving, parking (at shops, work, home, restaurants, and
Car Trouble 111
so on). For the US as a whole, about half of urban space is devoted to

car use, while 10 per cent of available arable land is taken up by roads
and parking places (ibid.). Many suggest that this has become a self-
reproducing trend, as the reorganisation of towns and cities to make
car-based mobility more possible has meant that increasingly a car has
moved from being a luxury to a necessity (e.g. Gorz, 1980, pp. 69–77;
Illich, 1974; Wolf, 1996).
The point to emphasise here is that the way that cars are usually dis-
cussed in academic and policy literature on global environmental
change is with respect simply to one environmental problem, taken in
isolation. So, regarding acid rain, the car is discussed with respect to
nitrogen oxide emissions, and the solution is (claimed to be) catalytic
converters.13 Regarding global warming, the discussion moves to
carbon dioxide, and the solution is portrayed as fuel efficiency and in
the longer term a move to non-petroleum-based car engines. Regarding
local air pollution, catalytic converters and lead-free petrol are the solu-
tions. Regarding congestion, road pricing, more road-building, and
perhaps some switching to public transport. The effect of focusing on
single problems is to suggest that there are technical fixes, and some
socio-technical fixes (public transport) which ultimately retrieve the
car. But if we look at the impact of the car in its totality, the likelihood
of success of such technical fixes declines significantly. However much
we reduce NOx emissions, congestion remains; however much we
introduce electric cars, these may simply become ‘elsewhere-emitting
vehicles’; however much we reduce the environmental impact of the
materials used in car construction, they will still kill people on impact;
and so on. Ultimately, producing a sustainable economy must involve
a shift away from a car-dominated economy.
Cars and the IR of the environment
Despite what has been argued above, cars do not feature much in dis-
cussions of global environmental politics within International
Relations (or in politics more widely). One reason for this is the focus
within IR on particular environmental problems, abstracting from the
broad interconnections between these problems. Another, as argued
throughout this book, is the exclusion of questions about underlying
causes of environmental change.
Where cars might appear is as particular objects of state or interstate
regulation with respect to global warming or some other problem. But
the silence is therefore more interesting given that in policy debates
concerning, for example, global warming, it is widely recognised as

being particularly problematic for states to regulate cars in order to
reduce emissions.
So an argument that global environmental change goes to the heart
of modern power structures and social processes becomes all the more
persuasive in this case. The global politics of the car disrupts main-
stream notions of the neutrality of the world’s power structures with
respect to environmental change. Cars show the implication of those
structures in both producing environmental change, and hampering
efforts to address that change. The politics of environmental change is
therefore a politics of resistance.
The net effect of the combination of the fostering and emergence of
a car culture, and active promotion of the car by states, has been a dra-
matic shift from rail and public transport to the private car as the dom-
inant means of transport. The main point to emphasise is that this
development has been anything but inevitable or ‘natural’. It has been
produced both by states directly putting resources into road construc-
tion and other subsidies to the expansion of the car, and participating
(for its own reasons of legitimation) in the production of a car culture
where (particularly masculine) twentieth-century identities are pro-
duced through motifs such as speed, which the car (at least in its
dominant construction) embodies.
This suggests that dealing with environmental change means much
more than simply persuading governments to tweak policy instru-
ments to achieve particular goals. The car is not something which
people relate to in the rationalistic fashion presumed in the economics-
driven world of policy analysis. It has been important to the continual
reconstruction and performance of gender divisions, and the reproduc-
tion of patriarchal power (through differential access to mobility,
space, and so on). In any case, governments are themselves complicit
in promoting a car economy, which has been useful for them both in
relegitimising their rule – both directly, as promoting the car valorises
dominant themes of modernity consistent with the values of the mod-
ern state; and indirectly, as the car economy has stimulated economic
growth at important periods, thereby helping to promote government
legitimacy. Reducing car ownership and use therefore produces certain
contradictions for the state – an environmental legitimation crisis,
as analysed by Hay (1994), whereby in the need to intervene eco-
nomically to maintain economic growth, the state comes into contra-
diction with the need to intervene with respect to environmental
change.
Car Trouble 113
Challenging car culture
Political contestation over the car is not new. Far from being the
unproblematic technology which all people until the early 1990s have
viewed as the promoter of human liberty and welfare, it has often been
seen in a damaging light both in environmental and social terms.
Before the late 1980s/early 1990s, two principal periods can be identi-
fied when car culture came under particular challenge. The first is at
the beginning of the car’s existence. Initially, there were sometimes
severe restrictions to be overcome. Culturally, a classic expression of
opposition to the car is often taken to be Toad of Toad Hall in Kenneth
Grahame’s Wind in the Willows (1908):
it is the motor car that overturns innocent stability, the golden age;
aboard a car Toad becomes ‘the terror, the traffic-queller, before
whom all must give way or be smitten into nothingness and ever-
lasting night’.14
(Overy, 1990, p. 73, quoting from Grahame, 1908)
Cars were widely seen as a nuisance. The British Prime Minister

Asquith, called them in 1908 ‘A luxury that is apt to degenerate into a
nuisance’ (quoted in McShane, 1994, p. 113). They were associated
with danger, noise, dirt, and threatened to disrupt established modes of
urban life. But very quickly, resistance to the car foundered on the iden-
tification of the car as a symbol of progress. In Wolfgang Sachs’ words:
What critics of the automobile saw themselves confronted with in

the debates of the time could be called the executive syllogism of
competition-driven progress: (a) technological development cannot
be stopped; (b) escape is not an option, so Germany [or Britain,
France, the US … ] must take the lead; (c) therefore, we are called
upon to support the automobile and its industry with all the means
at the State’s disposal … The world market cast its long shadow over
debates about the meaning of motorization on native streets.
(Sachs, 1992a, p. 27)
The second period of challenge was during the wave of environmen-

talism in the late 1960s/early 1970s. In this period, the dominant chal-
lenge was to an extent in the UK, but even more so in the heart of car
culture, the US.15 The challenges were rooted to a great extent in the
effects of the Highway Aid Act of 1956. Increasingly, cars lost their
romance for many Americans, and had become part of the problem
facing American society (Davies, 1975; Gordon, 1991, p. 14).16
According to Berman (1982), the Federal Highway Program which
the 1956 Act produced was a development of Robert Moses’ grand
schemes for reconstructing New York. Berman describes in great detail
the destruction of the Bronx by the Cross-Bronx Expressway con-
structed by Moses, and the resistance to that construction/destruction.
Later resistance to expressway building in New York, and to the use of
Highway Trust money for expressway construction in other US cities
was more successful, however (Berman, 1982, p. 326; Davies, 1975).
This resistance to road-building and the further development of a
car-dependent economy was to a great extent local in character, in
recognition of the way that such expressway construction necessarily
destroyed city neighbourhoods, and in many ways was designed delib-
erately to do so (e.g. Davies, 1975). But they also took on an environ-
mental character in the more narrow understanding of that term, in
terms of an emerging understanding of the car’s role in resource con-
sumption and pollution, prevalent themes in that wave of environ-
mental concern. For Wernick, this context of resistance to the car’s
dominance on social/environmental grounds explains shifts in the
way car culture was promoted through advertising (1991, p. 78), as
discussed above.
Such resistance to car culture, both in the 1960s and 1970s and again
in the early 1990s, mostly took the form of resistance to road-building
schemes. This is partly because this is where the destructive aspects of
car culture are most visible, and also appear preventable. The road
is clearly the condition of possibility of car driving. But once built,
preventing car use is clearly much more difficult.
I began this chapter with a discussion of public discourse surround-
ing recent road protests in the UK. The point there was to illustrate the
context within which contemporary promoters of car culture have had
to operate. But those road protests also tell us something about the
nature of environmental politics. For mainstream approaches to global
environmental politics, with their exclusive focus on inter-state
processes, such phenomena are simply absent, irrelevant. But if cars are
such an important component not only of the production of global
environmental change, but also of the social, economic and political
processes which make up state power and thus make inter-state politics
possible, then such an absence simply serves to reinforce the way that
the states system, capitalism, patriarchy, and so on, are naturalised and
made unchallengeable.
Car Trouble 115
One interesting feature of this is the trajectory of roads protest in the

UK. Alongside direct-action protests against particular road-building
schemes have been two complementary types of protest which have
made the link between road-building, car culture, and broader
questions of political forms. Critical Mass, which has a ‘long tradition
internationally’ (Doherty, 1997, p. 10), has been a loose unorganised
network of pro-cycling protests, where once a month cyclists in a num-
ber of the UK’s towns and cities have met and cycled round the city
centre at a Friday rush hour, clogging up traffic (further than it already
clogs itself). The point is to show how particular transport modes, and
through them, forms of mobility and subjectivity, dominate, and to
challenge that domination.
Reclaim the Streets has similarly concerned itself with reclaiming
urban space as a public space, in this case for parties. This loose organi-
sation has organised parties in public streets, shutting them down to
traffic, both as a form of protest, but also to show how public space has
been transformed and destroyed by the car and the shift from the
boulevard to the highway, as analysed by Berman. This makes the links
between a politics of resistance to the car and to the state explicit,
revealing the complicity of the state in reproducing the dominance of
the car, as such parties are in themselves illegal.
Secondly, such resistance itself also helps to illustrate the main point
made in this chapter. Resisters to road-building in the UK have often
been made up of an odd alliance of NIMBYs (Not in My Backyard)
wishing to protect their local sites of amenity, and radical Green
activists operating more on NOPE principles (Not On Planet Earth)
There are many instances of movement from the former to the latter
type, as involvement in protesting develops in protestors a deeper
sense of the social changes necessary to create sustainable societies.17
The understanding of the deeper Green activists of the way in which
road-building and car culture are embedded in a set of power structures
is clearly evident in the way they understand their own actions. This is
perhaps shown most fully by Seel in his analysis of the Pollok Free
State protest camp against the M77 extension in Glasgow, which he
conceptualises as ‘embryonic counter-hegemonic resistance’.18
This can also be seen in the way that ‘mainstream’ society responds
to such challenges. In addition to the broad cultural responses by the
media and in advertising campaigns outlined at the beginning of this
chapter, the political responses by the state to the protests support
such an interpretation. On the one hand, ‘The fact that they need six
hundred security guards and police to chop down fifty trees is very
significant. The state has to go to war on behalf of the car culture and a
multi-national company’ ( Jake, protestor at Pollok protest camp,
quoted in Seel, 1997, p. 122). On the other hand, the state in the UK
has brought in legislation specifically designed to respond to and crack
down on the new forms of protest involved in the roads protests, in
sections of the Criminal Justice Act of 1994 which introduced new
restrictions on ‘trespassatory assemblies’ and a new offence of ‘aggra-
vated trespass’ (Doherty, 1997; McKay, 1996; Seel, 1997, p. 110).
Resistance to the car (and by extension, to road-building) thus has
often been hampered by the car’s association as one of the ultimate
symbols of modernity and modernisation. To oppose it is thus to
oppose modernity itself (Berman, 1982, p. 294). As Berman writes:
The developers and devotees of the expressway world presented it as

the only possible modern world: to oppose them was to oppose
modernity itself, to fight history and progress, to be a Luddite, and
escapist, afraid of life and adventure and change and growth.
(1982, p. 313)
Or in the blunter words of Sam Turk, Ben Elton’s fictional director of

the thinly disguised ‘Global Motors UK’, ‘Objecting to roads! … But
that’s crazy! What are they going to object to next? Food? Don’t they
want to get from A to B!’ (1991, p. 49).
But shifts in the identification of the car with modernity are occur-
ring, produced in part by resistance to the car itself, in part by
increased recognition of the downsides of car culture, and in part by
the emergence of other technologies which are perhaps displacing the
car’s symbolic purchase. In Krämer-Badoni’s words, ‘the car is in the
process of losing the attribute of modernity’ (Krämer-Badoni, 1994,
p. 348). These shifts create possibilities for alternative modernities, not
based on car culture.
Nevertheless, challenging the car involves much more than can be
produced by technical or policy fixes. It challenges two fundamental
aspects of the organisation of modern societies – space, and identity.
The spatial organisation of societies has been fundamentally restruc-
tured around the car, particularly in the urban areas where the majority
of people live (Wolf, 1996, pp. 152–5; McShane, 1994, ch. 10), in such
a way as to reproduce dependence on the car, and make it difficult in
many places to envisage moving to a system not dependent on the car
without significant spatial reorganisation of cities. Secondly, cars have
Car Trouble 117
become central to modern identities, particularly masculinities, organ-

ised around notions of progress linked to speed. In Wernick’s terms:
the spread of cars rapidly transformed the entire ecology of life, cre-
ating massive, dependent road-systems and transformed cities; while
at the individual level, it accelerated private and occupational
mobility, altering our whole sense of time and space.
(Wernick, 1991, p. 71)
Consequently, most people now tend to express a fundamental

ambivalence when asked what they feel about the(ir) car. ‘Cars were
identified [in interviews] both as the most visible threat to the environ-
ment, and as an essential part of people’s daily lives which could not
be done without’ (Macnaghten and Urry, 1998, p. 237). The implica-
tion of Macnaghten and Urry’s account is that it is not primarily a
question of resolving disputes between groups of people within society,
but rather of dealing with this fundamental ambivalence which is pre-
sent within individual people. The depth of social change necessary
to move away from a car-dominated system should not therefore
be underestimated, as it is not just a question of changing technolo-
gies, economic policies, and so on, but deeply-rooted individual and
collective identities.
6
Fast Food, Consumer Culture
and Ecology
Objecting to roads! … But that’s crazy! What are they going to

object to next? Food? (Elton, 1991, p. 49)
Today, almost every direct action is embedded in an extensive

political matrix. No description is more misleading than
‘single issue politics’. The people who started the squatters’
estate agency in Brighton and those occupying the derelict
land in London, today, want to change the whole world, not
just part of it.
(Monbiot, 1996)
Introduction: McLibel
Alongside roads and car culture, many of the highest-profile protest

campaigns in the UK in the early 1990s were over food, or more partic-
ularly, over meat. One of these concerned the live export of veal calves
destined for overseas rearing where the conditions the animals were
kept in were held by protestors to be barbaric. The central issue was
therefore the question of humanity’s ethical obligations with respect to
other animals. Another was over bovine spongiform encephalopathy
(BSE), or ‘mad cow disease’, where substantial numbers of British beef
cattle were regarded as being infected with a disease which, it increas-
ingly came to be believed, could be transmitted to humans and become
Creuzfeld–Jakob disease. This conflict was over a broader range of
issues, primarily threats to human health, but also government legiti-
macy, particularly concerning its credibility in making pronouncements
concerning human health, animal welfare and the intensive-industrial
methods of animal rearing, and the authority of science. It could also
118
Fast Food, Consumer Culture and Ecology 119
be interpreted as being about the policing of boundaries between

humans and animals, the so-called ‘species barrier’. Much of its politi-
cal force derived from the permeability or otherwise of this ‘barrier’. A
third food campaign has been over genetically modified food. General
food scares concerning potential health implications of genetic modifi-
cation – the environmental implications of releases of genetically mod-
ified organisms into ecosystems have led to public campaigns, as well
as, during 1998 and 1999, direct action against fields of genetically
modified crops (the first trial for such criminal damage started in
August 1998), and reactions from the companies involved, notably a
very high-profile advertising campaign by Monsanto.
But along with that over genetic modification, perhaps the broadest
conflict in terms of the coverage of issues was what became known as
the McLibel case. In this libel case, easily the longest trial in British
history, the whole range of operations of the world’s largest food ser-
vice corporation (Tansey and Worsley, 1995, p. 136), and largest owner
of retail property in the world (Cummings, 1999, p. 16) was opened for
scrutiny, from many different angles or points of view. Animal welfare,
employment practices, tropical and temperate deforestation, packaging
and waste, nutrition, advertising, form only a small part of the ques-
tions which came up for debate.1
McLibel started with the decision by McDonald’s to issue writs in
September 1990 against five activists from London Greenpeace, an
anarchist collective (with no relation to Greenpeace International). The
writs claimed that a leaflet distributed by the group (as well as by other
groups) called ‘What’s Wrong with McDonald’s’ was libellous; that the
claims in it about corporate malpractice by McDonald’s were false and
damaging to the company’s business interests. Three of the activists
apologised to the company, unable to envisage challenging the case.
Two, Helen Steel and Dave Morris, decided they had nothing to lose
and to fight it.
The trial closed finally in December 1996, after two-and-a-half years
in court, preceded by three-and-a-half of preparation. The judge’s
verdict (he had ruled against a jury trial on grounds of the complexity
of some of the evidence) took another six months to deliver. There
were many things of interest in the trial. It has sparked a debate about
the nature of British libel laws which uniquely require defendants
to prove that their claims are true rather than plaintiffs to prove
them false (one of the themes in Vidal, 1997; also Gorelick, 1997). The
law is complicit in upholding corporate power behind the façade
of legal equality, through enabling large corporations to take on legal
personality in cases such as defamation, in combination with more

obvious features of the system which the case made evident, notably
the lack of availability of legal aid in libel cases, which resulted in Steel
and Morris defending themselves.
It has also, perhaps ironically, helped to stimulate further resistance
against McDonald’s and the ‘McWorld’ more generally; generating an
estimated 1.5 million leaflets distributed since the trial started (Vidal,
1995b; see also Beder, 1997, p. 69, who gives a figure of two million),
pledges from thousands to continue distributing them whatever the
verdict, events like the anti-birthday party at McDonald’s headquarters
on its 40th birthday (Bell and Valentine, 1997, p. 109), and the launch
of the McSpotlight website in 1996, which focused on the trial and
provided information and ideas for campaigners around the world, and
was reputedly accessed seven million times in its first year (Vidal, 1997,
p. 310). The very act of libelling those who objected to its practices
became a focus of protest against McDonald’s, exemplified by the
name McLibel (alongside ‘McMurder’, McExploitation’, and the other
‘Mc’ names given by protestors to aspects of McDonald’s practices),
and the existence of the McLibel Support Campaign. McDonald’s
actions, and Steel and Morris’s refusal to apologise, as many others had
had to in previous libel threats brought by the company (see Vidal,
1997, pp. 44–7, 124–6), were easily constructed as bullying tactics, of
the large and powerful trying to silence their critics, and using the law
as their ally. Steel and Morris made this explicit in their defence in the
case; in Steel’s words opening their case, ‘We feel there is one word that
can sum up what this case is about, and that word is “censorship”.
McDonald’s are using the libel laws of this country to censor and
silence their critics. … This is a show trial against unwaged, unrepre-
sented defendants’ (quoted in Vidal, 1997, p. 100). The way that the
case was readily constructed meant that the trial backfired on
McDonald’s (e.g. Bellos, 1995).
But what I want to emphasise is that McLibel, like the roads protests,
shows that at issue in (global) environmental politics is a fundamental
conflict over how the world should be organised. At root was a conflict
over the sustainability and desirability of a globalised, corporate
capitalist world order, exemplified by McDonald’s. So McDonald’s vs
Steel and Morris exemplifies conflicts over sustainability; but to the
protestors, these are fundamentally connected to questions of worker’s
rights, advertising practices, nutrition and health, and so on. As Brian
Appleyard put it in The Independent (1994), ‘It became clear what this
trial is all about – the globalization of culture and belief systems.’
The depth of conflict over world-views in McLibel can be seen

through the incommensurability of the arguments employed by Richard
Rampton, McDonald’s main lawyer, and the McDonald’s witnesses, on
the one hand, and the defendants on the other. Frequently, they could
agree on ‘facts’, but what was at stake was the interpretation, the mean-
ing of those facts. What conferred meaning on them were the funda-
mentally different world-views of the participants.
So, for example, McDonald’s representatives expressed a continual
incapacity throughout the trial to understand the motivation of the
defendants. Mike Love (McDonald’s UK Head of Communications), in
response to questions from Steel and Morris about why he thought
they and others protested against the company, stated that ‘We can’t
predict why anybody would do anything to protest against McDonald’s’
(quoted in Carey, 1995). Vidal’s book (1997) on the case enumerates
many instances of simple, but deep, incomprehension between differ-
ent players in the trial. Such incomprehension encompasses the large
question of McDonald’s failure to understand why the company might
be a focus for protest, to a range of smaller ones. On the question of
advertising targeted at children – one of the three issues where Steel
and Morris won (in the original trial, they won one more on appeal in
1999) – what for Steel and Morris was exploitation of children, through
‘pester power’, to get parents into the restaurant, and increase sales,
was simply normal advertising practice in a capitalist economy for
McDonald’s. On the questions of nutrition and of litter, the company
argued that overall questions of nutrition depended on a whole diet,
not just particular meals supplied by them, and that responsibility for
that lay with the individual; similarly for litter, what happened to the
packaging after it left the store was not their responsibility but that of
the customer, although McDonald’s has always had litter crews who
cleaned up outside the store (how successfully was disputed during the
trial). By contrast, Steel and Morris argued that McDonald’s, playing
such a large role in the diet of many people, and producing so much
packaging that it would play a large role in the littering of areas near
stores, had responsibilities in these areas which it was failing to live up
to. The differences here are essentially differences between agency-
oriented (where the responsibility lies with the person making particu-
lar decisions), and structural (where those who play a predominant
part in structuring the decisions of others have responsibilities in that
regard) ways of understanding the world.
These miscomprehensions do not seem best interpreted as disingenu-
ousness – as deliberate attempts by either side to appear to misunderstand
in order to score rhetorical points with the judge. For example, Love
seems genuinely not to understand Steel and Morris, and the thou-
sands of others like them. The trial was clearly about the ‘truth’; that is,
of course, the essence of trials in general, but of a libel trial in particu-
lar, where it is the veracity (as well as the damaging nature) of people’s
claims which are at stake. The point of the trial both for Mike Love and
for Dave Morris was the ‘truth’. ‘ “People are entitled to exercise their
freedom of speech and to demonstrate peacefully within the law,” says
Mike Love. “But we believe that those taking part should look at the
facts and be aware of the truth.” ’ But for Morris, McDonald’s has
forced its way into the public consciousness and yet is trying to sup-
press dissenting voices and alternative views of what it really repre-
sents. … The truth is always worth defending’ (quoted in Carey, 1995).
But the point is that the incommensurability in the exchange
described above between the arguments of the defendants and Love
shows that ‘the truth’ is discourse-dependent. What constitutes ‘bad
wages’ is not something which can be decided outside of discourse.
Discursive frames produce the criteria by which the ‘badness’ of wages
are to be judged. So for Preston, these are clearly produced by market
forces and minimal regulation by governments, while for Steel and
Morris, alternative notions of the good life are invoked. Clearly then,
this is ultimately a struggle over what the good life should be, as much
as over the ‘truth’ or otherwise of particular allegations made by the
‘What’s Wrong with McDonald’s’ leaflet. McDonald’s represents corpo-
rate capitalism, whose discursive frames produce a notion that ‘bad
wages’ (or many of the other criteria) are simply those which are
illegal.2 For the defendants, bad wages are endemic under capital-
ism where corporations, aided by states, are able to exploit workers
through low wages.
The conflict over McDonald’s in the McLibel case was therefore simul-
taneously symbolic and material. It was symbolic in the sense that Steel
and Morris clearly saw McDonald’s as symbolic of a broader global cor-
porate capitalist order, and as one of its biggest representatives (and par-
ticularly big in how it is directly present in many people’s daily lives).
But that symbolic struggle was simultaneously material, in that what
was at issue were the practices of a large corporation (and by extension
the broader system of which it is a representative) in relation to how it
uses and transforms both people and the rest of the natural world.
Drawing on this argument about the nature of McLibel, this chapter
argues that the practices exemplified by McDonald’s are best interpreted
as ecologically problematic, not solely in terms of particular instances
of environmental or social abuse, but as systematic and routine degra-

dations (Saurin, 1996). This is understood by anti-McDonald’s cam-
paigners such as Steel and Morris, for whom a focus on McDonald’s
is essentially strategic, focusing on how to transform the agency of
those for whom a Big Mac is part of their normal lives. To do this, I
first look at the literature on ‘McDonaldisation’ produced primarily by
the work of George Ritzer (1996). Here, the practices of McDonald’s are
interpreted as representative of, and in some senses driving, much
broader contemporary social trends. After discussing this, and critiques
of Ritzer’s thesis, I look at two sets of themes embodied in the con-
sumption practices exemplified by McDonald’s which can be seen as
ecologically problematic: (intensive) meat consumption, and the accel-
eration inherent in the notion of ‘fast’ food. Finally, I revisit questions
of resistance in the light of the foregoing arguments.
McDonaldisation: McDonald’s as modernity

and modernisation
In a widely cited work, George Ritzer interprets McDonald’s in terms of

Max Weber’s theory of rationalisation (Ritzer, 1996). He suggests that
‘McDonaldisation’ is an appropriate term for dominant social trends.
He defines this as:
the process by which the principles of the fast-food restaurant are

coming to dominate more and more sectors of American society as
well as the rest of the world.
(ibid., p. 1)
Following Weber’s analysis of rationalisation and bureaucracy, Ritzer

suggests that there are four major aspects of such a process: efficiency;
calculability (defined as quantification); predictability; and control/
replacement of humans by technology. The first of these involves
‘choosing the optimum means to a given end’ (ibid., p. 35), and
describes the process by which work is accelerated. Ritzer cites
Taylorism as the founding moment of twentieth-century concerns with
efficiency. For Ritzer, McDonald’s managed to increase efficiency in
food-service by Taylorising food-service production (primarily involv-
ing the intensification of the division of labour, also involving some
use of new technologies), through simplifying the menu greatly to
make assembly-line production possible, and through putting the
customers to work in terms of queuing and clearing away the tables
(Ritzer, 1996, pp. 38–41). Ray Kroc, founder of the McDonald’s empire,
was widely regarded as obsessed with efficiency.3 In Kroc’s words, ‘I put
the hamburger on the assembly line’ (quoted by Boyle, AP journalist,
cited in Love, 1987, p. 211).
The second aspect of rationalisation concerns the increasing quan-
tification of economic and other transactions; in this case, the inc-
reasingly detailed specifications concerning the size of a burger
(1.6 ounces) and a bun, the amount of onions, the length of grilling
time, the length of frying time for french fries, and so on. It also
involves quantifying the time taken to serve a customer, so that success
and quality becomes defined in terms of how many customers are
served within three minutes of entering the restaurant (Ritzer, 1996,
pp. 60–4).
The third concerns standardisation of the production process across
all McDonald’s outlets, so that customers know they will get exactly
the same product wherever they buy their Big Mac. Ritzer quotes
Leidner’s book Fast Food, Fast Talk: the Routinization of Everyday Life:
‘The heart of McDonald’s success is its uniformity and predictabil-
ity … [its] relentless standardization’ (Leidner, 1993, quoted in Ritzer,
1996, p. 80). Predictability occurs in the replication of settings, in the
scripted interaction between McDonald’s workers and customers, in
predictable employee behaviour, in predictable products (Ritzer, 1996,
pp. 80–2). The predictability in the final category is as total as techni-
cally possible: hamburgers are regulated in their fat content to high
degrees of standardisation; settings and frying times for french fries
are standardised and mechanised; types of potatoes, methods of freez-
ing, and so on, are all ruthlessly specified in the 600-page McDonald’s
operations manual.
Finally, increasing use of robots and technologies of surveillance
enable both direct increases in efficiency, calculability and predictabil-
ity, and also control of both workers and customers (ibid., ch. 6).
This is the area where Ritzer suggests McDonald’s have not fully ratio-
nalised their operations, but this is in part because he takes technology
to mean machinery; with a broader notion of technology, the opera-
tions specified in the operations manual become instruments of
employee control.
Ritzer then discusses the ‘irrationality of rational systems’; that sys-
tems organised along such rationalised lines produce outcomes which
are in practice irrational. More precisely, they are unreasonable in the
sense that they are dehumanising. Ritzer suggests this irrationality has
a number of features. He highlights some health and environmental
consequences, focusing on questions of nutrition (p. 129), food poi-

soning (p. 129), the amount and (lack of) biodegradability of packaging
producing large volumes of waste, the heavy use of paper having
impacts on deforestation, and the use of particular materials such as
polystyrene having particular impacts on landfill use and some specific
environmental problems such as the consumption of CFCs which
destroy the ozone layer (ibid., pp. 129–30).
He also argues it has a dehumanising effect on employees and cus-
tomers, because of the minimal skill required by each, because of the
‘assembly line eating’ it produces, and because of the scripting of the
relationship between customers and employees (ibid., pp. 130–6).
Finally, he suggests the homogenisation of diet and eating throughout
the world is dehumanising and irrational (ibid., pp. 136–7).
Ritzer’s book has been widely cited. It has had entire books devoted
to it (Alfino, Caputo and Wynyard, 1998). For example, simply in rela-
tion to food, a number of authors have discussed his thesis. For exam-
ple, Bell and Valentine (1997, p. 6), Warde (1997, p. 17, 37) and
Beardsworth and Keil (1997, pp. 120–1) all discuss Ritzer’s thesis in
terms of modernisation. Beardsworth and Keil emphasise the applica-
tion of scientific management to food service, and Ritzer’s appeal for
‘slow food’. Warde suggests that Ritzer’s account is a ‘massification
thesis’ where tastes become more homogeneous as corporate capitalism
develops. Warde suggests Ritzer’s work can be taken as an example of
Adorno’s account of mass consumption.
But the more general notion that McDonald’s represents many
important features of modernisation is widespread, going beyond
discussion of Ritzer’s work. One widely discussed moment is the open-
ing of the first McDonald’s in Moscow, after the end of the Cold War,
where the meaning of McDonald’s is interpreted as signifying the
arrival of modernity as consumer capitalism in the former Soviet
Union (Bell and Valentine, 1997, p. 190; Smart, 1994, p. 175). Fiddes
quotes a Russian journalist saying ‘It’s like the coming of civilization to
Moscow’ (1991, p. 66, quoting Reuter, 1990, p. 20).
The most predominant discussions of McDonald’s as modernity,
however, come in literatures on consumer culture, particularly with
respect to debates about globalisation and homogenisation. Bell and
Valentine (1997) begin their book with dialogue from the film Pulp
Fiction in which the differences between McDonald’s in the US and
in Europe are discussed. McDonald’s is taken as a paradigm case of
globalisation. In Bell and Valentine’s words, ‘virtually everyone’ uses
McDonald’s to ‘think global’ (1997, p. 190). Waters, in his overview of
debates on globalisation, suggests that the saturation of US fast-food

markets led McDonald’s to develop a globalising strategy (1995, p. 70).
Love (1987) makes a discussion of the globalisation of McDonald’s
operations the final chapter in his corporate history of the company.
Finkelstein emphasises the importance of the uniformity of fast-food
operations being global (1989, pp. 11–12, 93). Beardsworth and Keil
suggest that the standardisation of operations is something which
gives confidence to consumers in the face of ‘increasing levels of glob-
alization of culture and increasing levels of both social and geographical
mobility’ (1997, p. 170).
It remains debated, however, whether the global spread of fast-food
operations, exemplified by McDonald’s, is best interpreted as a
homogenising trend. Bell and Valentine (1997, p. 190) suggest there
is a prevalent homogenisation thesis, where globalisation is interpreted
as ‘McDonaldisation’ or ‘Coca-colonialism’. Ritzer’s thesis can be
taken as an example of this (1996). Warde (1997) argues that Ritzer
gives a version of a ‘massification thesis’, similar to that developed
by Frankfurt School writers such as Adorno, where ‘differences of
class, gender and nationality fade before the ubiquitous presence
of McDonald’s burgers and Coca-cola’ (1997, p. 17). Fantasia’s analy-
sis (1995) of ‘Fast Food in France’ argues that it does represent a process
of Americanisation of French culture. ‘“Fast food in France” has
had less to do with food than it has with the cultural representations
of Americanism embodied within it’, he argues (1995, p. 229). Star
(1991) also gives an account which relies on a version of a homogeni-
sation thesis, through a focus on the exclusions created by rationalised
production such as at McDonald’s: ‘McDonald’s appears to be an
ordinary, universal, ubiquitous restaurant chain. Unless you are: vege-
tarian, on a salt-free diet, keep kosher, eat organic foods … or are aller-
gic to onions’ (Star, 1991, p. 37). Evidence for the homogenisation
thesis could be drawn from Love’s corporate history of McDonald’s.
When the company expanded its operations beyond the US, it initially
tried to adapt the menu to indigenous tastes (for example in Germany,
the Netherlands, Australia), but these attempts failed and it moved
back to producing exactly the same menu as in the US. As it did this,
however, it tried to produce a ‘local’ image, sensitive to charges of
economic/cultural imperialism.4 Therefore the marketing and store
design but not the menu, were indigenised (Love, 1987, pp. 420–40,
for Australia, see also Probyn, 1998, p. 160).5
But the dominant trend in this literature is to resist this homogenisa-
tion narrative. Arguments that globalisation and McDonaldisation equal
homogenisation are interpreted as denying the agency of consumers in
constructing meaning through their consumption practices (Parker,

1998). Thus, McDonald’s is held to have very different meanings in
‘Moscow, Manchester or Michigan’ (Smart, 1994; Bell and Valentine,
1997, p. 190). Perry (1995) similarly argues that such ‘McTheorising’
‘subsumes cultural meaning under social and/or economic relations’
(as cited in Bell and Valentine, 1997, p. 11). Thus Bell and Valentine
argue, while discussing the argument of Star mentioned above, that an
equally persuasive interpretation of contemporary trends is to one
towards hybridisation of consumption practices towards food (1997,
p. 135). Probyn (1998) provides a slightly more nuanced version of this
argument. She suggests that McDonald’s produces homogenisation, in
part by using notions of family and food to imply that since we all [sic]
eat McDonald’s, we are all one global family, as we eat together. But at
the same time the company attempts to respond to concerns of diver-
sity by ‘tak[ing] up the trend towards hyphenating ethnic identities
(e.g. Italian-Australian, Chinese-Canadian) and gives us an identity as
McDonald’s-world-Australian or McDonald’s-fill in the blank’ (Probyn,
1998, p. 155). However, whether the homogenisation thesis is accepted
or not, it remains the case that these interpretations of McDonald’s
and the social trends it exemplifies are ones which are regarded by the
above writers as integral to modernity and modernisation.
Martin Parker’s discussion (1998) of Ritzer’s work is particularly inter-
esting for the present purposes. Parker argues that Ritzer essentially
offers a conservative elitist critique of mass consumer culture. This
suggests that a mass culture inevitably erodes the ‘superior’ culture of
elites and that the critique is Romantic and nostalgic. Parker traces this
critique back to ‘Arnold, Leavis, Eliot, Nietzsche’ and contrasts it with a
‘left’ critique (1998, pp. 2–5) which is nevertheless similar in many
respects, but focuses on how a mass culture is constructed to preserve
the power of capitalist elites, an argument coming primarily from the
Frankfurt School (as noted above, this latter position is how Warde
[1997] interprets Ritzer). Parker contrasts both of these critiques for
mass consumer culture with the more affirmative stance of what
cultural studies has become. The opposition is constructed as one of
structure versus agency, with critics of mass consumption being
regarded as overly structuralist, while the ‘popular culture’ writers
focus on how consumer items are appropriated by their consumers and
can become sites of resistance (see also Miles, 1998, Wood, 1998, and
Wynyard, 1998, for similar arguments).
While Parker wants to retain a notion of critique, and be able to
condemn McDonald’s (or McDonaldisation) for its dehumanising
labour process, ecological consequences, and so on, he makes this by
and large a matter of social ontology; the critique pertains to our own
social position and perspective. The critique then becomes simply what
McDonald’s means for us, and we are left without the possibility of
judging that critique. Parker concedes the lack of a firm basis for judg-
ing McDonald’s (1998, p. 15), as does Alfino, who writes ‘Postmoderns
are entitled to feel all the moral concern they want, but without a nor-
mative theory (and a prior commitment to some metaphysic of morals)
they have no rational basis for adjudicating Ronald McDonald’s crimes
against humanity’ (Alfino, 1998, p. 186).
The danger here is that a false opposition is set up; any judgemental
discussion of particular consumption practices becomes charged with
authoritarianism and elitism. But this argument is dangerously close
to neoliberal economic arguments about consumer sovereignty and
rational agency (as exemplified in relation to Ritzer by Taylor, Smith
and Lyon (1998). A rejection of Marxist notions of false consciousness
or needs which underpins Frankfurt School arguments about mass con-
sumption should not lead, either implicitly or explicitly, to an argu-
ment that mass consumption is unproblematic and can in some
versions of the argument become a mode of liberation. It is still possi-
ble to argue that particular consumption practices and the identities
constructed around them are produced through strategies of power,
rather than simply existing as individually decided preferences, let
alone as practices of resistance. As Kellner states:
Ritzer’s critics sometimes offer apologetics and celebration of

the mass culture he criticizes thereby uncritically replicating a posi-
tion increasingly widespread in cultural studies that puts all the
weight of praxis and production of meaning on the side of the
subject, thus effectively erasing the problematics of domination,
manipulation, and oppression from critical social theory.
(Kellner, 1998, pp. viii–ix)
Ecological critiques of mass consumption are interesting and useful

here. While it is certainly the case that some aspects of ecological
critiques have resonance with romantic anti-modernism, they under-
mine, if taken seriously, the notion that consumption is simply about
an endless play of signification. The semiotic aspects of consumption,
which most contemporary sociology of consumption focuses on, seems
to me inadequate here (e.g. Lury, 1996; Slater, 1993; Featherstone,
1991; Bell and Valentine, 1997). Ecology itself becomes simply reduced
to a meaning which particular consumer items, for example, the Big
Mac, have. The ecologist identifies the Big Mac as a product symbolic
of the high-intensity consumption which is undermining the sustain-
ability of the planet’s ecosystems. As shown above in relation to the
McLibel case, the focus on McDonald’s is clearly symbolic; the com-
pany stands as a symbol for all which Steel, Morris, and many others,
regard as a set of social forces to be resisted. But much of that resis-
tance is based on a notion that the practices exemplified are unsustain-
able; that is to say, impossible in the long term. Unsustainability
implies that a practice is impossible in the long run. It seems reason-
able to suppose that a condition of possibility of placing any other sort
of meaning on a Big Mac is that such an object can be presumed to
exist, along with people to eat it.
An ecological critique of this sort challenges the predominant
tendency within studies of consumption. It suggests that the material-
ecological basis of consumption practices is something which necessarily
places limits on the symbolic possibilities of objects of consumption.
In the language of ecological economists:
Every economic phenomenon … can be described as a flow of mater-

ial and energy which begins in the environment, passes through the
factory, house, city, humanised territory … and returns, sooner or
later, to the environment.6
(Nebbia, 1990, p. 80, cited in Hayward, 1994, p. 109)
At the same time, much ecological discussion of consumption is

overly technical, and abstracts from the symbolic-cultural meanings
underpinning consumption practices. Many treat consumption by and
large in terms similar to the way it is treated by neoclassical economists –
as the total amount of goods and services ‘consumed’, measured in
money terms (e.g. Lintott, 1998; Redclift, 1996) – and thus miss the
specifics of particular consumption practices in both semiotic and
material terms. Redclift argues that both semiotic and material analyses
of consumption are necessary (1996, pp. 4–6) although he concedes
that his book does not engage in the former. He suggests that Lash
(1990) is one of the few to have emphasised both (Redclift, 1996, p. 6).
Regarding food, Goodman and Redclift (1991) attempt such an inte-
grated analysis. While this ecological critique of consumption,
concerned with both the symbolic and material, could take a number
of angles, I will focus on two: meat and speed. Such themes feature
as two of the oppositions made by Warren Belasco in his analysis of
countercultural food politics – vegetable vs animal, and slow vs fast
(Belasco, 1989, pp. 50–61).
Meat
It is perhaps banal to point out that McDonald’s reproduces a meat-

centred diet. But my argument is that pointing this out serves to
emphasise the material, embodied, nature of consumption. Whatever
the symbolic constructions surrounding McDonald’s and a Big Mac, it
remains the case that such consumption necessarily reproduces an
intensive system of production and consumption of a narrow range of
foodstuffs, centring on beef production. Consumption of meat itself is
drenched with cultural meaning. The meanings of meat help to show
how the heavily meat-intensive diets, which at least the affluent indus-
trialised countries of the world have been able to sustain, are inter-
twined with the reproduction of various forms of social power. I will
emphasise three themes here.
Masculinity, power and domination

The first is the association between a meat-eating culture and a patriar-
chal one. The classic analysis of this is Carol Adams’ The Sexual Politics
of Meat (1990).7 Adams is not so much interested in the way in which
meat consumption is distributed between men and women (as well as
between [male] adults and children), which is a common assertion; but
that meat is the food which men arrogate for themselves particularly
(Adams, 1990, pp. 28–9; for works which emphasise this, see Kerr and
Charles, 1986; Fiddes, 1991, pp. 158–60). She is more interested in the
ways that meat-eating and patriarchy reproduce and reinforce each
other. Her claim is more than simply that meat is symbolically pro-
duced as masculine food, a commonplace assumption (Adams, 1990,
pp. 26–8, 32–4; also Fiddes, 1991); but that it helps to reproduce a form
of masculinity which is patriarchal; a masculinity as dominance.
Her main focus is on the intertwined nature of ‘absent referents’
involved in meat-eating and in patriarchal domination. ‘Absent refer-
ent’ is used to mean that which must be made absent in order to make
its domination/destruction possible. Thus, ‘through butchery, animals
become absent referents. Animals in name and body are made absent
as animals for meat to exist’ (Adams, 1990, p. 40). She suggests there
are three forms of absent referent here: the literal absence of a live
animal once it is killed; a definitional absence, where the name of
the animal is eradicated (cows become beef, pigs become pork); and
metaphorical, where for example the phrase ‘I felt like a piece of meat’
helps to metaphorically make actual pieces of meat, as dead animals,
absent (pp. 40–2). But she then suggests that women and animals are
overlapping absent referents, reproducing the social power which

enables others to make them absent:
sexual violence and meat eating, which appear to be discrete forms

of violence, find a point of intersection in the absent referent.
Cultural images of sexual violence, and actual sexual violence, often
rely on our knowledge of how animals are butchered and eaten.
(Adams, 1990, p. 43)
She then goes on to analyse parallel cycles of objectification, frag-

mentation and consumption in relation to women and animals, where
first their subjectivity is denied, and they become objects for the use of
men and humans in general. This objectification enables them to be
fragmented, which in both cases she takes literally: butchery, or the
‘disassembly line’ for animals; and sexual violence, rape, murder,
for women (pp. 49–61). Fragmentation then enables consumption
(pp. 47–8).
Adams also makes the connection between patriarchy and meat-
eating through connections between the movements opposing each of
them: feminism and vegetarianism. She shows, primarily through liter-
ary analysis of works of prominent vegetarians and feminists, how fem-
inist writers from the seventeenth century onwards have connected
meat-eating with patriarchy and war, and vegetarianism, with peaceful,
more equal societies: for example, in discussing the works of Mary
Shelley (the author of Frankenstein), Charlotte Perkins Gilman
(Herland), and Isabel Colegate (The Shooting Party). Thus, in her conclu-
sion, she argues, that ‘Meat eating is an integral part of male domi-
nance’ (p. 167) and ‘Meat eating is the re-inscription of male power at
every meal’ (p. 187). As a result of this, ‘vegetarianism acts as a sign of
dis-ease with patriarchal culture’ (Adams, 1990, p. 167).
The salient connection is perhaps that particularly modern ideolo-
gies and practices of domination, are constructed and understood
as masculinist. Thus, as pointed out in Chapters 3 and 4 above, the
domination of nature by humans, as a particularly modern phenome-
non conventionally understood as being developed in science by
philosophers such as Francis Bacon, was simultaneously a patriarchal
project to control women’s bodies and reorganise male power over
women (Merchant, 1980; Shiva, 1988; Plumwood, 1993). Chapter 4
showed how sea defences can be interpreted as a particularly visible,
high-profile, expression of such domination of nature. But meat-eating
is also a prevalent expression of such domination. Although more
mundane and everyday, it expresses human power over the rest of

nature particularly clearly (Fiddes, 1991).
Modernity, progress and affluence

Clearly connected to the question of domination, the second theme
underpinning meat-eating concerns the way that meat, like cars (as
emphasised in the previous chapter), has become a symbol of moder-
nity and affluence. Meat-eating culture has generally presented itself as
representing such progress. Histories of diet generally assume or explic-
itly argue that there is a ‘natural’ tendency to consume more meat as
societies get richer. Fiddes (1991, pp. 56–7) cites The Hamburger Book
(Perl, 1974), as arguing that meat-eating was the mark of the emer-
gence of civilization – the more civilised humans became, the more
meat they consumed, and the more complexity became involved in
the preparation of that meat. Adams also notes how this discourse of
civilization:meat-eating often has racist connotations, being used for
example to justify imperialism, and to explain the ‘backward’ nature of
‘primitive’ peoples. Cannibalism was often interpreted in terms of the
lack of meat in the diet leading people to turn to anthropophagy
(Adams, 1990, pp. 29–32).
The association of meat with modernity has produced a global politics
in which increases in meat-consumption have been taken as indicators
of modernisation in developing countries, and produced a North–South
politics in which refusal of meat by westerners may be taken by people
in the South as an insult. Such a dynamic is stimulated by global dispar-
ities in meat-consumption, paralleling global disparities in wealth and
income. ‘The developed world consumes roughly two-thirds of world
meat production whereas the developing world with three-quarters
of the world’s population only consumes one-third of total meat pro-
duction’ (Williams, forthcoming, p. 6). Given meat’s cultural position
as a superior, ‘modern’, ‘civilised’ foodstuff, a cultural North–South
politics of resentment is unsurprising, especially given that significant
portions of developing-country vegetable exports (primarily foods such
as soya and groundnuts) are exported to feed animals in the West.
Fast food may be seen as the ultimate in modernised meat-eating.
This is where food service was initially industrialised and rationalised –
recall Kroc’s statement that ‘I put the hamburger on the assembly line’
quoted above. Combined with America’s representation as the most
modern country, the hamburger, particularly McDonald’s, has become
a potent symbol of modernisation as Americanisation (Fiddes, 1991,
pp. 66–7).
Beardsworth and Keil (1992) illustrate a paradox of the relationship

between meat-eating and modernity, however. This is that the ‘vegetar-
ian option’, as they call it, is in some senses itself a product of the
nutritional variety produced by affluence. There is a sense in which
this argument presumes a myth of original meat-eating by humans, a
myth which is heavily debated. More importantly, however, it remains
the case that meat remains a symbol of affluence.
Resource intensity
The prosperity in industrialised countries which makes extensive meat-
eating possible facilitates a substantially more intensive form of food
production than can be sustained in non-industrialised societies. And
it is commonplace to observe that meat production is significantly
more resource-intensive than vegetable food-production. Adams notes
that Plato argued that because meat production required large amounts
of pasture land, it would lead to wars as neighbouring states competed
over land for that pasture (1990, p. 115–16). She says that some femi-
nist writers, such as Gilman, in her utopian novel Herland, picked up
on Plato’s argument as a reason for making her utopia vegetarian.
Analyses of vegetarianism suggest that understandings of the ecology
of meat production and its over-consumption of land is one factor
which leads some to become vegetarian, although it is not as common
a reason as health or animal welfare/rights beliefs (Beardsworth and
Keil, 1992).
The ecological aspect of meat-consumption has two aspects. One
is simply that meat-consumption requires much more throughput
of resources than does a diet not involving meat. It is commonly
observed that it takes 16 lb of grain to produce 1 lb of beef (Moore
Lappé, 1982, p. 69). In the UK, 80 per cent of agricultural land is
devoted directly or indirectly to meat and dairy production (Spencer,
1993, p. 330). Seager is worth quoting at length on such resource use:
between 1960 and 1985, 40 per cent of all Central American rain-
forests were cleared to create pasture for beef cattle. … Cattle ranch-
ing is responsible for an estimated 85 per cent of topsoil erosion
in the US, and similar devastation in Australia and Canada. Within
the US, half of all water consumed is used to grow crops that are
fed to livestock; meat production requires at least 10 times more
water than grain production. More than 50 per cent of water
pollution in the US can be linked to wastes from the livestock indus-
try, including manure, eroded soil and synthetic pesticides. … Meat
production places enormous demands on energy: the 500 calories

of food energy from one pound of steak requires 20,000 calories
of fossil fuel.
(Seager, 1993, p. 211, citing Adams, 1991, and Kirchoff, 1991)
In addition, meat production, especially on an industrial scale,

intensifies use of other resources in agriculture. Cronon’s classic
environmental history of Chicago (1991, pp. 206–59) gives us clues
here. In order to develop the mid-West agriculturally, to satisfy growing
demand for meat in the Eastern US cities, its whole ecology was
reorganised. Following the mass slaughter of the bison on the prairies,
and in part causing this slaughter, the plains were given over largely
to cattle, and indirectly through grain production, to pigs. This
involved a reorganisation of the ecology of the plains in accordance
with market logic, entailing a great intensification of production and
rationalisation of space. Refrigeration on railway carriages was devel-
oped in order to be able to ship meat (rather than live animals)
and thus accelerate the quantity of meat transported. The first mecha-
nised forms of production developed later in Chicago and then
by Ford, were introduced in Cincinnati, or ‘Porkopolis’. Known as the
‘disassembly line’ this innovation greatly increased the efficiency of
pork and beef production. Cronon suggests that one of the deepest
ecological consequences was that whereas the connections between
meat-eating and the animals and ecosystems this depended on were
previously visible (because local), the industrialisation of meat packing
made such connections obscure. Echoing Adams’ notion of ‘absent
referents’, Cronon suggests this development produced ‘unremem-
bered deaths’ (pp. 247–59).
It is not then perhaps an accident that the world’s largest food
service organisation, and a means of organising food consumption, are
centred on meat, resonant as both are with prevalent themes of moder-
nity and domination. However, reproducing and expanding such
consumption practices have necessary ecological consequences which
make them problematic. The capacity of the world’s soils to continually
expand their productivity to feed such resource-intensive modes of con-
sumption is doubtful at best, and has consequences also for the distrib-
ution of food among the world’s peoples. As Spencer puts it, ‘it is
profoundly ironic that the human need [sic] to prove our dominance is
the driving force which exhausts the environment’, (1993, p. 343). This
is resonant of Horkheimer and Adorno, for whom ‘the fully enlight-
ened earth radiates disaster triumphant’ (1979, in Hayward, 1994, p. 8).
The speed of fast food
The ecological consequences of meat production and consumption

have been greatly intensified by the modernisation of the food indus-
try, as exemplified by the ‘fast’ in fast food. As noted in the previous
chapter, speed/acceleration are often taken as primary defining features
of modernity – the continuous acceleration of life, and replacement of
older modes of consumption with newer, faster ones – ‘all that is solid
melts into air’, to repeat the famous phrase. Such industrialisation and
acceleration has produced consumption practices which are steadily
more intensive – people’s intake of food in the West has increased
throughout the 20th century, made possible by ever more ‘efficient’
means of food delivery.
Fast-food restaurants represent one important facet of this increased
efficiency (along with supermarkets, refrigeration, and so on). It was
the essence of McDonald’s distinctiveness from its inception.
Discussing the original restaurant in Pasadena, later moved to San
Bernadino, run by the McDonald brothers, Love writes:
Now they decided to make speed the essence of their business. ‘Our
whole concept was based on speed, lower prices, and volume’, says
[Dick] McDonald. … ‘Customers weren’t demanding it, but our intui-
tion told us that they would like speed. Everything was moving
faster’.
(Love, 1987, p. 14)
The McDonald brothers thus called their assembly line system the
‘Speedy Service System’.
These intensified consequences in part relate to increased meat
consumption, and increasingly to transformed conditions of produc-
tion of meat. But they also relate to other aspects of environmental
change – increased use of non-reusable packaging, increased use of
energy as more food is refrigerated and transported over greater dis-
tances, increased monoculture in agriculture, coevolution with auto-
mobility and its consequences. The emergence of fast food restaurants
has therefore set in train a dynamic which intensifies the ecological
impacts of food consumption.
Fast-food restaurants are major consumers of the raw materials mak-
ing up most of the products they sell. McDonald’s alone is the biggest
consumer of meat and potatoes in many of the countries it operates
in, in the US consuming 600 million pounds of beef annually, and
7.5 per cent of the US’s total potato food crop (Love, 1987, p. 3). Love’s
eulogistic corporate history is revealing in this regard; presented in
terms of McDonald’s huge commercial success, Love shows how some
of the deepest consequences of that success are the ‘revolutionary
changes in meat and potato processing’ (ibid.):
In their search for improvements, McDonald’s operations specialists

moved back down the food and supply equipment chain. They
changed the way farmers grow potatoes and the way companies
process them. They introduced new methods to the nation’s dairies.
They altered the way ranchers raised beef and the way the meat
industry makes the final product. … no one has had more impact
than McDonald’s in modernizing food processing and distribution
in the last three decades.
(Love, 1987, p. 119; also Cummings, 1999)
It is not difficult to envisage that such transformations are simulta-

neously ecological transformations. For example, concerning potatoes,
McDonald’s specified the use of the Idaho Russet as the ideal potato for
making a McDonald’s french fry. McDonald’s therefore rigorously
imposed use of this potato on its suppliers, producing increased mono-
culture in American (and later elsewhere) potato farming (Ritzer, 1996,
p. 13). They also transformed the way potatoes were stored, electrifying
this part of the process in order to produce a standardised product
quality, and later changing over to frozen potatoes in order to be able
to use the Idaho Russet all year round (the variety was unable to stand
the summer heat) (Love, 1987, pp. 119–23, 330–5). Similar shifts
occurred in beef production and processing, from reusable to dispos-
able packaging, and later on in chicken production. Love suggests that
as early as 1962 McDonald’s had sufficient market power to enforce
these changes on suppliers (ibid., p. 123). Others also suggest that large
institutional buyers such as McDonald’s hold great power over farmers
and processors (e.g. Tansey and Worsley, 1995, p. 141).
Such organisation of consumption requires the intensification of
agriculture, leading to what in animal farming is now usually referred
to as factory farming. Ritzer (1996, pp. 112–14) discusses this as an
aspect of McDonaldisation in relation to its ‘control’ dimensions. Such
farming necessarily increases the strains on the animals that live on
such farms, through feeding and breeding to increase bodyweight
greatly, use of growth hormones to accelerate growth, producing
bodyweights such that animals’ legs are routinely in great pain just
supporting them, intensive use of antibiotics, deprivation of space,

light, and so on (see e.g. Singer, 1976; or Spencer, 1993, pp. 322–9, for
a discussion of this). Fast food produces a dynamic whereby such con-
ditions of production are necessary, since the volume of production
could not be sustained without it.
One of the more controversial aspects of the McLibel case concerned
the claim that McDonald’s was involved in promoting deforestation.
The claim was that land was being cleared to make way for beef farm-
ing for hamburger meat. This has been a longstanding argument of
critics of fast-food restaurants. Again, the logic can be interpreted sys-
temically; that the intensification of production and consumption rep-
resented by the fast-food industry necessitates increases in the land
devoted to beef farming, with inevitable incursions into land which
was previously forested.8 The ‘What’s Wrong with McDonald’s’ leaflet
made such claims about McDonald’s; similar claims have been made
widely about the fast food industry more generally (e.g. Fiddes, 1991,
pp. 212–13; Transnationals Information Centre, 1987, p. 18).
Fiddes (1991, pp. 66–7, 232) suggests that the hamburger as an indus-
trialised, highly processed form of meat is itself a response to increasing
concerns about the ethics and ecology of meat consumption produced
by urbanisation. Hidden in a bun, and transformed from any obvious
connection to the body of the animal(s) which produced it, the meat
in a hamburger can be readily disconnected from its animal origins.
Like so much industrial production, the mass-produced hamburger

effectively divorces consumption from its ecological context. Fast-
flesh emporia entice the consumer with sanitised gratification; here
everybody smiles, while health, welfare, and environmental impli-
cations are banished to another less seductive world.9
(Fiddes, 1991, pp. 66–7)
Competitive wars between fast-food restaurants have led to phenom-

enon such as ‘supersizing’, where the restaurants have produced
progressively larger-sized portions to gain competitive edge over their
rivals. McDonald’s introduction in the late 1960s/early 1970s of the Big
Mac and the large portion of fries was to help McDonald’s compete
with Burger King and Wendy’s, but in the early 1990s another round of
increasing sizes gripped the fast-food industry (Wroe, 1996), producing
moral panics over the health threats (Bell and Valentine, 1997, p. 135),
but also intensifying further the ecological consequences of food
production and consumption.
Conclusions: resisting ‘McDonaldisation’
From the point of view of this discussion, Ritzer’s argument is promis-

ing but ultimately frustrating. He provides an argument that the fast-
food restaurant, with McDonald’s as its paradigmatic case, is exemplary
of processes of rationalisation, and that the organisational changes
instituted initially by the McDonald brothers and developed by Ray
Kroc, who turned McDonald’s into an empire, have then been broad-
ened out into many other economic sectors and areas of life (he
discusses education, health and the workplace at length, and many
other aspects of life). He also shows many of the downsides of such
developments, although he also suggests they have advantages also
(reminiscent of Berman’s (1982) arguments concerning the contradic-
tory nature of modernity and modernisation). But having done this,
his discussion of whether the ‘iron cage’ of McDonaldisation can be
escaped is very frustrating. He suggests that the process is ultimately
unchallengeable, without really arguing it in the relevant chapter (enti-
tled ‘The Iron Cage of McDonaldization’),10 or considering resistance
to McDonald’s or McDonaldisation at all.
The process Ritzer outlines apparently occurs almost outside human
agency. ‘McDonaldization has an inexorable quality, multiplying and
extending itself continuously’, he writes (ibid., p. 161). Earlier, he sug-
gests its inexorable quality by suggesting that even when McDonald’s
and the principles of organisation it developed are gone, rationalisa-
tion will go on:
When McDonald’s has, like its predecessors, receded in importance

or even passed from the scene, it will be remembered as yet another
precursor to what is likely to be a still more rational world.
(Ibid., p. 160)
Thus, ‘McDonaldized systems will remain powerful until the nature of

society has changed so much that they can no longer adapt to it’
(ibid.). This is both a frustratingly depoliticised interpretation, and a
contradictory one; elsewhere, McDonaldised systems are at the fore-
front of social change; now they appear as subject to the whims of
social change. But politically, it again suggests that these processes are
not produced by human agency. Ritzer is evidently aware of this criti-
cism. He does claim that ‘Lest I be accused of anthropomorphizing and
reifying McDonaldization, it is actually people and their agencies that
push the process’ (ibid., p. 229). But this is in an endnote; nowhere in
the text do the ‘people and their agencies that push the process’
appear, and then by definition nowhere do the people and their agen-
cies who resist the process and argue for alternatives appear. Since resis-
tance is impossible, and Ritzer is not entirely clear that it is desirable,
his argument is that all that can be done is to take steps to ‘humanize a
McDonaldized society’ (ibid., pp. xx–xxi). As Rinehart (1998) argues,
concerning this conclusion, Ritzer thus views all agency in excessively
individualistic terms, neglecting to consider possibilities of collective
action to resist rationalisation.
Rather, McLibel and the argument above suggest that resistance to
McDonald’s and McDonaldisation is possible. On the one hand, such
resistance has clearly had effects in transforming some of the practices
of institutions like McDonald’s. Lawson (1992, pp. 85–6) shows how
McDonald’s has often taken the lead in responding to criticisms, for
example by reducing paper-use by switching to polystyrene packaging
in 1976, and then back to paper in 1990 because of ozone depletion
and landfill concerns, by increasing recycling, and by improved energy
management, involving a 45 per cent reduction in energy-use at a test
restaurant. At the same time, there is much ‘Greenwash’ and PR
spin put on such changes which overestimate their impact (Lawson,
1992, p. 84; Beder, 1997, p. 171). McDonald’s have performed such
Greenwash by ‘forming a partnership with the Environmental Defense
Fund’ (Beder, 1997, p. 132; Rowell, 1996, p. 109; Karliner, 1997,
p. 192). Such PR efforts are at times helped by academic apologists for
their operations, often in management or business studies. Lawson
claims, for example, with obvious ideological effect, that ‘the contribu-
tion which the fast-food industry can make towards mitigating the
effects of major environmental problems, such as the greenhouse
effect, acid rain and the erosion of the ozone layer is probably mini-
mal’ (1992, p. 184). As Belasco suggests in a different but related
context, ‘what was significant was that these campaigns [to persuade
people of companies’ green credentials] had to be waged at all. A more
secure establishment would have had to say nothing … persuasion (or
force) is needed only when authority breaks down’ (1989, p. 130).
But at the same time, that such authority breaks down is insufficient
as evidence that more far-reaching changes will (or even can) occur.
The analysis above suggests that the effects of resistance designed to
promote reform of particular practices by McDonald’s and similar
organisations is always likely to be only ameliorative. For it is the ratio-
nalisation which is at the heart of such operations which is at issue.
Resistance is better thought of as building alternative forms of food
provision to the industrialised, rationalised system of provision exem-

plified by McDonald’s.
The critiques of McDonald’s and McDonaldisation by Steel and
Morris and their allies hark back to the countercultural critique
discussed extensively by Belasco (1989). The counterculture in the US
challenged the dominant modernist food industry over issues of ecol-
ogy, centralization, patriarchy, health and speed. They made food a
centrepiece of their broad social critique. Belasco recounts how these
critiques became either challenged by hegemonic culture and/or
coopted by it. As a consequence, the whole countercultural critique of
prevailing social organisation became transformed into an individualist
consumerist set of concerns over health (narrowed to particular ques-
tions such as cholesterol or sodium) and ‘nature’ (captured by big
business’s rendering the term meaningless). The anti-McDonald’s cam-
paigns revitalise the earlier food politics. At the same time, Belasco
shows (1989, ch. 4) how the alternative food culture created an alterna-
tive food economy and infrastructure. Like McDonaldised systems, this
is simultaneously a social and ecological transformation, but unlike the
former, it is one premised on principles consistent with ecological
sustainability. I turn now in the final chapter to examine how we
might conceptualise this political resistance, and what forms of politi-
cal action and community such resistance might lead to.
7
Conclusion: Globalisation,
Governance and Resistance
In the previous four chapters I have tried to establish primarily that the
power structures of global politics, as outlined in Chapter 3, systemi-
cally generate global environmental change. But Lenin’s question,
‘What is to be done?’, remains. For mainstream writers on environ-
mental change in IR, the answer to this question is clear. State elites
should build stronger international institutions to address such change
more effectively than they have to date. Environmentalists should per-
suade and pressure those elites to build such institutions. Occasionally,
perhaps, environmentalists can participate directly in fulfilling gover-
nance functions themselves, but this is relatively marginal to the
central feature of global environmental politics, which is inter-
state management. My intention has been to destabilise the assump-
tions on which this normative vision of international environmental
politics rests. But there are questions of political action still to
be addressed. Two in particular are most relevant here. Firstly, if capi-
talist, statist, scientistic, patriarchal structures are intrinsically unsus-
tainable, what forms of political and social structures are consistent
with principles of sustainability (defined in terms of the argument of
Chapter 3 as those which do not require accumulation, and are not
based on modes of domination)? And secondly, what forms of political
action might help to move societies from ‘here’ to ‘there’ (or, as Mary
Mellor puts it [1995], emphasising Green localist concerns) from ‘there’
to ‘here’?
Global civil society and global environmental governance
A useful way into these debates, as mentioned in Chapters 2 and 3, is

through the emerging literature on ‘global civil society’ and ‘global
141
environmental governance’.1 As mentioned in Chapter 2, there is a

growing set of writers within IR who are moving away from strict
notions of governance as a network of interstate systems, international
regimes. This is even the case for mainstream liberal writers such as
Oran Young (1997a). But in Young’s work, there is a clear tension
between this development and the disciplinary commitments of ortho-
dox IR, which is necessarily state-centric.
Wapner (1996) gives an account of three perspectives regarding the
state system – statist, suprastatist and substatist (see also Hurrell, 1994).
For Wapner, all three have significant commonality in focusing on the
states system, either as the locus of effective responses to global envi-
ronmental change, or as the core problem for global environmental
politics which needs to be transcended. Wapner then contrasts this to
what he calls ‘world civic politics’, which consists of the practices of
transnational environmental groups (he discusses Greenpeace, the
World Wide Fund for Nature and Friends of the Earth), which politicise
global civil society in various ways. For Wapner, this is a way of circum-
venting the state-centrism of IR and offering an account of global envi-
ronmental politics not based on regimes or other interstate processes.
Wapner’s focus is very useful in debunking notions that politics only
takes place in or between states. But he makes a number of moves
which I want to take issue with here. Firstly, I am not convinced by his
argument that substatists are committed to the states system in the
way he suggests. Clearly, he is right to suggest that they focus on the
states system as a generator of global environmental change and as a
constraint to achieving sustainability. But his suggestion is stronger
than this; effectively, he argues that such writers are committed to a
model of politics which is state-like. Decentralisation of power, as
Wapner reads the substatists, is simply a matter of recreating existing
political institutions, sovereign states, at much more local, ‘human
scale’ levels. But this is a misreading. Such Green decentralists do base
much of their arguments on questions of scale. But they are also clear
that such decentralisation for ecological purposes involves creating
fundamentally different political institutions. That is clear in the way
that many such writers are explicitly opposed to institutions and prac-
tices of sovereignty; as Helleiner (1996) points out, this has always
been an intended implication of the slogan ‘Think Globally, Act
Locally’ (see below). It is also clear that such decentralisation arises
from Green concerns with hierarchy and domination. So the state is,
for the substatist position, not simply about the scale of political insti-
tutions, but also their form.
Globalisation, Governance and Resistance 143
Secondly, Wapner ducks a question which I have argued should be a

central component of any account of global environmental politics;
that of the causes of global environmental change. In his accounts of
supra- and substatism, such concerns are clearly mentioned. However,
when he goes on to discuss world civic politics, such questions sud-
denly disappear from view. But it is not clear how Wapner moves from
a discussion of how the tragedy of the commons, or alternatively hier-
archy and domination, or ‘bigness’, systemically generate environmen-
tal change, to the focus on politics in the way he does. Isn’t some
notion of the appropriate forms and scales of political institution nec-
essary for the notion of world civic politics to be persuasive? What
Wapner’s analysis lacks here is a connection to some substantive
outcomes. How does world civic politics provide a model of a system of
governance which can in principle generate sustainability? Wapner’s
answer to this, given in another context, could be that there is no sin-
gle answer. World civic politics is just one among many mechanisms
which can be developed to help produce sustainable futures. But there
is still for me a contradiction here since some of the other mechanisms
are systemically anti-ecological.
Lipschutz (1997; also Lipschutz and Mayer, 1996) has a very similar
conception of an emerging pattern of global environmental gover-
nance. He outlines a common distinction between government and
governance, where as opposed to the reliance on enforcement through
law and force, as is typical of government, ‘governance is … a system of
rule that is as dependent on intersubjective meanings as on formally
sanctioned constitutions … of regulatory mechanisms in a sphere of
activity which function effectively even though they are not endowed
with formal authority’ (Lipschutz, 1997, p. 96, quoting Rosenau, 1992,
pp. 4 –5). Patterns of global governance are therefore a mix of interstate
regimes (as focused on by liberal institutionalists in IR) alongside ‘less
formalized norms, rules and procedures that pattern behavior without
the presence of written constitutions or material power’ (Lipschutz,
1997, p. 96). The latter typically involve ‘alliances between coalitions
in global civil society and the international governance arrangements
associated with UN system’ (ibid.), and thus global governance is a
multitiered pattern of governance, where actors in (global) civil society
are important in generating the norms and rules on which practices are
based. Lipschutz emphasises the network character of such patterns of
governance; that they are based not on the hierarchy associated with
the state but on horizontal relations among a variety of organisations.
‘Rather than via global hierarchy or markets, nature will most likely be
protected via governance through social relations … in which shared

norms, cooperation, trust, and mutual obligation play central roles’
(ibid., p. 98). He also emphasises that such patterns of governance are
functionally specific, that they emerge in response to particular prob-
lems, and that their primary mode of interaction is knowledge-based.
The purpose of such networks is learning about what forms of gover-
nance ‘work’. ‘The fundamental units of governance are, in this sys-
tem, defined by both function and social meanings, anchored to
particular places but linked globally through networks of knowledge-
based relations’ (ibid.).2
Lipschutz, however, contextualises his account of emerging patterns
of global environmental governance rather differently from Wapner.
He places these developments much more clearly in the context of
large-scale shifts in the global political economy. He characterises these
as ‘economic integration accompanied by political fragmentation’
(ibid., p. 84). Lipschutz argues that the primary significance of these
twin, connected developments is to intensify the difficulties of achiev-
ing effective global environmental governance purely through tradi-
tional forms of interstate management (ibid., p. 85). (He also argues
later, on pp. 91–2, that shared social meanings, another prerequisite of
effective global governance, are effectively impossible to reach at inter-
state levels – such meanings can only be shared at local levels, or
among networks of shared interests). The combined effect of these two
shifts is to produce a ‘neo-medieval’ form of world order, where there
are multiple levels of authority and governance from the local up to
the global (and many of the ‘global’ levels are not organised spatially
as this metaphor suggests), centred on functionally specific networks
of organisations.
Lipschutz gives a number of examples of such networks at work
in global environmental politics. He discusses, for example, the activi-
ties of the Climate Action Network (CAN), the Global Rivers Environ-
mental Education Network (GREEN), and the River Watch Network
(ibid., p. 88), and later, campaigns over the Mattole watershed in north-
ern California (p. 93), the Amazon rainforest (pp. 93–4), Love Canal
(p. 94) and by the residents of Owens Valley in Eastern California
against Los Angeles (p. 95). He suggests that networks and campaigns
such as these constitute the primary site of global environmental gov-
ernance. But in his conclusion and general conceptual argument, he
loses an important element of (at least some of ) such networks and
campaigns, namely an element of struggle and conflict. Global envi-
ronmental governance is thought of as a process of learning, where
actors develop shared meanings and norms to deal with problems, and
locally embedded communities share knowledge and norms through
global networks. Lost here is a sense of who is involved in such
processes. Implicitly, it is actors in (global) civil society, but it is unclear
whether state and corporate actors are involved. If not, then how do
the governance mechanisms affect the practices of those actors? If they
are, then surely conceptualising the process as simply one of learning is
inadequate. Either way, then, environmental movements and their
allies in civil society in these networks are necessarily involved in some
form of struggle with state and corporate actors, as is indeed high-
lighted in Lipschutz’s empirical stories.
This point would be emphasised if we also bring in another consider-
ation which is missing from the otherwise very useful analyses of
Wapner and Lipschutz. As already alluded to in the discussion of
Wapner’s book, one absence is a sense of the substantive outcomes to
be produced or promoted by such emerging governing mechanisms.
There is a sense in both writers’ work that such outcomes are radically
different from those produced by prevailing political institutions
(growth, centralisation, globalisation, and so on). But if that is the case,
the likelihood of such governance being effective in helping to pro-
duce sustainable outcomes is dependent on the degree to which they
are successful in devising strategies which resist the dominant logics of
states, capital, big science, bureaucracy, etc. While learning processes
among networks are clearly important, and could extend to parts of
states and some corporate actors, it is unlikely that this will be suffi-
cient (at least if the structural argument I have offered throughout this
book is accepted). Such actors have entrenched reasons not to learn to
‘tread lightly on the earth’ (or whatever other catchphrase is used), but
rather have strong reasons to resist the emerging patterns of gover-
nance outlined by Wapner and Lipschutz. Indeed, they perhaps
have strong reasons to promote forms of global management which
Lipschutz suggests is unlikely to emerge (1997, p. 85), and perhaps are
already doing so, as emphasised by some writers on UNCED (Chatterjee
and Finger, 1994; Hildyard, 1993; Shiva, 1993; Paterson, 1996b).
Globalisation and global environmental politics
I will develop these two points, concerning the substantive outcomes

generated by patterns of governance, and practices of resistance to
existing political forms, below. I now turn to a discussion of globalisa-
tion. Partly this is because, as Lipschutz rightly points out, such a
context is important for understanding emerging patterns of gover-

nance, and ways that such governance can be further developed. But it
is also because I would conceptualise such changes rather differently
from Lipschutz, and this has important consequences for the develop-
ment of the argument.
For Wapner, contemporary social change at a global level is concep-
tualised primarily in terms of the emergence of a ‘global civil society’.
The basis for considering social interaction transnationally exists, and
social actors moving across state boundaries are able to effect political
change. Without disputing this, it is perhaps also worth emphasising
that this is a very particular, pluralist, account of such global social
change, especially in the context of the point that this literature down-
plays the political conflicts involved in such non-state ‘global environ-
mental governance’. Specifically, the emergence of global civil society
should be thought of as one of the facets of the broader process of
globalisation. Lipschutz does emphasise this context, but I want to
engage with work on globalisation in order to develop the argument in
ways different to his.
Lipschutz’s account of contemporary social change, as ‘economic
integration accompanied by political fragmentation’, resonates with a
widespread literature on what has come to be known as (economic)
globalisation. Debates about globalisation typically focus on the one
hand on whether globalisation is happening (or whether the current
shifts in the global economy are better characterised as ‘internationali-
sation’, ‘triadisation’, ‘regionalisation’ or some other phrase), and the
implications of such changes for conventional accounts of the possibil-
ities of political action.3 Specifically, such debates are often concerned
to examine whether globalisation has created a situation where there is
no possibility for states to pursue any path of political-economic man-
agement other than the neoliberal one dictated by global finance and
Transnational Corporations. Lipschutz’s account (1997, pp. 86–7) of
what Phil Cerny has called the ‘competition state’ (1990) (although
Lipschutz does not use this phrase), operating at the level of local polit-
ical institutions, is clearly consistent with such concerns. Lipschutz
offers an argument which sides with those who suggest that globalisa-
tion does in fact attenuate state autonomy and proscribe certain forms
of action; this is part of his explanation for why conventional inter-
state collective action on global environmental change is increasingly
difficult to achieve.
Lipschutz also shares with many in debates on globalisation an
account of what it is. Although he only briefly defines it, he suggests
that ‘global economic integration is a condition whose origins are to be

found in … the Industrial Revolution, the rise of English liberalism, and
the institutionalisation of free trade’ (1997, p. 85). This is slightly dif-
ferent from many of the debates on globalisation, particularly in its
idealist focus on ‘English liberalism’, but it shares with most accounts a
focus on a set of discrete trends. Most literature on globalisation
focuses on the triad of trade, transnational corporations, and finance,
as measures of the process. These are the measures by which both pro-
ponents of a globalisation hypothesis, and its critics, tend to advance
and evaluate their arguments. Globalisation consists, therefore, of a set
of empirical measures through which economies have (or have not,
depending on your view) become progressively more closely linked,
since either 1945, or the early 1970s. Lipschutz’s characterisation of
integration is consistent with such a view of globalisation.
However, such an account of what constitutes globalisation fails to
see capitalist society as an integrated whole. Seen as such, globalisation
can be seen less in economic integration, in the sense of greater
amounts of GDP being accounted for by trade or Foreign Direct
Investment, and more in terms of a broad reorganisation of the power
of capitalist elites to global levels.4 Globalisation therefore can be seen
in increased patterns of interconnection between (previously national
or regional) capitalist elites across the globe. Such elites are simultane-
ously public (as in state officials and politicians) and private (TNC
executives, bankers), and their increasing interconnections can be seen
in the increased intensity of macroeconomic policy coordination, par-
ticularly in G7/8 countries, in the variety of forums for elite consensus
formation (such as the Trilateral Commission), but also in the variety
of private cooperative arrangements, from credit rating agencies
through to interfirm alliances in R&D and production. Simultaneously,
the process entails a globalisation of consumer culture which embeds
an increasingly large number of people’s lives in the daily practices of
consumption which tie them in, both materially and symbolically, to
the fortunes of global capitalism.
As I have suggested elsewhere (1996b), environmental change and
politics have provided fertile strategic ground for such globalisation.
The processes surrounding UNCED provided many opportunities for
TNCs to promote themselves as ‘saving the global environment’
(Finger and Kilcoyne, 1997). They intensified their organisation of res-
ponses to environmentalism through institutions such as the (World)
Business Council for Sustainable Development, and while making sure
that no mention of TNCs was made in UNCED documents, entrenched
themselves as the main legitimate actors in producing responses to

global environmental change (ibid., Hildyard, 1993; Chatterjee and
Finger, 1994). This ‘Greening of the Global Reach’ (Shiva, 1993a) has
entrenched the power of TNCs both through legitimation and through
intensification of their collective organisation as a ‘transnational capi-
talist class’.
Caroline Thomas suggests that such increased interconnections are
best conceptualised as ‘the process whereby power is located in global
social formations and expressed through global networks rather than
through territorially-based states’ (Thomas, 1997, p. 6). However, I
would take issue with the last part of Thomas’s formulation. If concep-
tualised as a social whole, then the opposition of states to (globalising)
capitalism is misplaced. I would use the phrase ‘in addition to’, instead
of ‘rather than’, in Thomas’s phrase. Indeed, states can often be seen as
agents themselves in promoting globalisation, as Helleiner’s work on
the globalisation of financial markets (1994; 1995) demonstrates con-
vincingly. If states are part of a broader social whole (capitalist, patriar-
chal, technocratic), then there is no reason why state managers and
elites will oppose processes of globalisation; indeed there are good rea-
sons to believe they would promote it, since (at least as far as globalis-
ing capitalist elites are concerned) it promotes the accumulation which
is one of the state’s structural imperatives.
This account of globalisation helps to illustrate complications to
Lipschutz’s argument concerning processes of ‘global environmental
governance’ which I outlined above. If globalisation is a central process
in both capital accumulation and state reorganisation, and capitalism
and the states system are necessarily anti-ecological (as I argued in
Chapter 3), then appropriate ecological responses to globalisation are
ones of resistance, not of (or perhaps more precisely in addition to)
learning. Perhaps more can be said about globalisation here than sim-
ply that it is an expression of the logic(s) of capitalism and the state
system. Globalisation intensifies existing dynamics of capitalism which
tend to disrupt ecological systems. This is primarily through distancia-
tion – that as globalisation increases the physical distance between pro-
ducers and consumers, it makes it increasingly difficult to be aware of
the ecological or social consequences of one’s consumption practices.5
The appropriate forms of political action to respond to global envi-
ronmental change in this political-economic context are therefore
resistive. This could be seen to have two aspects. Firstly, it can be seen
as resistance to globalisation. Since the world’s structures of power are
fundamental sources of (both) globalisation and global environmental
politics, resistance to globalising processes can be part of broader resis-

tance to the structures themselves. Secondly, it can be seen as resis-
tance within globalisation. Certain aspects of globalisation can perhaps
be useful to resisting capitalism, the state, and so on, and to furthering
a Green social transformation. For example, the widespread use of
telecommunications for global networking purposes by critical social
movements can be seen as one of globalisation’s unintended conse-
quences, one of the ‘chinks in its armour’ where possibilities of resis-
tance are created. Paul Preston, President of McDonald’s UK, alluding
to the McLibel case, suggested that ‘one downside of globalisation
may be that local incidents soon become international crises’ (Vidal,
1995a). Central to the possibilities of this have been the creation both
of international media, but also (and perhaps more importantly) alter-
native sources of global information flows, principally the Internet.
Newell (forthcoming), does place discussion of governance in pre-
cisely this context. He shows how, given that globalisation constitutes
a reorganisation of world politics so that TNCs can further their inter-
ests, involving the retreat not of the state so much as of regulationist
strategies by states, NGOs increasingly step in to regulate, or ‘govern’,
the practices of TNCs. NGO strategies are varied, from occasional
alliances with TNCs to promote ‘learning’ as implied by Lipschutz’s
model, through to shareholder activism, consumer boycotts, counter-
advertising, and developing codes of conduct. Through such a lens, it
becomes clearer that such governance is often more conflictual than is
implied by Lipschutz.
Resistance and transformation
My main contention in this section is that the processes of global envi-

ronmental governance which Lipschutz discusses are perhaps most fruit-
fully thought of as processes of resistance.6 Such resistance is to an extent
about holding those with power in the global economy, and/or in states
to account, making them legitimise their actions, democratising them,
transforming their effects. It is in this sense a form of governance as out-
lined in the global governance literature. But it is also about (re)creating
fundamentally different sorts of social space and political economy. It is
not only about regulating, governing the practices of TNCs, but also
about creating spaces where TNCs cannot dominate. Lipschutz gives
some examples which do fit into this category, but a whole host of oth-
ers could be given. In Chapters 5 and 6 I discussed some in relation to
cars and road-building and in relation to the fast-food industry.
A classic example of such resistance in this literature concerns the

patenting of seeds and other plant genetic material (e.g. Guha and
Martinez-Alier, 1997, pp. 109–127; Shiva and Holla-Bhar, 1993; Kneen,
1995). Numerous other examples could be given, from the Chipko
movement, which is universally mentioned, but whose meaning is
heavily contested (see, for example, Bandyopadhyay and Shiva, 1987;
Weber, 1988; or, for a perspective critical of the conventional view of
Chipko, Rangan, 1996), to the environmental justice movement
(Bullard, 1990; Szasz, 1994). Taylor’s edited volume Ecological Resistance
Movements (1995) presents perhaps the broadest account of such resis-
tance. Recognising the inevitable diversity of such movements, Taylor
nevertheless suggests that there are some features connecting those dis-
cussed in his book, from all over the world. He argues (1995a) that
they have three distinctive features. Firstly, such movements respond
to threats to livelihood and survival; ‘popular ecological resistance
often originates in a desperate quest for survival as industrial processes
threaten habitual modes of existence and as people recognize that their
well-being is being threatened by environmental degradation’ (Taylor,
1995a, p. 335). Secondly, they involve specific attempts to preserve or
create ethical sensibilities towards the non-human world and within
human societies conducive to producing sustainability. Taylor terms
such shifts in consciousness ‘moral and religious’ (1995a, p. 336). Such
motivational concerns often connect deeply with material interests in
survival to produce these movements. Thirdly, along with many other
commentators (e.g. Seager, 1993; Mellor, 1992), Taylor notes that in
many of the movements discussed in his book the gendered impacts of
environmental degradation result in ecological resistance movements
very often being women-led.
Gramscian notions of counterhegemony are perhaps one conceptual
tool to understanding such resistance. Some, for example Seel (1997),
have explained roads protests in the UK in such terms. But the usage of
counterhegemony in neo-Gramscian IPE remains rooted in an under-
standing of politics in terms of reviving social democracy in the face of
a neoliberal project which has globalisation as its main rhetorical
device (see Paterson, 1999, for more detail). When ecology is dealt with
by Gramscians in IPE, it is usually dealt with in a cursory fashion,
clearly as an add-on extra which doesn’t challenge their main political
purposes (e.g. Cox, 1999, p. 9; Gill and Law, 1988, pp. 370 – 4).
Polanyi’s (1957) notion of a counter-movement is perhaps more
fruitful. As Bernard (1997) emphasises, Polanyi understood the counter-
movement to be a reaction to what he termed the ‘disembedding’ of
the economy, as social forces promoting market freedom successfully

disengaged the economy from webs of social obligation. Central to
such disembedding is the ongoing creation of what Polanyi called the
‘fictitious commodities’ of land and labour (fictitious in that they are
not produced by the market). The counter-movement arises because
people object to the way in which the commodification of land and
labour disrupts their capacities to meet subsistence needs, as well as
because they recognise that such disembedding is dangerous in the
context of the necessary human interdependence with the rest of
nature. So for Polanyi, resistance is directly connected to the ecological
disruptions produced by a liberalising capitalism, thus conceptualising
resistance similarly to the way Taylor characterises empirical examples
of ecological resistance (see Bernard, 1997, for an extended account of
Polanyi, and also Mittelman, 1998, for a similar application to ecologi-
cal resistance movements).
At the same time, Polanyi’s account of the goals of resistance is also
more immediately consistent with a Green concern than is a Gramscian
account. For him, the reembedding of the economy meant much more
than simply taming the market with rules, as in Ruggie’s use of Polanyi
in describing the Bretton Woods system as ‘embedded liberalism’ (1983;
Bernard, 1997, p. 86). It involves precisely ‘removing the market as the
dominant institution in society’ (Bernard, 1997, p. 86).
This is much like the arguments of an increasing number of writers
on development who call for the ‘end of development’ (Escobar, 1995,
p. 19), which I outlined in Chapter 3. At that point I effectively implied
that this was simply an academic trend. But, as Escobar emphasises,
the rejection of development is also made by many grassroots move-
ments, especially (but not solely, as we have seen in Chapters 5 and 6)
in the South (ibid., pp. 215–16). These authors and movements
are ‘not interested in development alternatives but in alternatives to
development, that is, the rejection of the paradigm altogether’ (ibid.,
p. 215).
The practices of resistance just described, as well as those discussed
in Chapters 5 and 6, should therefore be conceptualised in this con-
text.7 Of course, as Taylor emphasises (1995a) they are highly diverse,
and to make this move here is highly problematic. But even where
they are not explicitly ecological in intent, these movements (as dis-
cussed by Escobar and others) reject fundamentally the dominant
social logics which, as I have tried to show in Chapter 3, are inevitably
ecologically unsustainable, and work towards social systems which are
more conducive to sustainability. Taylor suggests that they are often
explicit in understanding ‘the problem’ in broadly these terms – that

environmental degradation and social disruption result from the incur-
sions of global capital and national economic and political elites, that
economic growth is not an answer and is impossible in the long run,
that commons produce political-economic mechanisms conducive to
social stability and environmental sustainability, and that political and
economic decentralisation is necessary to achieve these goals (1995a,
pp. 337– 41). Chapter 3 showed how development is a central discourse
through which patriarchal, technocratic, capitalist, statist societies
reproduce themselves. By opposing development, such movements
oppose the logics of those structures.
Escobar emphasises this point (although perhaps rather differently)
through poststructuralist lenses. By focusing on development as dis-
course, or ‘regime of representation’, he shows that opposition to
development is fundamentally cultural (in the broad sense). It opposes
the forms of knowledge and ways of knowing, the techniques and
strategies of power, which are epitomised by and practised through
development as a discourse, and aims to construct societies not based
on such practices of domination. As he argues, while highlighting the
importance of ecology in such struggles:
These struggles – between global capital and biotechnology interests

on the one hand, and local communities and organizations on the
other – constitute the most advanced stage in which the meanings
of development and post-development are being fought over …
[they] raise[s] unprecedented questions concerning the cultural poli-
tics around the design of social orders, technology, nature, and life
itself.
(Escobar, 1995, p. 19)
An account of development as discourse has many similarities with

the account of globalisation given above. If globalisation is about the
reorganisation of capitalist power to global levels, then such a shift is
necessarily discursive. It involves shifts in the forms of power and legit-
imation engaged in by capitalist elites, new means through which such
power is reproduced. Such an account of globalisation is given both by
Ian Douglas (1997), and by J.K. Gibson-Graham (1996). For both of
these writers, globalisation as discourse operates in order to bring the
effects it purports to describe into being. It does so particularly effec-
tively since a central part of its discourse is that such processes
are inevitable, irresistible. Gibson-Graham suggests this argument by
analogy with the ‘rape script’: just as discourses of rape tend to render
women as powerless victims, which becomes self-fulfilling, discourses
of globalisation render societies as powerless to prevent the ‘penetration’
of global capital. Thus, globalisation should be understood as a ‘lan-
guage of domination, a tightly scripted narrative of differential power’
(Gibson-Graham, 1996, p. 120). Douglas is, in a similar vein, primarily
concerned with:
the way in which a series of social imperatives has been established

on the back of the rise to hegemony of the concept of globalisation.
These imperatives include: ‘agility’, ‘rapidity’, and ‘mobility’; ‘trans-
formation’, ‘adaptation’, and ‘invention’; ‘competitiveness’, ‘outlook’
and ‘foresight’; ‘self-reliance’, ‘self-motivation’ and ‘self-monitoring’;
‘economy’, ‘efficiency’ and ‘excellence’; the list continues.
(Douglas, 1997, p. 165)
Through such imperatives, globalisation is ‘seen to be inexorable (a

logic to which “there is no alternative”) and inevitable’ (ibid., p. 166).
Douglas’s account in particular shows many similarities with the
account given of development by Escobar and others. Both involve
mobilisations of people in new ways to meet needs of accumulation.
Both involve new forms of knowledge and techniques of power,
through which subjects are produced as efficient workers. Douglas
indeed shows how such mobilisations are contemporary expressions of
prevalent forms of power in modernity.8 Globalisation and develop-
ment are from this perspective different aspects of dominant discourses
through which social structures are reproduced. Thus in the concrete
examples discussed above, resistance to development and resistance to
globalisation amount to much the same thing, and these practices
therefore are direct analogies (in the terms of my argument) to
Lipschutz’s networks of global environmental governance.
Toward a sustainable world?
But where is such resistance heading? It should be emphasised that

resistance is, as I hope is obvious from the previous section, simultane-
ously resistive and reconstructive. As Esteva puts it (1992, p. 20), such
resistance (usefully defined by him as a struggle ‘to limit the economic
sphere’) is seen by its practitioners as ‘a creative reconstitution of the
basic forms of social interaction, in order to liberate themselves from
their economic chains’.9
The predominant image within Green literature, emphasised in

many of the instances of resistance given above, is of the (re)creation
of small-scale, anarchistic, egalitarian communities. This can be seen,
for example, especially in The Ecologist’s (1993) invocation of the
‘commons’ as the normative site both of resistance and of a sustainable
social system, in Sachs’ (1997) notion of the ‘home perspective’, in
Latouche’s (1993) concept of the ‘informal’, in Mellor’s (1995) inver-
sion of a conventional phrase concerning political strategy ‘getting
here from there’, and in many other formulations, perhaps most classi-
cally in the slogan ‘Think Globally, Act Locally’.
The localist imagery and focus is also prevalent in the ‘anti-develop-
ment’ literature. Escobar, for example, emphasises such concerns in
resistance movements (1995, p. 19, pp. 222–3). ‘The nature of alterna-
tives … can be most usefully gleaned from the specific manifestations
of such alternatives in concrete local settings’ (ibid., p. 223). He sug-
gests that one of the two defining features of such resistance is ‘defense
of cultural difference, not as a static, but as a transformed and transfor-
mative force’ (ibid., p. 226), cultures which he locates not in nation-
states but in local communities. For him, the emphasis on the
specificity of localities is in part because of a rejection of the dominant
development paradigm as inevitably universalistic, and of such univer-
salisms as inevitably dominating. ‘To think about alternatives in
the manner of sustainable development, for instance, is to remain
within the same model that produced development and kept it in
place’ (ibid., p. 222).
In many ways, these two literatures – Green, and anti-development –
emphasising the (re)construction of local community-based social and
political forms, have much in common, albeit coming to the question
from differing backgrounds. Esteva and Prakash (1997) are a good
example of these two backgrounds coming together in the same place.
For reasons both to do with the failure of development, and to do with
the imperatives of ecology, they emphasise localism. For them, this
involves necessarily also emphasising not only a localism of action, but
also of thought. They take apart the slogan ‘Think Globally, Act
Locally’. This suggests that a form of global consciousness is necessary,
but it ‘rejects the illusion of engaging in global action’ (ibid., p. 278),
both because it is impractical, but also because it involves an ‘arro-
gance’, a ‘far-fetched and dangerous fantasy’ (ibid.). Global action will
necessarily be oppressive, managerialist, domineering, the slogan
implies. Esteva and Prakash associate such a view with what they term
‘alternative global thinkers’ (they name James Robertson and The
Other Economic Summit, David Korten, and Greenpeace, ibid.,

pp. 288–9, note 5). But they also suggest that global thinking is equally
dangerous, and that thought should also be local. They suggest firstly
that global thinking is impossible:
To fit the Earth conveniently into the modern mind, the latter has
shrunk it to a little blue bauble, a mere Christmas-tree ornament;
and invited modern men and women to forget how immense,
grand, unknown and mysterious it is’.
(Ibid., p. 278)
Global thinking is thus designated ‘God-like’. In practice, they suggest,

we ‘can only think wisely about what we know well’ (p. 279) and thus
advocate the ‘Wisdom of thinking little’, which they associate with
Gandhi, Illich, Kohr, Schumacher and in particular Wendell Berry.
They cite Berry’s arguments concerning food. Berry suggests that if we
start with this, there is no need to ‘think global’ to resist the forces
which produce food in an unsustainable and unjust manner. The
focus should be to build local alternatives to global food industries.
Such local alternatives would have a better capacity to be ecologically
sound and based on just treatment of workers, because the condi-
tions of production are visible to those consuming the food (ibid.,
pp. 279–81).
Kuehls (1996), Dalby (1998b) and Stewart (1997) all suggest that this
localism in Green politics is problematic. One older objection to such
images is that such small-scale Green communities would rather likely
be parochial, inward-looking, and perhaps even xenophobic, and
at least that there are no guarantees that they would not simply
export their ecologically problematic features on to other communi-
ties. Kuehls’, Dalby’s and Stewart’s objections are connected, but put
rather differently.
Dalby suggests, while agreeing with Green critiques of ‘global envi-
ronmental management’, that:
The political dilemma and the irony here is that the alternative to
global management efforts – that of political decentralization and
local control, which is often posited as the political alternative by
green theory – remains largely in thrall to the same limited political
imaginary of the domestic analogy, and avoids dealing with the hard
questions of coordination by wishing them away …
(1998b, p. 13)
The second part of this critique, concerning questions of coordination,

is relatively conventional. Critiques of localism within Green theory,
for example by Eckersley (1992) or Goodin (1992) are very similar. I
have discussed these already in Chapter 3 (and at more length in
Paterson, 1996c).
The earlier part of Dalby’s critique, however, is that Greens remain
committed to a sovereign model of politics, the ‘domestic analogy’.
This, although put in a different theoretical context, is the same form
of critique as made by Wapner, discussed earlier in this chapter. As I
stated there, it is a mistake to suggest that Green arguments for decen-
tralisation remain within a sovereign model of politics. Shifts in the
scale of political organisation are simultaneously shifts in forms of
political organisation.
Kuehls does recognise that Bookchin, whom he discusses as an exem-
plar of this Green localist position, is anti-state (it would be difficult to
avoid this conclusion). But somehow Kuehls implies that Bookchin
remains committed to the state as a model of political organisation, as
the site of politics:
Ophuls’s and Bookchin’s theories are easily placed onto O’Riordan’s

and Dobson’s matrix of ecopolitical thought due to their similar ori-
entation to state and sovereignty. Although one [Ophuls] endorses
the state as an appropriate place for ecopolitics and the other holds
the state to be the absolute negation of an appropriately ecological
politics, both reify the state as the locus of political activity – for
good or bad.
(Kuehls, 1996, p. 106)
This conclusion seems perverse to me. Bookchin is held to negate the

state but to be committed to it as the locus of political activity. His
anti-state position must therefore be an anti-political position, suggest-
ing that in his ‘utopia’ (for want of a better term) there would be no
politics. This seems a bizarre reading of Bookchin, who would be
entirely happy with the notion that politics occurs outside the realms
of the state, as Kuehls (and others discussed in this chapter) assert. A
model of politics, like Bookchin’s ‘municipal confederalism’, which
rejects the state, necessarily rejects sovereignty, and is therefore open
to possibilities for global coordination which Dalby and many others
imply is necessary.
The other part of Kuehls’ critique of green localism is that it fails to
appreciate ‘the difference of political space that exceeds the sovereign
territorial state model of political space’ (Kuehls, 1996, p. 106). By this,
Kuehls refers on the one hand to Haraway’s notion of the cyborg,

which engenders a society which has moved ‘from comfortable old
hierarchical domination to scary new networks … of domination’
(Haraway, 1991a, as cited in Kuehls, 1996, p. 108). On the other hand,
although clearly connected to the former, he refers to the obsolescence
of the ‘sovereign territorial state model’ in terms of economic globalisa-
tion (although he doesn’t use the phrase). Citing Harvey (1990), he dis-
cusses the capacity of global finance to switch flows of capital around
the world at speed as evidence here. ‘The old model of the body poli-
tics is inadequate in the face of the networks of global capital’ (Kuehls,
1996, p. 108). Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari, Kuehls refers to such
a global form of political space in terms of ‘nomadic trajectories and
worldwide machines’ (ibid., passim).
But such a characteristic surely takes the current trajectories of global
politics and implies that they are irresistible, irreversible. The point of
writers like Esteva (upon whom Kuehls draws extensively in his
account of governmentality) is precisely to suggest that to the extent
that globalisation is occurring, it should be challenged and countered.
The ‘worldwide machines’ should be resisted and dismantled. The
descriptions of contemporary global politics by Kuehls, Dalby, or in a
different language but with similar effect, by Wapner and Lipschutz,
are premised on the continued existence of a globalising capitalism, a
continued existence which Greens want to prevent. Discussion of
political forms need not therefore be premised on such global eco-
nomic connections.
Of course, global ecological flows would still exist in a world of
small-scale, self-reliant ecological communities. For most advocates of
such a world, so would global social and cultural flows. But this does
not invalidate a model of politics which starts with the local and looks
outwards, rather than one which starts with the fact of transnational
economic flows, as do Kuehls, Dalby, Wapner and Lipschutz, and sug-
gests that such flows will always exist as a constant within which polit-
ical actors will have to operate.
Ultimately, these critiques conflate two notions which should be
kept separate. Sovereignty is conflated with any concern for a form of
politics which is connected to place, that is, to communities one of
whose constitutive features is their situatedness in particular places.
Stewart makes this move most clearly (1997, p. 13), in discussing The
Ecologist (1993):
Once again the assumption is that political containers are appro-

priate as long as they are locally controlled, and democratic.
Sovereignty is a problem if it means illegitimate use of power … but

sovereignty for the people in a commons is ethical. Local communi-
ties ought to have the power to decide their fate, the problems are a
matter of external threats and violations of these rights. Once again
the principle of state sovereignty lurks in these ideas of commons
and locality. Political life once again is reduced to a matter of living
in unique local boxes.
(Stewart, 1997, p. 13)
The conflation here suggests that any argument for living in spatially
discrete places and communities must of necessity also involve an
argument that these ‘political containers’ or ‘local boxes’ must be sov-
ereign – they must regard themselves as having exclusive rights to
determine what goes on in that place. In my view, this is an implausi-
ble interpretation of most of the writers whom Kuehls, Dalby and
Stewart discuss. Localism need not be committed to a sovereign model
of politics even while it is committed to building communities which
have much more intense connections to particular places than do soci-
eties in modernity.
As Helleiner (1996) points out, such arguments perhaps miss
the meaning of the most popular of Green slogans, ‘Act Locally, Think
Globally’. Helleiner emphasises that the initial usage of that phrase by
Dubos10 was precisely to guard against parochial localism, by empha-
sising the way that local action is embedded in global modes of con-
sciousness and normative beliefs. In addition, as Esteva and Prakash
point out, it is precisely global proposals which are parochial:
Global proposals are necessarily parochial: they inevitably express

the specific vision and interests of a small group of people, even
when they are formulated in the interests of humanity.
(1997, p. 285; see also Shiva, 1993a)
As Esteva and Prakash emphasise, a rejection of global thinking does

not mean that resistance, and the communities that resistance con-
structs, are not thought of as connected. One objection to an emphasis
on local action is that such initiatives ‘seem too small to counteract the
“global forces”’ (1997, p. 281). They suggest that local resistance does
indeed need outside solidarity and allies. But they reject the idea that
this necessarily involves ‘thinking globally’:
In fact what is needed is exactly the opposite: people thinking and

acting locally, while forging solidarity with other local forces that
share this opposition to the ‘global thinking’ and ‘global forces’

threatening local spaces.
(Esteva and Prakash, 1997, p. 282)
They suggest that the magazine The Ecologist is a prime example of

such a political practice. While much of its work demonstrates and
supports ecological resistance around the world, it refuses a ‘God-like’
global viewpoint. ‘In no way do these forms of transnational sharing
transmogrify local people into globalists’ (Esteva and Prakash, 1997,
p. 288).
Where does this leave us regarding where I started this chapter, with
notions of ‘global environmental governance’? Certainly, Lipschutz
and Wapner share with Sachs, Esteva and others a rejection of a ‘global
management’ image of such governance. But they do not see such gov-
ernance as resistive of dominant social forces. The networks, move-
ments, which make up global civil society, and which practise
governance in that society, are separated in Lipschutz and Wapner’s
arguments from the practices they govern. Those practices (I assume
they are not explicit) are those of TNCs, governments and perhaps
consumers. As Samhat puts it, such an approach focuses on ‘civil soci-
ety networks that raise consciousness, mobilise social forces, monitor
behaviour, and expose transgressions’ (1997, p. 378). All of these roles
presume that it is someone other than the members of the networks
who is being governed. In the models of governance envisaged under
the localist visions of The Ecologist and others, there is no such separa-
tion. Political economy becomes again precisely that; it rejects the sep-
aration of polities from economies that is fundamental to capitalist
modernity. While Lipschutz and Wapner’s arguments represent per-
haps the best which International Relations has yet come up with
regarding thinking seriously about political responses to the ecological
crisis, a more radical vision is nevertheless needed. The notion of net-
works in global civil society is a useful way to think about how and
where action to promote sustainable societies might occur. But for the
practices of such networks to actually promote sustainability, their rad-
icalisation towards local and solidaristic resistance practices and con-
struction of alternative forms of political and social life, are necessary.
The fundamental point here in terms of this argument of this book
as a whole is that the question of governance, whether localist or
‘rhizomatic’, should be informed by a conception of the origins of global
environmental change. Like liberal institutionalists or realists, Kuehls
and others only tangentially address this question, perhaps eschewing
such notions of causality as overly modernist. Yet a set of assumptions

about such causes is a necessary part of evaluating these debates about
forms of politics appropriate to producing a sustainable society. I have
tried to show that global environmental change is driven by twin
dynamics of domination and accumulation, systemically produced by
global political structures. Such dynamics of modernity inevitably ‘tear
space away from place’. A rhizomatic ecopolitics is founded ultimately
on accepting such a dynamic, rather than resisting and transforming it.
While such networks may help to move societies away from the large-
scale processes and structures driving environmental destruction, their
effect can never be more than tactical. By contrast, a localist Green per-
spective is founded on an understanding of global environmental poli-
tics that broadly locates the origins of global environmental change in
the dynamics I have identified, and this is for me the most appropriate
political response to global environmental change.
Feminists make a separate, and perhaps more salient point, concern-
ing the development of local communities (for example, Mary Mellor,
1992). Noting that the arguments made by many Greens for localism
are based on some sort of naturalism (‘natural’ ecological boundaries
for bioregionalists, for instance) she argues forcefully that such a
politics needs to avoid such naturalisms, and to base arguments
on explicitly political principles. Otherwise, the possibilities for repro-
ducing patriarchy in small-scale communities, a frequent feature of
such ‘natural’ communities, cannot be prevented (1992, ch. 4, also
pp. 234 –8).
Mellor couches some of this critique in terms of balancing local
organisation with global forms of politics. In this context she seems
uncertain as to how to resolve this local–global dilemma, citing Green
decentralist arguments in response to traditional centralising socialist
tendencies, and the need for global forms of ‘administration’ when dis-
cussing Green localist arguments (compare, for example, her treatment
of it at pp. 113–15, 234, and 238). Her most representative position is
that ‘we can unite globally only if we break up the nation-state into
smaller self-managing communities. A true internationalism can be
built only from the bottom up’ (1992, p. 234).
But her more important point is that ‘we must be careful not to fall
victim to the “structural fallacy” – that is, assuming that if the struc-
ture is right (be it collectivised control of the means of production or
decentralised small-scale communities) the rest will fall into place’
(Mellor, 1992, p. 238). I read this as meaning two things. Firstly, it indi-
cates that we need to specify more closely the political basis on which
communities should be organised. Secondly it indicates that ultimately

there is no substitute for politics – even a ‘Green utopia’ will involve
continual struggle over rights, justice, distribution questions, what
forms of production are sustainable, and so on.
Mellor concentrates on the first implication. She suggests persua-
sively that responding to global environmental change requires a poli-
tics which starts from the provision of basic needs. This is also for her
what connects Green politics, socialism and feminism (1992, p. 239).
Taking basic needs as primary requires that we start from the reality of
women’s lives in patriarchal societies. This is because it is women’s
lives which produce most of the basic needs for all people. Men’s lives
are primarily organised around accumulation-based practices. Basic
needs are defined by her, drawing on Max-Neef (in Ekins, 1986, p. 49)
as ‘subsistence, protection, affection, understanding, participation,
leisure, creation, identity (or meaning) and freedom’ (Mellor, 1992,
p. 239). Green communities would therefore need to be based on the
primacy of the values of nurturing, care, and emotional labour,
through which such needs are met. At the same time, such communi-
ties need explicitly to reject the essentialisms by which such values are
assumed to be biologically female, an assumption which reproduced
women’s subordination. Recovering what Mellor calls the ‘WE’ world
(Women’s Experience) will entail continued struggles for women’s
‘control over their bodies both sexually and in terms of reproduction’
(p. 276), and for economic independence from men (pp. 276–7). Men
will have to abandon ‘the benefits and constraints of both patriarchy
and masculinity’, to live in the WE world (p. 277).
There are many questions concerning both the contours of such a
society and how we might get to it, which are beyond my current
capacities to answer. But such a set of basic principles concerning the
scale of human societies and the principles on which those societies
might be based, are consistent with the argument I have tried to make
throughout the book. Since global environmental change is produced
systematically by a globalising patriarchal capitalism, we need to work
toward societies which as systems do not necessarily generate such
degradation. They may produce some forms of environmental degrada-
tion but this would not be systemic by nature, nor global in scope. And
to avoid such consequences, societies must avoid making domination
and/or accumulation their basic principles, but rather be based on egal-
itarian, non-hierarchic politics, and on economics oriented towards
meeting basic needs for all.
Notes
1 Introduction: Understanding Global

1 For example, see Conca, Alberty and Dabelko (1995), Vogler (1995), Haas,
Keohane and Levy (1993), Bartlett, Kurian and Malik (1995), Elliott (1998),
Chatterjee and Finger (1994), Miller (1995), The Ecologist (1993). Choucri
(1993) achieves the same effect, as the foreword is written by Maurice
Strong, UNCED’s Secretary-General.
2 The formulation here is not intended to exclude the questions thrown up by
poststructuralist perspectives. Doran (1995) for example, argues that a critical
global environmental politics should be based on poststructuralism. For him,
the most pertinent questions are those of power/knowledge. I would argue that
my three questions can all be investigated through such a lens. But I would
want to make claims concerning the origins of global environmental change
central to a critical global environmental politics. Doran makes answers to
such questions a matter of rhetoric, not amenable to detailed explanation
(such a notion being overly modernist, I suspect). Thus while his normative
position is very close to my own, he has little time for, and few conceptual
tools for, an analysis of the origins of global environmental change.
3 For example Conca (1993), Dalby (1992), Doran (1995), Elliott (1998),
Kuehls (1996), Litfin (1994), Paterson (1995, 1996a), Runyan (1992), Saurin
(1994, 1996), Boardman (1997), Helleiner (1996), Hovden (1998), Laferriere
and Stoett (1999).
4 I develop this point further in Paterson (forthcoming a).
5 Saurin (1996, p. 85). I take issue with Saurin’s argument in one respect. He
suggests a classic Marxian focus on production relations. While I agree that
these are crucial, dynamics of consumption practices are also important, and
while it is clear that they are connected to production, I would argue they
are not simply epiphenomenal. For the case here, it is more that the direct
consumer is the ‘agent’ of environmental change than the direct producer
(Saurin, 1996, p. 87). I discuss questions of consumption in more detail in
Chapter 6.
2 Realism, Liberalism and the Origins of

Global Environmental Change
1 Also on effectiveness, see Keohane, Haas and Levy (1993), Bernauer (1995),
or Victor et al. (1998).
2 For others who use this threefold typology of power, interests, and ideas, see,
for example, Rowlands (1995), albeit in a slightly modified form, Vogler
(1992), or Hansenclever, Mayer and Rittberger (1996).
162
Notes 163
3 CERES stands for the Coalition for Environmentally Responsible Economies.

They were formerly known as the Valdez Principles. Other examples could be
given, such as the Forestry Stewardship Council, established by WWF to cer-
tify timber that is sustainably produced (Humphreys, 1996, pp. 149–51). In a
more conflictual manner, organisations like Multinationals Monitor and
even magazines such as Ethical Consumer, or campaigns like those against
McDonald’s or Nestlé, fulfil such governance functions. See Newell (forth-
coming 1999). This question is also discussed further in Chapter 7.
4 While in many ways the political dynamics of the ways environmentalists
have tried to advance an environmental security agenda which disrupts the
traditional focus of security in nationalist/statist and militarist terms is
highly interesting, and reveals much of the dynamics of using existing polit-
ical institutions to achieve Green goals, it is not the focus of this section. For
examples, see Deudney (1990); Mische (1989); Finger (1991); Dalby (1992,
1998b). For a useful overview of the debates, see Kakonen (1994), and for
selections of key texts, see Conca, Alberty and Dabelko (1995, pp. 239–77) or
O’Tuathail, Dalby and Routledge (1998, pp. 179–243).
5 Waltz writes that ‘The death rate among states is remarkably low. Few states
die; many firms do. Who is likely to be around 100 years from now – the
United States, the Soviet Union, France, Egypt, Thailand, and Uganda? Or
Ford, IBM, Shell, Unilever and Massey-Ferguson? I would bet on the States,
perhaps even on Uganda.’ (Waltz, 1979, p. 95)
6 In this schema, I refers to environmental impact, P to Population, A to
Affluence (sometimes C for Consumption is used), and T to Technology.
Prominent in debates over this in the 1970s was the one between Barry
Commoner and Paul Ehrlich over the relative importance of technology or
population. The typology provided by Choucri (1993a) cited earlier is clearly
a version of this threefold explanation of environmental change.
3 The ‘normal and mundane practices of modernity’:

Global Power Structures and the Environment
1 The phrase in the title here is taken from Saurin (1994).

2 Several parts of this chapter were previously included in my chapter ‘Green
Politics’ in Scott Burchill’s Theories of International Relations (1996; Paterson,
1996c). These include much of the section on Green political theory, the sec-
tion ‘Against development’, and the concluding section.
3 This discussion is perhaps rather arbitrarily centred on these three books. For
other discussions of Green political thought, see O’Riordan (1981), Hayward
(1994), Atkinson (1991) or Martell (1994).
4 This section will follow Eckersley’s Environmentalism and Political Theory
(1992), largely for reasons of simplicity, but also because her book still
represents the most developed application of ecocentric ideas to politics.
The references here will simply refer to page numbers from that book.
For other ecocentric works, see, for example, Birch and Cobb (1981) or Fox
(1990). Hayward (1994), for one, is sceptical that a full ecocentric position
is necessary for a radical ecological politics, and argues for an ecological
humanism.
164 Notes
05 The other positions which Eckersley identifies are resource conservation,

human welfare ecology, preservationism and animal liberation (1992, ch. 2).
06 The classic early critique was provided by researchers at the University of
Sussex (Cole et al., 1973). For many of the raw materials they predicted
would run out by 2000 there are in fact now greater reserves than there
were in 1972 (reserves being related to price – the higher the price, the
greater amounts are recoverable).
07 To see this at work in Green writings, see for example Bunyard and Morgan-
Grenville (1987); Porritt (1986); Spretnak and Capra (1985); Trainer (1985);
Henderson (1988); Goldsmith (1992). There is an interesting revival of
notions of limits in the 1990s, after the domination of notions of ‘ecologi-
cal modernization’ and ‘sustainable development’ in the 1980s and early
1990s. This can be seen in different ways in, for example, Douthwaite
(1992), The Ecologist (1993), Booth (1998) and the ‘ecological footprint’
analysis of Wackernagel and Rees (1996).
08 This concept was originally used in the World Conservation Strategy devel-
oped by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN,
1980), and popularised by the Brundtland Commission, or World
Commission on Environment and Development (WCED, 1987).
09 Peter Doran (1995) has also made a similar argument from a poststructural-
ist point of view within IR. For Doran, however, while there is this general
critical approach, there is perhaps an overriding interest in the knowledge
structures of global politics. Yet another starting-point broadly consistent
with the approach here would be the growing interest in IPE in the work of
Karl Polanyi. See, for example, Bernard (1997).
10 I do not of course intend this to imply a simple endorsement of Bull’s view.
It is intended only to illustrate that the states system is often regarded to
involve a number of social mechanisms regulating how states interact with
each other. The formulation of sovereignty as ‘produced formal indepen-
dence’ is intended to be consistent with an argument that sovereignty
should not be seen as a static ‘thing’, but rather a ‘bundle of rights’ pertain-
ing, in the modern era to states, but before that to God (via the Pope),
which have evolved over time (see e.g. Litfin, 1997; Weber, 1995; Conca,
1994; Bartelson, 1995). In this context sovereignty should not be seen as
something defining the (modern) states system, and its evolution is not
necessarily evidence of changes in the dynamics of that system. It is com-
mon to conflate sovereignty and the states system, as does for example
Conca (1994, e.g. at p. 703). Rather, sovereignty is an expression of how
state rulers have legitimised their rule, and its content has changed as the
means of legitimation have changed. The states system has therefore been
able to retain its fundamental features, as outlined here, irrespective of
changes in the context of sovereignty.
11 This is not of course inconsistent with the fact that many companies do
consider the ecological consequences of their actions. A more upbeat read-
ing of this relationship would emphasise that many firms have undergone
radical changes in their production methods to limit emissions, reduce
resource consumption, and so on. Such an interpretation often depends on
liberal assumptions of ‘consumer sovereignty’ – that firms are simply
responding to consumer demand for more ecologically benign products and
Notes 165
production processes. In this interpretation, there is (at least implicitly) an

unlimited potential for such change to occur. However, if assumptions
about consumer sovereignty are dropped (i.e. there is much more room for
manipulation of demand by firms), and, more importantly, if limits to the
potential for improvement in rates of resource use by firms exist, then lim-
its to the ‘greening of industry’ must also exist. At any rate, what is not in
dispute is that any such greening can only occur within a primary concern
for the ‘bottom line’ – what is at dispute is how much change is possible
within this constraint. For readings on the ‘greening of industry’, see, for
example, Welford and Starkey (1996), Schmidheiny (1992), Athanasiou
(1996, ch. 5), Karliner (1997).
12 This perspective would also emphasise that the external costs assumed by
neoclassical environmental economics, to be ‘naturally’ external, have in
practice been historically produced as external; firms have historically acted
to make sure that those costs were not included in their production costs.
13 This is to an extent simply an ecological version of worries many critical
theorists had concerning scientific-technological domination and its conse-
quences for democracy and human emancipation (Marcuse, 1964; Ellul,
1964; Habermas, 1968).
14 In the case of the last example, the classic case is that of the siting of haz-
ardous waste sites in the US, which has spawned the large environmental
justice movement (Bullard, 1990; Szasz, 1994).
15 In fact, Carter places theoretical primacy on the state as the stabiliser of all
these other power relations. This reflects his anarchism, and a concern to
counter the economism of many Marxists. He develops an anarchist theory of
history elsewhere (1989), focusing on the state as a generator of social
change, but perhaps risks simply inverting Marxist categories, producing a
politicist reductionism to replace the economic reductionism of many
Marxists. If that is the case, then the argument here is certainly that none of
these structures can be given ontological primacy. Perhaps interestingly, since
the argument I develop has much in common with those developed by writ-
ers who are often called ‘historical sociologists’, Carter’s argument is in many
ways strikingly similar to Tilly’s in Capital, Coercion and European States (1990).
16 For Green writers making arguments similar to this see, for example,
Bookchin (1982); Spretnak and Capra (1985); Porritt (1986). For feminist
writers, see Shiva (1988); Seager (1993); Plumwood (1993); or Mellor (1992).
And for Marxists or socialists, see Trainer (1985); Ryle (1988). There is an
artificiality in separating these writers into their separate boxes; many
regard themselves as falling into at least two of these categories.
17 I present here what seems to me the strongest version of the argument.
Some Greens do believe it is more fruitful to try to reconstruct the term
development, rather than to reject it. However, they would be equally criti-
cal of the forms of development criticised by writers mentioned in this sec-
tion. A debate about whether to reject or reconstruct notions such as
development can easily collapse into a simple terminological dispute which
is not particularly important. The important point here is that if develop-
ment is understood as necessarily involving quantitative growth of the sys-
tem, greater complexity of technological systems, and increasing economic
interconnections across the globe, then Greens are clearly opposed to it.
166 Notes
18 For a selection of writings advancing arguments like the one discussed here,
see Sachs (1993b, 1992b), Escobar (1995), Esteva and Prakash (1997), Esteva
(1987), The Ecologist (1993), Shiva (1988), Trainer (1989), Apffel-Marglin
and Marglin (1990). For other discussions, see Hayward (1994, pp. 14 –16)
or Kuehls (1996, pp. 81–5).
19 For a critique of Brundtland along these lines, see Visvanathan (1991) or
Kuehls (1996, pp. 81–5).
20 This is not necessarily inconsistent with an argument that economic
growth (at least under capitalism) necessarily increases inequality.
Inequality increases while the poor are bought off through quantitative
increases in their own consumption, produced by growth in the system
as a whole.
21 Like many other Greens, she suggests that social justice, in the form of at
least a considerably more egalitarian world than that which currently exists,
is an integral part of ecocentric ethics.
22 Examples of this would be Ophuls (1977) and Hardin (1974).
23 There is an important, although never clearly defined, difference between
self-sufficient and self-reliant. The former implies that there should be no
trade or other exchange of material resources between communities, while
self-reliant is a less strong injunction: merely that communities should be
primarily only dependent on their own resources, using exchange with
other communities where they cannot produce particular items themselves.
24 Bioregionalists argue that ecological societies should be organised with
natural environmental features such as watersheds forming the boundaries
between communities.
25 The notion of subsidiarity is often used in Green discourse. It is not,
however, used in the way that many governments use it – to protect their
rights against those of supranational organisations (the classic case being
the UK government in relation to the EU). In the Green version, it has
radical implications for decentralisation of power to the local level, with
power only transferred to higher levels if deemed necessary – local levels
deciding what is necessary.
26 See also Wall (1994).
27 I discuss some objections to the ‘ecoanarchist’, and ‘decentralist’ position in
Paterson (1996c, 1999a). In particular, Goodin (1992) suggests that some
forms of global, authoritative institutions are necessary under any Green
scenario. He suggests this on game-theoretic grounds. His primary rationale is
that any possible future which we can envisage will involve communities
across the globe in ecological interdependencies, and therefore with the need
to cooperate with each other. Goodin, however, makes a misleading move
when he concludes that this will necessarily require authority to be located at
global levels. His game-theoretic models could lead equally to the conclusion
that only mechanisms to facilitate communication would be necessary,
which is something rather different from authoritative institutions.
28 See also The Ecologist (1993) for extended discussions of similar arguments.
29 It will be clear from what follows that this is a usage of commons which
renders the term ‘global commons’, in widespread use in mainstream envi-
ronmental discussions, to refer to problems such as global warming or
ozone depletion, nonsensical.
Notes 167
30 This has a lot in common with the game-theoretic argument mentioned

above which often emphasises how in small-scale systems it is easier to gen-
erate cooperation than in large-scale systems. Ostrom (1990) develops this
argument explicitly with respect to commons regimes.
4 Space, Domination, Development: Sea Defences and

the Structuring of Environmental Decision-Making
01 For a more descriptive history of the construction of sea defences in the

Netherlands, drawn on by Schama, see Lambert (1971).
02 According to McPhee, this is for largely historical reasons, when the river
had to be protected during the war with the English in 1812. The Army
simply kept those responsibilities afterwards. Water is not the only aspect of
nature which is treated as an enemy. For just two richly detailed examples,
see Rodman’s (1993) account of the understanding of ‘invasion’ by exotic
plants in a number of cases in the US, or Lowenhaupt Tsing’s (1995)
account of the ‘killer bees’ moral panic in the US. In the latter, direct links
are made between the ‘invasion’ of the US by a new species of bee, and
racialised understandings of US identity. For Brazilian scientists, where the
bee ‘originated’, the bee was understood and celebrated as a multicultural
hybrid of African, European, and indigenous American strains of bee. US
scientists, by contrast, understood this hybridity in terms of danger, remi-
niscent of US notions of the ‘melting pot’, and tried to fix the identity of
the bees as African.
03 For more on managed retreat, see Pethick (1993). On some of the political
conflicts involved in putting it into practice, see The Guardian, 29
November 1994, or 4 August 1995; Hutchings (1994), or many of the sub-
missions to the House of Commons Agriculture Committee (1998a; 1998b).
04 Elvin and Ninghu’s (1995) discussion of historical changes in a river course
in China provides a healthy (if inadequate) corrective to the Eurocentrism
here. Although much of the evidence regarding early construction of sea
defences is impressionistic, their picture of the construction of such works
is impressively similar to the pattern in Europe. Sea walls appear to have
been built earlier in China, but groynes were first used (as far as one can tell
from their narrative) in the eighteenth century, much as in Europe.
05 This is also reflected in most contemporary policy discussions regarding sea
defences. See, for example, Turner, Bateman and Brooke (1992), who use
cost–benefit analysis to discuss a case in Aldeburgh, and focus primarily on
the number of properties to be affected. Cunningham (1992) provides the
only discussion of sea defences by somebody working within political stud-
ies (that I could find), and confirms the dominance of cost–benefit analysis
and financial considerations, in her case in relation to a technocratic model
of decision-making where engineers are held to dominate (she cites Parker
and Penning-Rowsell, 1980 as using such an assumption). Also see Viles and
Spencer (1995, pp. 289–311), Parker and Penning-Rowsell (1983). In an
entirely different context, Elvin and Ninghu (1995, p. 8) suggest that sea
defences in China also had more to do with protecting economic functions
than protecting lives, although in their case the economic functions to be
168 Notes
protected were agricultural (as in much of rural England or the Netherlands,

for example).
06 Groynes are the wooden structures built perpendicular to the coastline to
slow down the movement of shingle along the shoreline and therefore keep
it on particular beaches. The shingle on the beach is what protects the coast
from being inundated by the sea in high tides or storms. Without shingle
(and therefore groynes) sea walls are quickly eroded by the sea.
07 Sea defences are covered nationally in the UK under the Coast Protection Act
(1949), and the Land Drainage Act (1976). Under the latter, the Ministry of
Agriculture, Fisheries and Food pays a substantial portion of the costs of
replacing sea defences, but has to approve the scheme according to various
criteria. For a history and comparison of the two Acts and problems of com-
patibility between them (although this discussion does not cover the changes
in organisation in the early 1990s), see Trafford and Braybrooks (1983).
08 SGS is a large transnational company concerned with certification and
auditing the management systems of companies. SGS Forestry is its forestry
division.
09 See the minutes of relevant meetings of the Council’s two committees
involved, the Strategic and Economic Development sub-committee of the
Policy and Resources Committee, and the Environment Committee, con-
tained in Eastbourne Borough Council (1992; 1993; 1994a; 1994b; 1995a;
1995b; 1996).
10 Counsell also attributed the structural narrative underlying the Channel 4
News story to political factors. The story (April 1995) was shortly before that
year’s local elections, and prominent Liberal Democrat MP Matthew Taylor
was due to visit Eastbourne (where the Council was Liberal Democrat domi-
nated). Counsell suggested that this inhibited Channel 4 from being more
critical of the Council. Interview, 29 November 1996.
11 This interpretation is based on an interview with Peter Padgett, Senior
Engineer at Eastbourne Borough Council, 27 November 1996.
12 This publication has no date on it, but must have been produced in early
1994.
13 This is not to suggest that such reasons were contrived to mask the impor-
tance of tourism and aesthetics. The Council was open about tourism being
important (interview with Peter Padgett, 27 November 1996).
14 Ray Russell is an architect local to Eastbourne with a reputation as a ‘Green’
architect, who was involved in the campaign against the use of greenheart
in the project.
15 That Eastbourne does have such an image can be seen in the Lonely Planet
Guide to Britain, whose entry on Eastbourne describes it as ‘uninspiring
and depressing. … Most (visitors) seem to be elderly pensioners on package
holidays. Trying to solve the riddle of why they come can lend a brief, grue-
some, fascination’ (quoted in Coles, 1995, p. 24).
16 The importance of tourism can also be seen in the way that the Council
and the engineers planned the construction of the new groynes. Many of
the discussions in Council minutes discuss this question and are keen to
minimise disruption to tourism. For example, ‘works within “tourist sensi-
tive areas” would be mainly confined to the autumn/winter/spring period’
(Eastbourne Borough Council, 1993, p. 744).
Notes 169
17 Ray Russell, letter to Bert Jones (Eastbourne Borough Council Chief

Engineer), 3 March 1994, and press release, 28 February 1995.
18 Guyana is, perhaps ironically for this case study, a country which has by
and large escaped the worst of deforestation (Myers, 1994, p. 31). Its level of
forest cover in 1990 was still 85–90 per cent (Palo, 1994, p. 51), along with
Surinam and French Guyana the highest levels in Latin America. On the
beginnings of increased deforestation there, see Colchester (1994).
19 Peter Padgett (interview) also stated that when DTL was taken over and the
Council was trying to get guarantees from them that they would try to get
FSC certification for their greenheart operation, the Guyanan government
became involved, resisting the FSC on the grounds of ‘eco-colonialism’.
20 For general reviews of some of these factors see, for example, Thomas (1992,
pp. 245–54), or Mahur and Schneider (1994). The timber trade is not in
general regarded as a major direct cause of deforestation, but logging opera-
tions can have important secondary effects leading to deforestation (Barbier
et al., 1994).
21 This is, however, exactly the same as produced for the Selsey Bill to Beachy
Head Shoreline Management Plan, the next stretch of coastline to the west,
so there appears to have been no significant shift in meaning as the defini-
tion is translated from central to local government.
22 Other participants in the process in Eastbourne reflect such a notion of sus-
tainability. In Posford Duvivier’s brochures it has the same meaning, and
excludes consideration of the sustainability of the production of the materi-
als used in projects (Posford Duvivier, n.d. (a), n.d. (b), received in 1997). In
their ‘Environment’ brochure, there is a photograph entitled ‘Assessment
of forest management practices, Guyana’ (n.d. (b), p. 2), but no mention
in the text that this is part of their understanding of sustainability.
Similarly, the Environment Agency’s section on ‘Environmental issues’
in its Principles of Floodplain Protection, exclude such considerations
(Environment Agency, n.d.), as do Aitken and Howard in their materials on
Greenheart (n.d., received 1997) and the House of Commons Agriculture
Committee (Agriculture Committee, 1998a).
23 See for example editions of the Eastbourne Herald on 26 November 1994,
11 March 1995 or 15 November 1995, for examples of this representation.
24 Posford Duvivier and the Council did make many commitments and
claims concerning DTL’s commitments about the social effects of their
forestry practices, that they would take such considerations into account.
In particular, claims were made that at Mabura Hill, the site where
DTL had a concession to log greenheart, no indigenous people were liv-
ing. However, at the point at which the debate was scientised (as I
suggest was the focal point of the debate), such considerations disappear
from view.
25 An interview with councillors involved ( Janet Grist and Mrs M. Pooley,
Chair and Deputy Chair of the Environment Committee of the Council)
showed, in a contradictory way, both that they deferred to ‘their’ experts,
the Council’s officers and consulting engineers, in matters of scientific
expertise, rejecting FoE evidence in consequence, but could also speak quite
articulately on the matter of the evidence provided by the officers.
Interview, 19 February 1997.
170 Notes
5 Car Trouble
1 The local Conservative MP, Adrian Rogers, advocated starving the protestors,
depriving them of air and water, and using CS gas on them, according to one
of the protestors’ father, Addrian Hutson (‘Letters’, The Guardian,
8 May 1997, p. 18).
2 For more details on the construction of Swampy and the other protestors on
the A30 protest in the UK press, see Paterson (forthcoming b).
3 When I gave a paper on this topic at Carleton University in April 1999, it
was written up (favourably) in the ‘Wheels’ section of the Ottawa Citizen, as
part of a regular column entitled ‘Clearing the Air’ (23 April 1999, C4).
4 Other car manufacturers have also espoused the joys of unnecessary car-
driving in their ads. VW, for example, in early 1999, has billboard ads for the
Bora, which says ‘Distant Relatives Beware’, and then has a slogan under the
VW logo and the name of the car, ‘Any Excuse’.
5 The force of this advert may have been helped by similar nostalgic construc-
tions of The Professionals by Comic Strip Productions, who wrote two spoofs
of the series (and whose member, Peter Richardson, directed the ad, see
Baird, 1998, p. 141), one in the mid-1980s, called The Bullshitters, and with a
follow-up produced in the early 1990s. The latter focused on the death of a
TV detective, and three different sets of TV detectives fighting over which
era’s style (from the flamboyant, crushed velvet-wearing late 1960s/early
1970s, through all-action mid-1970s [The Professionals/Bullshitters], to laconic,
austere mid-1980s [Spender]) in which to go about investigating the murder.
Perhaps importantly in terms of making the discursive link, the actor in the
advert is also in the second of these two shows, although playing a different
character.
6 As Volti (1996, p. 663) points out, there is surprisingly little academic mater-
ial on the rise of the car, given its importance in twentieth-century society
throughout much of the world. Nevertheless, this account draws in particu-
lar on a number of general critical works which are worth mentioning at this
stage. Of particular importance are Sachs (1992a), Wolf (1996), Ross (1995),
Gorz, ‘The Social Ideology of the Motor Car’, in (1980), Flink (1975, 1988),
Rupert (1995), McShane (1994), Schwartz Cowan (1997), Freund and Martin
(1993, 1996).
7 Wernick (1991, pp. 67–70) suggests that from about 1980 onwards, the car
was displaced as the symbol of progress by the computer. Speed/acceleration
is still the predominant theme, however, which links both and enables the
shift from one to the other. For a fuller treatment of the relationship
between cars and growth, see Paterson (forthcoming a).
8 This episode is mentioned widely. The fullest treatments are in Gordon
(1991), Dunn (1981), and St Clair (1986). For others who discuss it, see Wolf
(1996, p. 84), Hamer (1987, p. 22), Wajcman (1991, p. 28), Freund and
Martin (1993, p. 135), UNCTC (1992, pp. 57–9), McShane (1994, p. 115). For
a fuller treatment of these four themes, see Paterson (forthcoming a).
9 Elton (1991) also focuses on the inequalities produced by car-centred trans-
port, with one of his two main characters having cerebral palsy, and there-
fore unable to drive and disabled by the car-centred system, and the other
having lost her legs when hit by a car, but then reliant on a car because of
Notes 171
the inadequacies of London’s public transport for those in wheelchairs. His

other theme is corrupt relations between government ministers and the
roads lobby.
10 The exception of course is the question of the suffrage, where the benefits
can be claimed for a much broader group of women.
11 Although it is always dubious to conflate women and children, children’s
independent mobility has also been reduced by the car, as parents increas-
ingly prevent children from going across towns and cities on their own
because of fears about their safety on the roads (Hillman et al., 1990, cited
in Tiles and Oberdiek, 1995, p. 135).
12 Although this is always problematic, I shall stick to a narrow definition of
‘environmental’ here. I have discussed above some of the aspects of
inequality produced by a car-dominated system, for example around class
and gender. The reorganisation of urban space that a car-based system
effects is of course a crucial form of environmental change in terms of peo-
ple’s direct experience of the space around them. The substantial number of
deaths and serious injuries caused by cars, should also in many ways be
considered an environmental problem. In the UK, for example, more peo-
ple have been killed on the roads since 1945 than were killed in the Second
World War on active service (Hamer, 1987, p. 2; for general figures on this
see Wolf, 1996, pp. 201– 4). Here, however, I deal only with aspects of the
‘environment’ involving pollution and resource consumption.
13 ‘Claimed to be’, since catalytic converters only work fully when engines are
warmed up, i.e. after four-to-five miles, but the significant majority of car
journeys are under two miles. Thus their effect on actual emissions is much
smaller. They have, however, led to a decrease in NOx and CO emissions,
although as the IEA points out, this will be offset in the early twenty-first
century by overall traffic growth, particularly of trucks (IEA, 1993, p. 31).
On the other hand, they also have their own problems. They decrease fuel
efficiency by a small amount and therefore marginally increase CO2 emis-
sions, and greatly increase nitrous oxide emissions (Wolf, 1996, pp. 174 –7).
They also produce small quantities of platinum and palladium, themselves
with known connection to health problems (ibid.).
14 Toad is also cited by McShane (1994, p. 144) as an important example of
cultural hostility to the car in the early twentieth century.
15 On opposition in the UK in this period, see Hamer (1987, chs 5 and 6). The
opposition centred on plans to build inner-city motorways in London, and
the expansion of the motorway programme in the early 1970s. Although in
smaller numbers than in the US, the opposition was also expressed in
books, see, for example, Aird (1972).
16 The large volume of US literature on this from the mid-1960s to the mid-
1970s is a testament to this. For a review, see Davies (1975) or Flink (1972,
ch. 7; 1988, ch. 20). The earliest was perhaps Lewis Mumford’s The Highway
and the City (1963). For a selection of others, see Leavitt (1970), Owen
(1972), Mowbray (1969), Schneider (1971), Buel (1972) or Flink (1975).
17 For example Smith (1997, p. 350, note 32) citing The Guardian,
1 March 1996.
18 Seel (1997). For other analyses of roads protests in Britain, see for example
McKay (1996), Smith (1997), Doherty (1997, 1999), Welsh and McLeish
172 Notes
(1996). The analyses by Seel and McKay in particular support the interpreta-
tion given here.
6 Fast Food, Consumer Culture and Ecology
1 For a general overview of the trial, see Vidal’s book on it (1997),

or the McLibel Support Campaign’s website, at http://www.McSpotlight.org.
For shorter accounts, see Rowell (1996, pp. 353–5) or Beder (1997,
pp. 68–9).
2 Throughout the trial, many of the claims made by McDonald’s witnesses and
lawyers centred on the question of whether they broke the law. For its repre-
sentatives, working within the law, were above criticism, or so they implied.
For the defendants, this was irrelevant; McDonald’s could be working legally
yet unethically. The law is designed to protect their interests anyway, and so
is not a good guide to ethical action. For analyses which focus on
McDonald’s employment practices, see Transnationals Information Centre
(1987) or Gabriel (1994).
3 Ritzer (1996, p. 37). See also Love’s history of the McDonald’s company
(1987). For a similar account of rationalisation of Burger King, see Reiter
(1996, especially ch. 6) and more generally on fast-food operations, see Ball
(1992, pp. 65–82).
4 Caputo (1998) certainly provides evidence that such cultural imperialism is
not absent from academic texts on the subject. Similarly to the characters in
Pulp Fiction, he shows, perhaps inadvertently, that McDonald’s is understood
by many Americans as a way of taming other countries through the repro-
duction of a certain predictable place to eat familiar to an American traveller.
He describes a journey to Canterbury in southern England in 1981, before
Canterbury had a McDonald’s, where on their arrival in the city he and his
family became progressively more frustrated at being able to find any food to
eat. When they did find some, it was unfamiliar to them, and they repeat-
edly had to ask for extras (bun, salad, ketchup) to make their English burger
and chips approximate something they recognised from McDonald’s. How
conscious he was of this when he wrote the story is not clear, but the
account is heavily imbued with a narrative of the superiority of American
culture, food, service, etc. This is, perhaps not coincidentally, connected
to comments on the congested state of British roads. See Caputo (1998,
pp. 40 –2).
5 There is always a good counter-example to such claims. As I finish this chap-
ter ( June 1999), McDonald’s has introduced the ‘Lamb McSpicy’ and
‘McChicken Korma Naan’, as if purpose-designed to give the proponents of
the hybridisation thesis tasty morsels to chew on.
6 On ecological economics, see for example Martinez-Alier and Schluepmann
(1990), or Daly (1992). Much of the argument connecting the economy to its
biophysical context draws on the use of the notion of entropy developed by
Georgescu-Roegen (see Guha and Martinez-Alier, 1997, ch. 9, for a discussion
of his work).
7 For others, see Twigg (1983, pp. 23– 4); Seager (1993, pp. 207–13); Fiddes
(1991, especially pp. 144 –62).
Notes 173
08 In addition, the intensive use of paper in packaging promotes (temperate)

deforestation.
09 Smart (1994, pp. 175–8) makes similar claims, that the globalisation of food
styles, producing what he terms the ‘gastro-tourist’, helps to conceal the
costs of the industrial food system, and the unequal distribution of food
across the world.
10 That chapter is instead devoted to a discussion of the driving forces (eco-
nomic, cultural and social) behind McDonaldisation, and to alternative
interpretations of contemporary social trends, discussing theorists of post-
industrial society (Daniel Bell), post-Fordism, and postmodernism (he men-
tions David Harvey and Frederic Jameson at greatest length).
7 Conclusion: Globalisation, Governance and Resistance
01 The main literature to which I refer here is Lipschutz with Mayer (1996),
the title of which is the subtitle to this section, Lipschutz (1997) and
Wapner (1996, 1997). In a slightly different theoretical context, drawing on
critical theoretic accounts of political community, especially by Linklater
(1990; 1992), Samhat (1997) develops similar arguments, using climate
change as one of his case-studies. For an account closer to that developed
here, focusing on debates about TNCs and globalisation, see Newell (forth-
coming 1999).
02 Lipschutz is, however, keen to emphasise that the functionalism here is not
that of the functionalists of the 1960s (Mitrany, Haas). The functionally
specific nature of emerging patterns of governance is not conceptualised as
an emerging pattern of political integration as in earlier models – it does
not lead to a transcendence of existing structures of government. States still
exist in Lipschutz’s model. Rather, functionally specific networks of gover-
nance for him are the consequence of innovation – the response of actors
to the inability of traditional models of government to respond to specific
problems, and the emergence of networks to learn how to respond more
effectively (Lipschutz, 1997, pp. 87–8).
03 Lipschutz erroneously suggests that ‘the political implications of such a
process have not been given much serious thought’ (1997, p. 86). Such an
impression may be correct in North America; it is far from true in Europe,
where the literature debating the implications of globalisation is enormous,
and growing daily. Much of the literature in this debate is concerned either
to show that such measures of integration do not add up to something war-
ranting the term ‘globalisation’, and/or that globalisation does not mean
that there is no alternative to neoliberalism. For a selection of such litera-
ture, see Hirst and Thompson (1996), Weiss (1997), Zysman (1996), Jones
(1995), Ruigrok and van Tulder (1995). For (in my view) more nuanced
accounts, see Palan and Abbott with Deans (1996), Kofman and Youngs
(1996), or Held et al. (1999).
04 This is not to say that globalisation cannot be measured in part using such
accounts of integration. But such measures will inevitably be heavily
debated, turning as they do on the interpretation of statistics, the meaning
of which will always be disputed. Conceptualising globalisation as capitalist
174 Notes
reconsolidation at global levels means, however, that accounts of globalisa-

tion need not rely on such statistical evidence.
05 This argument is given most fully in Saurin (1994). I give it more space than
I do here in Paterson (1999).
06 Pasha and Blaney (1998) offer a critique of Lipschutz and others which
starts from a similar premise to mine here, but ends up in a rather different
direction. They argue that rather than offering a democratising potential in
global politics, the actors making up global civil society as identified by
Lipschutz, Wapner and others are engaged in supporting, in an oligarchic
fashion, ongoing global concentrations of power. Much of their argument
derives from an alternative theoretical account of civil society drawn ulti-
mately from Marx (whereas Lipschutz’s conception is liberal). For me, Pasha
and Blaney underestimate the resistive potential of many of the diverse
movements which could be said to make up global civil society.
07 But see, for example, Rangan (1996) for an alternative interpretation of
such resistance. Rangan suggests that rather than opposing development
itself, such protestors are trying to promote a more inclusive, participatory
form of development.
08 Douglas (1997). See also Kuehls (1996, pp. 80 –9), Escobar (1995, p. 10). All
three writers draw heavily on Foucault for these accounts of power and dis-
course with respect to globalisation and/or development.
09 On how such resistance is simultaneously reconstructive in the context of
the roads protests, see Seel (1997).
10 Helleiner suggests (1996, pp. 63– 4) that it was Dubos (1981) who coined
this phrase. The phrase does, however, have an alternative lineage from the
mainstream environmentalism of the early 1970s. Situationist Raoul
Vaneigem used it in his The Revolution of Everyday Life (1983), originally
published in 1967 (in 1967 French edition, p. 185; see Marcus, 1990,
p. 239). While, as Marcus notes, the phrase is now a common bumper
sticker and ‘the person who bought it will never know’ the origins of the
words this is nevertheless an interesting context for the emergence of Green
politics. The concerns of Debord and other Situationists have many affini-
ties with those of Greens.
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Wolf, Winfried (1996) Car Mania: a Critical History of Transport, London: Pluto.
Wood, Dennis (1992) The Power of Maps, New York: Guilford Press.
Wood, Roy (1998) ‘Old Wine in New Bottles: Critical Limitations of the
McDonaldization Thesis – the Case of Hospitality Services’, in Mark Alfino,
John Caputo, and Robin Wynyard (eds) (1998) McDonaldization Revisited:
Critical Essays on Consumer Culture, Westport CN: Praeger, pp. 85–104.
Worster, Donald (1994) Nature’s Economy: a History of Ecological Ideas, 2nd
edition, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Wright, J.C. (1902) Bygone Eastbourne, London: Spottiswoode.
Wroe, (1996) ‘Invasion of the Monster Munch’, The Observer, 25 February, p. 24.
Wynne, Brian (1989) ‘The Toxic Waste Trade: International Regulatory Issues
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Wynyard, Robin (1998) ‘The Bunless Burger’, in Mark Alfino, John Caputo, and
Robin Wynyard (eds) (1998) McDonaldization Revisited: Critical Essays on
Consumer Culture, Westport CN: Praeger, pp. 159–74.
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Resources and the Environment, Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press.
Bibliography 195
Young, Oran R. (1994) International Governance: Protecting the Environment in a

Stateless Society, Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press.
Young, Oran R. (ed.) (1997) Global Governance: Drawing Insights from the
Environmental Experience, Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press.
Young, Oran R. (1997a) ‘Rights, Rules and Resources in World Affairs’, in Young,
Oran R. (ed.) Global Governance: Drawing Insights from the Environmental
Young, Oran R. (1997b) ‘Global Governance: Towards a Theory of Decentralized
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Insights from the Environmental Experience, Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press,
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Young, Oran and Gail Osherenko (eds) (1993) Polar Politics: Creating International
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pp. 157–84.
Index
accumulation, see economic growth state legitimacy and, 44

Adams, Carol, 130–4 Critical Mass, 115
anthropocentrism, 32, 25–7, 40 ,60
automobiles see cars Dalby, Simon, 22, 39, 155–8, 162, 163
decentralisation, 10, 36, 63, 65, 142,
Beck, Ulrich, 51, 80–1, 91 152
Berman, Marshall, 102–3, 105–6, ecoanarchism and, 62
114–16, 138 see also commons regimes, localism
Bookchin, Murray, 4, 44, 53, 62, deforestation, 77, 84–8
156, 165 debt and, 85–6
neoliberal approach to, 86–8
capital accumulation, see economic meat and, 119, 125, 133, 137
growth development, 54–8, 74–7, 151–2, 154
capitalism, 6, 10, 16, 29, 32, 40, 42, see also economic growth
45–50, 75–6, 91, 105, 114, 122, Dobson, Andrew, 36, 37–8, 61, 156
125, 147–9, 151, 157, 159, 161 domination, 5, 8, 39, 40, 52–3, 63,
cars, 6–7, 9, 95–117, 135 66–74, 142, 153, 157
advertising 95–9, 102, 107–8, 114–15 the state and, 44–5
as democratisers, 106–7 see also patriarchy, state-building
environmental impacts of, 110–11 ‘domination of nature’, 5, 8, 39, 44,
freedom and, 101, 104 53, 66–74
gender and, 107–9 meat and, 131–2, 134
identity and, 105–6, 117 nation–building and, 67–74
naturalisation of, 99–100 science and, 50–1
political economy of, 100–1
race, class and, 109–10 Eastbourne, 66–94
resistance to, 113–17 history of sea defences, 67, 71,
speed and, 101–6 74–7
Carter, Alan, 54–5, 62, 165 replacement of sea defences
climate change, 6, 12, 15, 28, 58, 60, controversy, 77–80, 82–3
77, 110–11, 177 Eckersley, Robyn, 35–7, 59–61, 156
commodification, 47, 49, 58, 75–6, on urgency of environmental crisis,
100, 151 59
enclosure of land and, 57 eco-authoritarianism, 3–4, 8, 59, 61
of labour, 46 ecocentrism, 35–7, 59–60
commons regimes, 57, 63–5, 154 Ecologist, The, 1, 24, 51, 61, 63–5, 76,
Conca, Ken, 2, 41, 24, 162, 163, 164 154, 157, 159, 163, 164, 166
constructivism, 13–14, 16 economic growth, 5, 7, 8, 26, 30–1,
consumer culture see consumption 36, 40–1, 43–4, 46–7, 56, 57, 66,
consumption, 6, 8, 26, 28, 32, 46, 55, 100–1, 112, 152, 166
62, 105, 126–9 130, 132–7, as systemic imperative, 44, 46–7,
147–8, 163, 164, 166 100–1
ecological critiques of, 128–9 see also development
196
Index 197
environmental security, 7, 19–23 Helleiner, Eric, 39, 74, 142, 148, 158,
and population growth, 29 162, 174
epistemic communities, 2, 14, 50 Homer-Dixon, Thomas, 4, 20–2,
Esteva, Gustavo, 153–6, 157–9, 166 17–19
expert systems, 51, 57–8, 85, 90–2, 94
externalities, 48, 52 identities, 7, 128
cars and, 101, 105–6, 112, 116–17
fast-food operations, 123–4, 135–7 ‘hybridisation’, 127
feminism, see under Adams, Mellor, national, 43, 68–9, 70, 167
Merchant, patriarchy, Shiva patriarchy and, 51
Fiddes, Nick, 125, 130, 132, 137, 172 relation to structures, 33, 42
Forestry Stewardship Council (FSC), see also consumption
78, 79, 87, 90, 169 individualism, 51–2, 58, 101
Friends of the Earth (FoE), 17, 78–81, see also identities
85, 87, 90–3, 142 inequalities, 48–9, 57
Freund, Peter, 99, 102, 107, 109, 110, cars and, 106–10
170 class, 109–10
gender, 53–4, 108–9
game theory, 3, 13–14, 15, 19, 25, international, 3, 7, 22, 33, 44, 84–8,
166, 167 132
gender, see patriarchy in meat consumption, 130–2
global civil society, 17, 141–5, 146, 159 international cooperation, 2, 9, 12,
‘global commons’, 23–4, 59, 166 14–15, 23, 25, 43, 50
global environmental change, origins realist scepticism concerning,
of, 3, 5–9, 23–9, 40, 54–8, 61, 62, 18–19, 25
162 interstate competition, 29, 40, 43–4
as ad hoc trends, 8, 11, 23, 26–9
Kuehls’ neglect of, 159–60 Keohane, Robert, 1, 8, 13–16, 17, 19,
Wapner’s neglect of, 43 24, 26, 30, 33, 162
see also tragedy of the commons knowledge structure, 50–1
global environmental governance, 9, Kuehls, Thom, 39, 40, 42, 155–8, 159,
141–5, 146, 148–9, 153, 159 162, 166, 174
global governance, 8, 16–17, 25, 29–30
globalisation, 9, 10, 61, 64, 84, 86, liberal institutionalism, 3–5, 7, 9,
120, 125–7, 144–9, 150, 152–3, 12–19, 23–34, 60, 143, 159
159, 173, 174 limits to growth, 36, 37–8, 40, 46–7,
McDonald’s and, 125–7 56, 61
Lipschutz on, 146 Lipschutz, Ronnie, 9, 17, 143–9, 153,
global warming, see climate change 157, 159, 173, 174
Gramscian IPE, 42, 150–1 Litfin, Karen, 23, 34, 45, 162, 164
green political theory, 35–40, 59 localism, 154–9
and International Relations, 7, 38–40 critiques of, 155–8
see also commons regimes, localism feminism and, 160–1
groynes, see sea defences
Guyana, 66, 77, 84–8, 89–90, 93, 169 managed realignment, 68, 71–3
Martin, George, 99, 102, 107, 109,
Haas, Peter, 1, 14–15, 24, 26, 33, 162 110, 170
Hardin, Garrett, 4, 23–6, 34, 53, 59, Marxism, vii, 39, 45, 48, 55, 128, 162,
61, 63, 166 165
198 Index
McDonald’s, 9, 118–40, 149, 163 realism, 3–5, 7, 11, 12, 18–34, 159
McDonaldisation, 123–9, 138–40 Reclaim the Streets, 115
McLibel, 9, 118–23, 149 reductionism, 50, 53, 91
McPhee, John, 69, 70, 76–7, 167 relative gains debate, 18–19
Meat, 6–7, 118–19, 130–4 regime theory, 6–8, 12–16, 23, 25,
resource intensity of, 133–4 30
sexual politics of, 130–2 resistance, 10, 40, 63, 65, 95, 112,
as symbol of modernity, 132–3 113–17, 120, 128–9, 138–40, 148,
Mellor, Mary, 4, 36, 53–4, 55, 141, 149–53
150, 154, 160–1, 165 Gramscian account of, 150
Merchant, Carolyn, 50, 52, 54, 71, Polanyi and, 150–1
131 resource consumption, 164
militarism, cars and, 110, 114, 171
cars and, 106–7 meat and, 133–4
the environment and, 55 see also consumption
‘environmental security’ and, risk, 50–1, 80–1
19–20 Ritzer, George, 123–8, 138–40
military competition and the
environment, 44, 55 Sachs, Wolfgang, 55–6, 58, 96, 107,
military metaphors of the 113, 154, 159, 166, 170
environment, 67–70, 72–3, 167 Saurin, Julian, 6–7, 30, 41, 84, 123,
Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries 162, 163, 174
and Food (MAFF), 74, 78, 89 Schama, Simon, 68–9, 71, 76, 167
Mississippi, 69, 70, 76–7 science, 2, 50–1, 88–94
Multinational Corporations, see political economy of, 92–4
Transnational Corporations see also expert systems
sea defences, 9, 66–94, 131
nation-building, see state-building Shiva, Vandana, 4, 58, 131, 145, 148,
Netherlands, The 68–9, 70–1, 76, 167, 150, 158, 165, 166
168 sovereignty, 43, 67, 70, 156–7
NGOs, environmental, 2, 17, 142, state-building, 40, 43, 67–74
144, 149 state system, 5, 29, 31, 40, 42–5,
see also Friends of the Earth 73–4, 142, 148
structure, usage of the term, 41–2
‘organised irresponsibility’, 51, 80–1 sustainability, 5, 38, 41, 45, 48, 61,
78–9, 84, 88–94, 120, 129, 140–3,
patriarchy, 8, 9, 16, 32, 40, 51–4, 55, 150, 152, 159
61, 98, 107–9, 112, 114, 130–2, sustainable development, 38, 55–6,
140, 160–1 154, 164
population growth, 21, 26–9, 32, 37, Swampy, 95
76, 163
profit-maximisation, 46, 47–8, 49, technological fix, 6, 38
86–7 technology, 46, 51, 55, 58
property, 24–5, 34, 48, 57, 64, 67, in car advertising, 97
75–6 military technology and economic
growth, 43
rationalisation, 41, 44, 52–3, 58, 94, modernity and, 102–4, 123–4
123 as origin of global environmental
see also McDonaldisation change, 8, 23, 27, 29, 32, 163
Index 199
patriarchy and, 108 UNCED, 1–2, 145, 147, 162

see also expert systems,
rationalisation vegetarianism, 133
Thomas, Caroline, 20, 148, 169 feminism and, 131
tragedy of the commons, 4, 8, 11,
Wapner, Paul, 2, 9, 17, 25, 142–3,
232–6, 29, 34, 53, 61
145–6, 156–7, 159, 173, 174
Transnational Corporations (TNCs),
17, 22, 116, 146–8, 163, Young, Oran, 4, 13–15, 17, 23–7,
168 29–30, 142

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Understanding Global

ENERGY EXPORTERS AND CLIMATE CHANGE POLITICS (with Peter Kassler)

First published in the United States of America 2000 by

GE170 .P38 2000

© Matthew Paterson 2000

Printed and bound in Great Britain by

1 Introduction: Understanding Global Environmental

2 Realism, Liberalism and the Origins of

3 The ‘normal and mundane practices of modernity’:

Green politics and International Relations 35

4 Space, Domination, Development: Sea Defences and

Cars and environmental change 110

6 Fast Food, Consumer Culture and Ecology 118

Introduction: McLibel 118

7 Conclusion: Globalisation, Governance and Resistance0 141

Global civil society and global environmental governance 141

During part of my life as a student, we had a new Vice-Chancellor.

the structural constraints facing agents should not be understood to

As usual, I owe many debts incurred in the production of this book.

it possible to make fairly heavy teaching commitments manageable.

What does it mean to understand global environmental politics (GEP)?

the production of environmental problems (why do they occur?)

Any understanding of GEP contains implicit or explicit answers to

Figure 1.1 Understanding of global environmental politics

The bulk of the book is then intended to help develop the

than simply to argue that (for example) states cannot effectively

under attack. There therefore exist practices of resistance to car culture,

produced by global environmental change), are not relevant questions

aspects of ease of organising the research, such a focus is consistent

insufficient attention to how such emerging practices of governance

The realist and liberal global environmental

game theory, the branch of rational choice theory devoted to situations

work on the Mediterranean Action Plan and on ozone depletion (1989;

also unstable. Partly this instability is because Keohane lumped

fully be characterised as one of interstate anarchy, towards a situation

particular is sceptical (in his concluding chapter in 1997b). I will return

Realism and environmental security

that security. As a result, the focus on relative gains makes achieving

It is in its realist variant, however (although the term realist is rarely

be an unlikely result of environmental changes, internal instability of

It is time to understand ‘the environment’ for what it is: the

While he does go on to suggest that wars could result from environ-

marginal areas, which produces both greater ecological destruction and

agendas make assumptions (usually implicit) concerning the origins of

The causes of global environmental change

The two clearest examples illustrating the assumptions of realist and

Tragedy of the commons

change as a problem of global commons is ubiquitous (for example,

Such a market failure occurs when property rights are ‘undefined or

one of the ‘realities’ of international relations. But liberals are rather

environmental change. In his International Governance (1994), the clos-

Population Use per capita of Environmental Social

Figure 2.1 Main variables and causal relationships

and preferences) are the most important in determining likely trajecto-

change in themselves. For Homer-Dixon, population is taken formally to

Towards a structural account of global

One of the effects of operating with these two assumptions concerning

much material to support such a claim. Young suggests, for example,

enmeshed in a ‘system that is linked by the imperative of economic

Hempel (1996) also provides an example of an argument which almost

Rather than attributing environmental destruction to the actions of

Hempel reviews the debate concerning underlying causes of environ-

and failure to have markets comes from a neoclassical perspective where