CHAPTER-III

THE ‘ENVIRONMENT’ ISSUE: CONCEPTUAL ANALYSIS

The environment stands out as directly affecting the quality of our individual and
collective lives, as well as the political and economic choices we make. A contemporary
perspective on the environment confirms that multiple issues of population, natural
resources, enrgy and pollution are integrally related. Trends in one of these issues affect
each of the others. Policy decisions taken to address one issue have impacts on each of
the others. Two conceptual perspectives help us think about the significance of
environmental issues. These perspectives are not contending approaches; rather they
augment each other. First is the notion of collective goods. Collective goods help us
conceptualize how to achieve shared benefits that depend on overcoming conflicting
interests. How can individual contributors to air pollution or ocean pollution be made to
realize that their acts jeopardize the very collective good they are utilizing.

The second conceptual perspective is sustainability. This redefined concept is

sustainable development which provides the criterion to evaluate the soundness of
environmental policies from scientific and economic perspectives. How can
development proceed and the Earth and its resources be maintained? Employing the
criterion of sustainability forces individuals to think about policies to promote change
that neither damage the environment nor use up finite resources.

This human-nature relationship connects the extraordinarily diverse set of issues

encompassed by environmental politics. The increasing tendency to conceptualise these
problems as ‘environmental’ reflects the emergence of an environmental discourse,
which has given coherence and political significance to the notion of ‘the environment’.
Underpinning this discourse is a holistic perspective which, rather than examining
individual issues in isolation, focuses on the interdependence of environmental,
political, social and economic issues and the way in which they interact with each other.

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 Nevertheless, it was not until the emergence of ‘modern environmentalism’, the
wave of popular concern about environmental issues that swept across the developed
world during the 1960s, that the environmental discourse became widespread. The rise
of modern environmentalism highlights a second distinctive feature of the environment
as a political subject, unlike most other single issues. It comes replete with its own
ideology and political movement. First, it was driven by the idea of a global ecological
crisis that threatened the very existence of humanity. Secondly, modern
environmentalism was a political and activist mass movement which demanded a
radical transformation in the values and structures of society. It was influenced by the
broader ‘politics of affluence’ and the general upsurge in the form of new social
movements.1

There is now a sufficiently comprehensive and distinctive view of

environmental issues to talk in terms of a green political ideology, or ecologism. In
particular, green political thought offers two important insights. One is the belief that
we need to reconceptualise the relationship between humans and nature, which prompts
many important questions about which parts of nature, if any, have value, on what basis
that value may be attributed and whether such value is equal to that of humans. A
further critical insight is the conviction that the Earth’s resources are finite and that
there are ecological limits to growth which, unless we change our ways, will be
exceeded sooner rather than later. Radical greens draw the inference that we need a
fundamental reassessment of our value systems and a restructuring of existing political,
social and economic systems in order to achieve an ecologically sustainable society.

Andrew Dobson in his famous work 'Green Political Thought' defines ecologism
as a distinctive green political ideology encompassing those perspectives that hold a
sustainable society requires radical changes in our relationship with the non-human
natural world and our mode of economic, social and political life.2 Whatever position is
adopted, the advantage of a broad definition of ecologism is that it includes a wide
range of perspectives, all of which seek to generate a higher ecological consciousness

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that will turn the tables in favour of the environment. Obviously, the onus of persuasion
is on those who want to destroy rather than those who want to preserve.

The distinction between reformist and radical approaches provides a useful

shorthand means of categorizing two quite different ways of thinking about
environmental problems. Broadly speaking, reformist approaches adopt a managerial
approach to environmental problems, secure in the belief that they can be solved
without fundamental changes in present values or patterns of production and
consumption whereas radical positions argue that a sustainable and fulfilling existence
pre-supposes radical changes in our relationship with the non-human natural world, and
in our mode of social and political life. In short, reformist and radical approaches
represent qualitatively different interpretations of environmental problems.

Andrew Dobson also makes the bigger and bolder claim that 'ecologism' should
be regarded as a distinct political ideology. To cohere as an ideology, ecologism must
have three basic features: A common set of concepts and values providing a critique of
the existing social and political systems; A political prescription based on an alternative
outline of how a society ought to look; A programme for political action with strategies
for getting from the existing society to the alternative outline. Ecologism, according to
Dobson, passes the test on all three counts. First, it is characterized by two core ideas: a
rethinking of the ethical relationship between humans and the natural world and the
belief that there are natural limits to growth. Secondly, it offers an alternative political
prescription for a sustainable society. Thirdly, it identifies various strategies for
reaching the sustainable society. By contrast, reformist approaches do not add up to an
ideology. They offer no distinctive view of the human condition or the structure of
society. They are embedded in and ‘easily accommodated by other ideologies’ such as
conservatism, liberalism or socialism.3

In the arena of social and political theory, ecologism encapsulates the most
interesting, challenging and distinctive contributions made by environmental political
theorists. One further question underlying the discussion concerning the implications of

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ecologism for practical political arrangements; what impact has it had on the
development of green parties and the wider environmental movement, and what lessons
does it have for policymakers? Radical perspectives such as 'deep ecology' question the
existence of a clear divide between humans and nature and may even push humans off
their pedestal at the top of the ethical hierarchy. If ecologism is a separate ideology,
then the way the human-nature relationship is conceptualized arguably provides its most
distinctive and radical feature.

The most radical approaches adopt a holistic analysis of the human-nature

relationship : they include all ecocentric perspectives, notably deep ecology, and the
group of intermediate approaches known as ‘ethical holism’. Holism is concerned with
the different parts of nature interact with each other in ecosystems and the biosphere,
the interdependence and reciprocity that make up the ‘whole’ rather than atomistic
accounts of nature that focus on individual parts in isolation. A holistic view of nature
holds that everything is connected to everything else, that the whole is greater than the
sum of the parts, that processs takes primacy over the parts and that there is unity of
humans and non-human nature.4

Overall, holistic arguments have potentially far-reaching implications like

removing narrow human interests from centre-stage, attributing value to non-human
entitles and nurturing a new ecological consciousness. They represent a radical
enterprise that seeks to push back the boundaries of conventional political philosophy
by replacing anthropocentric moral reasoning with an ecocentric moral sensibility.
Whether or not we judge them successful in this task, they draw our attention to the
importance of developing an ecological consciousness that will encourage us to alter
our relationship with nature.

How serious is the problem of environmental degradation? We do not know

precisely, because any assessment will have to rest on uncertain estimates and a number
of disputable assumptions about future developments. 'One side in this debate is taken
up by ‘modernists’ who believe that continued improvement in scientific knowledge

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and in our technological competence will enhance our capability to protect the
environment.'5

The other side in the debate is taken by ‘ecoradicals’ who think that the
ecosystem has a limited carrying capacity. Such a limit ‘defines how large a species
population can become before it overuses the resources available in the ecosystem’.
Ecoradicals believe that human societies on earth are moving dangerously closer to the
limits of the planet’s carrying capacity; they also think that there are no simple
technological fixes that can take care of the problem. Therefore, many ‘ecoradicals’ call
for strict population control and dramatic changes in modern lifestyles towards a more
environment-friendly, less consumption-oriented and waste-producing way of life.6

It is the ecoradical position that challenges traditional IR approaches.

Ecoradicals call for dramatic changes in lifestyles, including very significant changes in
economic and political organization. They criticize arguments, such as the Brundtland
Report, which call for environment protection within a framework of sustainable
growth. Ecoradicals find that this is not at all sufficient. For some, real sustainability
means abandoning industrial mass production and reverting to some form of
deindustrialized society. Behind such radical ideas lies a world view profoundly
different from the ‘modernist-anthropocentric' view that is dominant in Western secular
thinking i.e., that ‘man is above nature’. The ecoradical world view is very different; it
puts equal value on humans and nature as part of one single biosystem. In this view,
man has no right to exploit nature. Humanas have a duty to live in harmony with nature
and to respect and sustain the overall ecological balance.7

Ecoradicals call for profound changes not only in economic but also in political
organization. They argue that the state is more of a problem than a solution for
environmental issues. The state is part of modern society, and modern society is the
cause of the environmental crisis. But there is no agreement among ecoradicals about
the role of the state or what to put in place of the state. The current debate, then,
concerns scope and depth of necessary reforms for facing the environmental challenge.

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But many also argue that the more extreme proposals from some ecoradicals go too far
and are unrealistic. In the space between these extremes there is a debate about what
would be the concrete contents of a ‘green state’8 and what a transition to more
sustainable development could look like, given the experience of the earlier great
transition from pre-modern to modern industrial society.

What would a truly radical environmental politics – an entirely new relationship

between human politics and the natural environment – look like? Alex Loftus, William
Ophuls and Mick Smith all tackle this question. They approach it from the perspective
of political philosophy, building their arguments in conversation with, and imparting
environmental perspectives to, established works within existing schools of thought.
Loftus works within the critical Marxist tradition,9 Smith the postmodern tradition.10
Ophuls is a little more eclectic, but seems to be coming for the most part from a
Straussian perspective.11

All three see the problems with contemporary environmentalism not as a failure
of policy, but as a deeper failing in the very structure of contemporary society. The
particular failures they see are different but overlapping. For Loftus, it is capitalism; for
Ophuls, rationalism; and for Smith, governmentality and bio-politics. Their solutions all
focus on a radically democratic politics, participatory rather than representative, in
which individuals can embrace a direct relationship with the natural and lived
environment. The solutions differ beyond this commonality, particularly in the scale of
polities. Smith envisions a world of only small polities and Loftus a world of
democratized cities, with Ophuls somewhere in between.12 All three scholars assume
that radical democratization will successfully address the environmental crisis, without
telling us how this relationship will work.

There is a widespread assumption among environmentalists that Marxism, as a

'productivist' ideology, has little to say, and little concern, for the fate of the
environment. Contrary to a common perception, much of it understandably based on the
diabolical environmental depredations carried out in the name of socialism by the

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former Soviet Union, Eastern Bloc and China. On the contrary, Marx and Engels had a
much more holistic view of humankind’s place in the environment.

Marx and Engels viewed humans not as something separate from the
environment, as capitalist ideological orthodoxy does, but dialectically interconnected.
The views of karl Marx on the relationship between nature and humanity is as: "Nature
is man’s inorganic body, that is to say, nature in so far as it is not the human body. Man
lives from nature, i.e. nature is his body and he must maintain a continuing dialogue
with it if he is not to die. To say man’s physical and mental life is linked to nature
simply means that nature is linked to itself, for man is a part of nature".13

A British socialist, A.G. Tansley, who became the first president of the British
Ecological Society, he coined the term 'ecosystem', a concept central to our modern
understanding of ecosystems ecology is now an academic research field of its own.
Tansley wanted to explain how his materialist conception of natural communities had
become fused with all physical and chemical factors such as soil and climate and so
came up with the term 'ecosystem' to speak effectively of this dynamic equilibrium and
essential unity. As he explained, "It is the systems so formed which, from the point of
view of the ecologist, are the basic units of nature on the face of the earth. Our natural
human prejudices force us to consider the organisms as the most important parts of
these systems, but certainly inorganic 'factors' are also parts, there could be no systems
without them and there is constant interchange of the most various kinds within each
system, not only between the organisms but between the organic and the inorganic.
These ecosystems, as we may call them, are the most various kinds and sizes. They
form one category of the multitudinous physical systems of the universe, which range
from the universe as a whole down to the atom. "14

And in an image of how Marxist dialectics can help us understand the constant
motion and interconnectivity of life processes, Tansley goes on to explain how "the
systems we isolate mentally are not only included as parts of larger ones, but they also
overlap, interlock, and interact with one another".15

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 Karl Marx was concerned with taking a long-term view of the earth over a
century before the UN discovered a problem. In the third volume of 'Capital', he
essentially defined sustainability, "From the standpoint of a higher socio-economic
formation, the private property of particular individuals in the earth will appear just as
absurd as the private property of one man in together men. Even an entire society, a
nation, or all simultaneously existing societies taken together, are not owners of the
earth, they are simply its possessors, its beneficiaries, and have to bequeath it in an
improved state to succeding generations."16

Ecologism has an ambivalent relationship with socialism. Many 'greens'

emphasize the sharp differences between the two doctrines, in particular the socialist
commitment to unconstrained economic growth and they point to the poor enviromental
record of countries in the former Soviet bloc. There are, of course, several distinct
traditions of socialism, which can be broadly divided into revolutionary doctrines, such
as Marxism and reformist approaches, such as social democracy. Most versions are
characterised by two related features that seem to set socialism apart from ecologism:
its anthropocentrism and its commitment to economic expansion.17

It is on this second point that ecosocialism has started to build a bridge between
socialism and ecologism. In particular, some writers in the ecosocialist tradition
concede that there may be ecological limits to growth and that unrestrained economic
expansion is unsustainable. At a strategic level, the 'industrialism or capitalism' debate
has little immediate significance because the global hegemony of capitalism, reinforced
by the collapse of the Soviet bloc, clearly makes it the main adversary for both greens
and socialists. Thus ecosocialism encourages 'greens' to focus their attention on
capitalism as the root cause of ecological problems.18

The emergence of ecosocialism has encouraged a process of mutual learning on

other issues too. Socialism presses greens to consider how change might be achieved
when confronted by the institutions and power relations associated with global

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capitalism, such as multinational corporations, international financial markets and trade
liberalisation.

The dialogue between these two ideologies has been particularly lively.
Ecologism has certainly been sharpened by the socialist critique of capitalism.
Socialism has also taken on board some of the lessons of ecologism; indeed, many
socialists would agree that 'A socialism for the Twenty First century must put at its
heart the ecological challenge and escape from the limits of productivist thinking'.19 Yet
critical differences remain on key issues, such as attitudes to human-nature relations and
in the institutional and cultural manifestations of each movement.

After tracking the emergence of 'green theory' in the form of 'ecologism' in the
social sciences and humanities in general, this chapter explores how green theory has
itself become more transnational and global, while critical IR theory has become
increasingly green. Green IR theory is shown to rest at the intersection of these two
developments.

Environmentalism in IR is concerned with the analytical relationship between

the natural environment and global politics. There are a number of different research
agendas within this perspective that reflect disagreement over how to characterize the
relationship between IR and the environment as well as how this relationship should be
studied. As a result, there are considerable empirical and methodological differences
among IR theorists who analyze environmental political issues on a global scale.
International or global environmental politics (GEP), green theory and green political
thought are often used as general terms to describe this approach. For this reason, the
term 'environmentalism' and the 'environment' issue in IR are used here as umbrella
term, meant to capture the entire body of alternative approaches within the perspective.

While environmental concerns had informed some prior IR scholarship, it was

not until the early 1990s that environmentalism, as an analytical approach in its own
right, began to emerge. Since then environmentalism has become an increasingly
prominent IR theoretical approach. Why it has increased in prominence is related to
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changes in the earth's natural environment because, as Peter Dauvergne argues, "The
history of research on global environmental politics is woven into the history of global
environmental change. The end of the Cold War and the global economic events that
unfolded thereafter are particularly important in this regard. Because the Cold War's end
was analytically unexpected, it encouraged the development of new IR theories, such as
constructivism and new variants of realism. It also encouraged a growing interest in
environmentalism thanks in part to the subsequent effects on the natural environment of
increased global economic exchange after the Cold War".20

Yet during the Cold War, the analytical attention of many IR scholars was on
the 'high' politics of security given the intense military and nuclear rivalry between the
two superpowers. Economic and environmental issues were relegated to what was
pejoratively labelled 'low' politics as these were seen as less consequential to state
survival. With the end of the Cold War, the environmental limitations of industrial
growth took on new urgency, and analytical interest in these topics increased
accordingly. Thus, the concept of sustainable development gained further traction and
has informed global cooperative efforts on the environment since the early 1990s.

Finally, post-Cold War globalization amplified damage that had already been
done to environment, particularly to the earth's ozone layer and with regard to global
warming. Prior industrial and consumer practices would have contributed to
deteriorating global environmental conditions regardless of globalization, but global
economic activity after 1990 compounded the problems.

These environmental developments attracted the attention of IR theorists,

particularly since many of the causes for environmental deterioration were the sort of
global political, economic and social forces that were already central to IR analysis. In
fact, a striking attribute of environmentalism's different research programms is the
extent to which they have been informed by or have borrowed from prior theoretical
perspectives, even as their subject matter appears to lie beyond the boundaries of
traditional analyses. Some strands clearly adhere to realist propositions, others utilize an

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'Neo-liberal institutionalism' perspective, and more recent IR environmental theorizing
employs elements of post-positivist approaches like social constructivism,
postmodernism and critical theory.

It should be made clear at the outset that there is no single environmentalist

approach to IR research. IR scholars who identify as environmentalists are a diverse
bunch, both in terms of the phenomena they study and the methodologies they employ
in their work. There are, however, some shared considerations and concerns that loosely
connect a growing number of researchers together under an environmentalist label.

Basically, then, environmentalist scholarship revolves around two big questions:

Why is the environmental condition so bad and what can be done about it? In seeking
answers, particular attention is then given to institutions, ideologies, practices, and
structural features of contemporary life that can be shown to produce environmental
degradation or, on the flip side, that offer hope for ways of life that are environmentally
benign or restorative.

A second feature of environmentalism in IR is that environmentalist scholarship

tends to be inherently, unabashedly normative.21 There is much debate among
environmentalists about what a better world would look like. And even among those
who agree on the contours of a preferred future there are few widely held and
straightforward prescriptions for action.

These two points of connection, what we might call a broadly held ecological
concern and a normative sensibility, are basic to the IR environmentalist tradition. A
first implication is that environmentalists have found analytic benefit in what Daniel
Deudney has described as 'bringing nature back in' to analyses of international affairs.
By urging that nature be made a focus of IR analysis, Deudney was suggesting, in part,
that the geographical and historical distribution of natural resources should not be
ignored when trying to understand particular IR phenomena.22

By the closing decades of the twentieth century, however, a growing body of

green IR theory had emerged that called into question some of the basic assumptions,
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units of study, frameworks of analysis and implicit values of the discipline of IR. Green
IR theory, drawing on more radical green discourses from outside the discipline of IR,
has helped to expose what might be called the ecological blindness of IR theory.
'Emerging primarily out of a critique of mainstream rationalist approaches (primarily
neo-or structural realism and neoliberalism, green IR theory has simultaneously drawn
upon, and critically revised and extended, neo-Marxist inspired International Political
Economy (IPE) and normative international relations theories of a cosmopolitan
orientation. This new wave of green scholarship has reinterpreted some of the central
concepts and discourses in IR and global politics and challenged traditional
understandings of security, development and international justice with new discourses
of ecological security, sustainable development (and reflexive modernization) and
environmental justice.'23

The green voices in the global climate change debate have extended this line of
critical inquiry to include neglected areas of environmental domination and
marginalization. These are domination of non-human nature, the neglect of the needs of
future generations and the skewed distribution of ecological risks among different social
classes, states and regions.

While the term 'green' is often used to refer simply to environmental concerns,
by the early 1990s green political theory had gained recognition as a new political
tradition of inquiry that has emerged as an ambitious challenger to the two political
traditions that have had the most decisive influence on twentieth century politics,
liberalism and socialism. Like liberalism and socialism, green political theory has a
normative branch (concerned with questions of justice, rights, democracy, citizenship,
the state and the environment) and a political economy branch (concerned with
understanding the relationship between the state, the economy and the environment).24

There has also been an increasing engagement by green political theorists with
some of the core debates within normative IR theory, particularly those concerned with
human rights, cosmopolitan democracy, transnational civil society and transnational

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public spheres. This scholarship has also fed into and helped to shape, a distinctly green
branch of normative IR theory concerned with global environmental justice.

Green IR theory shares many of the characteristics of the new IR theories

emerging out of the post-positivist approaches in post-Cold War era. They are generally
critical, problem-oriented, interdisciplinary and above all unapologetic about their
explicit normative orientation. In their quest to promote global environmental justice,
green IR scholars seek to articulate the concerns of many voices traditionally at the
margins of international relations, ranging from ENGOs, green consumers, ecological
scientists, ecological economists, green political parties, indigenous peoples and
broadly, all those seeking to transform patterns of global trade, aid and debt to promote
more sustainable patterns of development in the North and South.

In recent years the intellectual resources of mainstream liberal political theory

have been increasingly applied to environmental issues in IR. Today there is an
influential current of thought that conceives of cosmopolitan justice as a globalization
of liberal principles. As Anthony J. Langlois argues, "Much of what goes by the name
of contemporary cosmopolitanism is liberalism envisioned at the global level. The
tension here as one between political liberals, who "have a focus on the commonwealth,
the common good," and economic liberals whose focus on individual self-maximization
translates into a concern about market advantage. What is distinctive about political
liberalism, then, is a kind of commitment that economic liberals would presumably
struggle to recognize as liberal at all."25

Liberals support the idea of ecological interdependence. Problems can be solved

only by new and more far-reaching mechanism of cooperation at global level. Moreover
the liberals advocate increased scientific understanding of environmental problems that
will work to reduce state interests and to facilitate international cooperation. We are
already witnessing the emergence of a complex structure of international environmental
regimes with new sets of institutions and an array of new legal concepts. Indeed the
effectiveness of many environmental regimes does not derive solely from their

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individual strengths but from the extent to which they tie states into a continuing and
institutionalized process of negotiation.

Liberals view that the global environment problems and consequent process of
institutionalized enmeshment are deeding to a 'fading away of anarchy' at the inter-state
level and to a 'denationalizing' or ínternationalized' of the state. Basically, it is no longer
accurate to conceptualized states as having their traditional degree of autonomy because
of the network of formal and informal regimes in which they are becoming increasingly
involved and this process of enmeshment is likely to progress throughout the coming
century.26

Alternatively, scholars of Neo-liberal Institutionalism have long evinced an

interest in environmental issues. Robert O. Keohane argues, "There is no integrated
regime governing efforts to limit the extent of climate change. Instead, there is a regime
complex: a loosely-coupled set of specific regimes. We describe the regime complex for
climate change and seek to explain it, using interest-based, functional and
organizational arguments. This institutional form is likely to persist; efforts to build a
comprehensive regime are unlikely to succeed, but experiments abound with narrower
institutions focussed on particular aspects of the climate change problem. Building on
this analysis, we argue that a climate change regime complex, if it meets specified
criteria, has advantages over any politically feasible comprehensive regime.
Adaptability and flexibility are particularly important in a setting - such as climate
change policy, in which the most demanding international commitments are
interdependent yet governments vary widely in their interest and ability to implement
them. Yet in view of the serious political constraints, both domestic and international,
there is little reason for optimism that the climate regime complex that is emerging will
lead to reductions in emissions rapid enough to meet widely discussed goals, such as
stopping global warming at two degrees above pre-industrial levels. In such a regime
complex, the UNFCCC would continue to play an umbrella role and provide the
framework for international negotiations."27

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 Thus neo-liberal institutional scholars could rightfully argue that they were
among the first IR theorists to analytically examine the topic. Their focus is on the role
that IOs, regimes, interstate negotiations and institutional design play in inducing or
inhibiting cooperation on environmental affairs. It is also positivist in its
epistemological orientation, although unlike realist environmentalism it has a
programmatic, reformist orientation to the institutional arrangements in global politics,
and is concerned with how to reform the UN machinery to deliver more effective
environmental governance.28 The application of this approach to the study of the
environment remains an active if not dominant approach to the subject matter in the
mainstream IR literature.

In this context, neo-liberals, seek to create international regimes that optimize

the 'rational exploitation' of nature, both as a 'tap'(in providing energy and natural
resources) and as a 'sink' (via the waste assimilation services of the earth, oceans, and
atmosphere) in ways that expand the menu of state development options.29 However,
their rational choice framework implicitly sanctions an instrumental orientation towards
the non-human world and leaves little room for understanding or promoting alternative
'green identities' of particular states or non-state actors. Whereas neoliberals implicitly
accept capitalist markets and sovereign states as background 'givens' to international
regime negotiations, green IR theorists are concerned to expose the ways in which these
social structures serve to thwart the development of more effective environmental
initiatives. They also seek to give voice to new forms of counter-hegemonic resistance
to neoliberal economic globalization. Like all critical theorists, green IR theorists
emphasize the role of agents in transforming social structures, in this case, to promote
environmental justice and sustainability.

Although neo-liberals offer a more plausible account of the evolution of

international environmental cooperation, their framework of analysis is unable to
provide a satisfactory account of the normative dimension of environmental regimes.
Instead, neo-liberals typically reduce environmental regimes to the outcome of a set of
interest-based bargaining positions held by states, usually unpacked in terms of relative

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environmental vulnerability, relative capacity to adjust to environmental change and the
relative costs of adjustments. By contrast, green theorists point out that environmental
regimes embody moral norms that cannot be reduced to state interests or capacities.

Liberal institutionalist analysis of regime creation may still be the predominant

IR approach to global environmental change, but it is not the only one. Marxist and
Gramscian writers would reject this formulation. For them, the state system is part of
the problem rather than the solution and the proper object of study is the way in which
global capitalism reproduces relationships that are profoundly damaging to the
environment. The global spread of neo-liberal policies accelerates those features of
globalization-consumerism, the relocation of production to the South and the
thoughtless squandering of resources-driving the global ecological crisis. Proponents of
this view also highlight the incapacity of the state to do anything other than assist such
processes.30 For example, they would point to how free market concepts are now
routinely embedded in discussions of sustainable development and how the WTO rules
tend to subordinate attempts to provide environmental Genetically Modified (GM)
Crops. This argument is part of a broader debate among political theorists concerning
whether the state can ever be 'greened'.

Early realist environmentalism sought to explore the relationship between

resource scarcity and armed conflict. Environmental issues were examined as
extensions of geostrategic and balance-of-power politics. Hence environmental scarcity
was analyzed in relation to nation-state security and for its potential to be elevated to
the realm of high politics. Early realist environmentalism was also positivist in its
epistemological commitments, as many scholars sought to build on the early findings of
Thomas Homer-Dixon, which suggested a strong correlation between scarcity and
conflict.31

While research on scarcity and conflict has continued, scholarly attention has
increasingly turned to the development of an 'environmental security' approach that
attempts to broaden the concept of national security to include non-military threats.

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Daniel Deudney argues, "This approach has a great deal in common with the
geostrategic interests of classical realism, its proponents have tended to be explicitly
antirealist, while most self-avowed realists. The result is a relative absence of sustained
realist contributions to contemporary environmental debates and it remains a
comparatively underdeveloped strand of environmentalism".32

According to the neo-realist perspectives that long dominated academic

international relations, individual sovereign states operate in an anarchic system in
which their behaviour is almost exclusively shaped by considerations of power politics.
As no nation can fully trust the intentions of others, individual countries are unlikely to
co-operate to protect the global commons. If individual states cannot solve global
environmental problems by acting alone, there is little point in one state changing its
behaviour without the assurance that others will too.

Realists, therefore, treat the environment primarily as a security issue in so far as

problems of the global commons could be a source of conflict between states. But the
rising tide of international environmental co-operation poses a problem for the realist
view that in international politics, anarchy and conflict are the rule, order and co-
operation the exception. One explanation is that it may be rational for actors to co-
operate when they are assured that others will cooperate too. If individual states have
common interests, such as to prevent pollution, then the mutual recognition that each
state will have to interact repeatedly with others over the long term might build the trust
necessary to provide the assurance that co-operation will be forthcoming and that other
states will not free-ride.33 Realists may be also inaccurate in characterising all
international relations as concerned with power politics, for example, the claim that
states seek to maximise relative gains can be replaced with the reasonable assumption
that they pursue absolute gains. If each state is seeking to improve its absolute position
rather than always seeking to 'win' each play of the game (i.e. to accept an absolute gain
even if it is lower than the gains accruing to another country), then co-operation is more
likely because everyone can end up a winner. Such assumptions underpin institutionalist

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perspectives, which regard environmental co-operation as perfectly rational whenever
self-interested states judge that the benefits of co-operation will outweigh the costs.

Neo-realism, in particular, is criticized for 'normalizing' rather than challenging

the environmentally exploitative practices sponsored by states. From their Hobbesian
universe, neo-realists maintain that rivalrous state behaviour is inevitable owing to the
anarchic structure of the state system and that it would be foolhardy for states to pursue
environmental cooperation that did not confer absolute gains.34 Of course, neorealist
theorists do not personally endorse environmental exploitation but they remain
unreflective about the political purposes served by their theories and therefore provide
an apology for environmental exploitation and international non-cooperation. Green IR
theorists have also challenged the restrictive understanding of national security that has
dominated realist theories of all persuasions and argued instead for a
morecomprehensive framework for understanding security that takes human well-being
and ecosystem integrity, rather than states, as the fundamental moral and analytical
reference point.

Theoretical dimensions of GEP is associated with the green wing of

international political economy (IPE) but it also draws insights from critical theory. Its
focus is on the inter-relationship between the global economy,political institutions and
the natural environment. As such,it is concerned with how different actors and
processes within the capitalist world system encourage or depend on particular material
practices that lead to environmental degradation. Expending on earlier analyses of the
relationship between industrialization and the environment, these new environmental
political economy scholars examine the environmental effects of trade, corporate
activity, consumerism, foreign aid and globalization itself. None of these economic
activities exist in a vacuum, however, the political and ideological components that
naturalize such activity are also considered.

More generally, however, green political economy scholarship has defined itself
in opposition to rationalist regime theory. Indeed, the state-centric focus of rationalist

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regime theory is seen to deflect attention away from what is seen to be the primary
driver of global ecological degradation and environmental injustices, namely the
competitive dynamics of globalizing capitalism rather than the rivalry of states per se.
Capitalism operates at a global level in ways that leave highly uneven impacts on
different human communities and ecosystems, with some social classes and
communities leaving much bigger écological footprints' at the expense of others.35

Instead of allocating blame and responsibility to particular state, green IPE

theorists suggest that we should be monitoring and allocating responsibility to
transnational commodity chains,from investment, resource extraction, production
through to marketing, advertising, ,retaling, consumption and disposal. 'Indeed, one of
the innovations of green IPE is that it focuses as much on global consumption as global
investment and production. One prominent concern of green IR theorists is that
international economic regimes, such as the global trading regime, tend to overshadow
and undermine many international environmental regimes. This has sparked an ongoing
green debate about the desirability and possibility of greening the World Trade
Organization (WTO) versus setting up counter-institutions, such as a World
Environment Organization, to balance the disciplinary power of the WTO.'36

On the whole, green IPE initially formed the backbone of green IR theory.
However,it has been increasingly complemented by green normative inquiry,
particularly in the wake of the increasing transnationalization of green political theory,
which has injected a distinctly green voice into the more general debates about
international justice, cosmopolitan democracy and the future of the state.

Some of these green themes (highlighted by Critical Theory), particularly the

critique of the ascendancy of instrumental reason, were central to the first generation of
Frankfurt school critical theorists, who were the first Western Marxists to problematize
the domination of nature and explore its relationship to the domination of humans. 'The
exploration by T. Adorno and Max Horkheimer of the 'dialectic of Enlightnment'
pointed to the multiple costs to human and non-human nature that accompanied the

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increasing penetration of instrumental reason into human society and nature'.37 This
general theme has been further developed by the second generation of Frankfurt school
critical theorists, led by Jurgen Habermas. One of Habermas's enduring concerns has
been to protect the 'lifeworld'from the march of instrumental rationality by ensuring that
such rationality remains subservient to the practice of critical deliberation. Habermas's
ideal of communicative rationality has served as a major source of inspiration in the
development of green democratic theory and critical green explorations of the
relationship between risk, science, technology, and society. Whereas orthodox Marxist
theory had confined its critical attention to the relations of production, green theory has
expanded this critique to include the 'forces of production'(technology and management
systems) and the risks of modernization.38

There remains disagreement among green political theorists as to whether green

politics should be understood as antimodern, postmodern, or simply seeking more
'reflexive modernization', although the latter appears to have emerged as the most
favoured approach. Indeed, the second wave of green political theory of the mid-1990s
and beyond has been less preoccupied with critical philosophical reflection on
humanity's posture towards the non-human world and more concerned to explore the
conditions that might improve the 'reflexive learning capacity' of citizens, societies and
states in a world of mounting yet unevenly distributed ecological risks. The green
critique of industrialism and modernization has not eclipsed the politics of 'left versus
right', but it has certainly placed the traditional distributive struggles between labour
and capital and between rich world and poor world, in a broader and more challenging
context. Indeed, improving distributive justice while simultaneously curbing
ecologically destructive economic growth has emerged as the central political challenge
of green theory and practice, both domestically and internationally.

Robert Cox once distinguished what he calls 'problem-solving' theory from

'critical theory'. The former, which aims toward social and political reform, accepts
prevailing power relationships and institutions and implicitly uses these as a framework
for inquiry and action. As a theoretical enterprise, problem-solving theory works within

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current paradigms to address particular intellectual and practical challenges.39 Critical
theory, in contrast, questions existing power dynamics and seeks not only to reform but
to transform social and political conditions.

Critical environmental theory has come under attack in recent years. While
inter-disciplinary engagement has refined our ability to identify and make visible
impediments to creating a greener world, it has also isolated critical environmental
studies from the broader discipline and the actual world it is trying to transform. Indeed,
critical environmental theory has become almost a sub-discipline to itself. 'To many,
this has rendered critical theory not more but less politically engaged as it scales the
heights of thought only to be further distanced from practice'.40

Scholars working in the social constructivist tradition has argued that a state's
support for international environmental treaties is not determined by domestic interests, but
rather is constructed' by a 'world environmental regime' that informs and structures national
preferences. States internalize a form of peer pressure, and seek to 'enact' behaviours
expected of modern states, including the ratification environmental treaties. These scholars
argue that the states most deeply embedded in world society tend to ratify more
environmental treaties.41 Whatever the merits of this perspective, it cannot by itself explain
EU leadership, because a host of other advanced industrialized democracies such as Japan,
the US, Australia and Canada are embedded in world society to a similar degree as the EU,
but none of them has asserted a role of global environmental leader on par with the EU.

According to constructivists, choices governing legal implementation are

fundamentally guided by norms, beliefs and rules, which collectively provide the
foundation for individuals' interests.42 Hence, it is suggested that normative
commitments are not prefigured, but are frequently learned, internalized and embedded
through a process of transnational engagement. Accordingly, constructivists predict that
compliance happens where legalized norms are internalized, meaning that they 'resonate
and are considered legitimate locally' and therefore become institutionalized into
accepted practice.

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 In recent times, considerable importance has been attached to the normative
identities, preferences and beliefs of civil society. Thus, it is suggested that global civil
society plays a pivotal role in embedding, mobilizing and sanctioning normative
obligations at the international level. In this context, green IR theorists have explored
the role of not-state forms of 'deterritorialized' governance, In the form of transnational
initiatives of environmental NGOs (such as IUCN, Greenpeace etc). This new
scholarship has produced a more complex and layered picture of global environmental
governance that is able to recognize new, hybrid and network patterns of authority that
straddle state jurisdictional boundaries.

By the late 1990s and early 2000s, environmentalism in IR had emerged that
collectively may be referred to as 'green theory.' These approaches are intended to
address the shortcomings of realist and neo-liberals at institutionalist approaches. They
draw upon a variety of theoretical perspectives. Fundamental point is the shared belief
that environmental issues need to be understood on their own terms, not simply as an
appendix to existing IR theories and schools of thought. We have to view environmental
issues in the context of a larger structural phenomenon in mainstream analysis of global
politics.

Generally, 'environment' as an issue became prominent in IR in post-positivist

and post-Cold War era. When post-modernists seriously challenge the power oriented
theories of structuralism, especially the neo-realism, environmentalism and 'Green IR'
along with feminism and other normative theories became the critical issues in studies
and as the social movements in this era. Presently, whatsoever, this issue is in
mainstream or not, but emerged as very genuine and prominent part of academics.

141
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1. Michael Jacobs (1997), Greening the Millennium, Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 5-6.
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3. Ibid, pp. 101-107.
4. Robyn Eckersley (2010), Environmentalism and Political Theory : Towards an
Ecocentric Approach, NY : State University of New York Press, pp. 77-78.
5. B. Lomborg (2011), The Sceptical Environmentalist, Cambridge : CUP, pp. 82-83.
6. Robin Eckersley, op.cit., pp.101-105.
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8. Robyn Eckersley (2004), The Green State, Cambridge : MIT Press, p. 85.
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13. Quoted in John Bellamy Foster (2000), Marx's Ecology: Materialism and Nature, New
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15. Ibid.
16. Quoted in John Bellamy Foster (2009), The Ecological Revolution, NY : Monthly
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17. Tim Hayward (1995), Ecological Thought, Cambridge: Polity, pp. 101-110.
18. Ibid.
19. Marry Mellor (2006), Socialism, Cambridge: Polity, p. 104.
20. Peter Dauvergne (2005), Handbook of Global Environmental Politics, Cheltenham:
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21. Mathew Paterson (1996), ''Green Politics" in Scott Burchill and Andrew Linklater,
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22. Daniel Deudney (2011), Security and Conflict in New Environment Politics, Albany:
SUNY Press, pp. 114-124.
23. Ibid.
24. Mathew Paterson, op. cit., pp. 253-260.
25. Anthony J. Langlois (2014), Liberal Cosmopolitanism: A Review, Cambridge : MIT
Press, p. 114.
26. Ibid, pp.120-130.
27. Robert O. Keohane (2011), "The Regime Complex for Climate Change," Perspectives
On Politics, Vol. 9, No. 1, p. 75.
28. Peter Dauvergne, op. cit., pp. 120-125.
29. R. Bryant & S. Bailey (2012), Third World Political Ecology, London : Routledge, pp. 40-50.
30. Ibid.
31. Thomas Homer-Dixon (1999), Environment, Scarcity and Violence, Princeton: PUP, p. 105.
32. Daniel Deudney, op. cit., p. 97.
33. Robert O. Keohane (1989), International Institutions and State Power: Essays in IR
Theory, Boulder : Westview Press, pp. 20-27.
34. Michael Mason (2004), Environmental Democracy, London: Earthscan, pp. 50-60.
35. Peter Newell (2008), "The Political Economy of Global Environmental Governance,"
Review of International Studies, Vol. 34, No. 2, pp. 507-525.
36. Ibid.
37. T. Adorno & Max Horkheimer (1972), The Dialect of Enlightenment, New York:
Herder, pp. 50-60.
38. Mathew Paterson, op. cit., pp. 257-258.
39. Robert Cox (2002), The Political Economy of a Plural World: Critical Reflections on
Power, Morals and Civilization, London: Routledge, pp. 26-35.
40. A. Stainer (2011), After Post-Modernism, London: Routledge, pp. 50-55.
41. John Hannigan (1995), Environmental Sociology: A Social Constructionist Perspective,
London: Routledge, pp. 50-55.
42. Ibid.

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