CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

BEYOND INDIVIDUAL RESPONSIBILITY:

ENVIRONMENTAL GOVERNANCE AND
THE AFFLUENZIC SOCIETY

ANDREW BRENNAN AND NORVA Y. S. LO

Abstract
Contemporary industrial society is characterized by a condition of
affluenza, in which the continuous consumption of material goods sits at
the centre of human life and aspirations. Through a set of positive
feedbacks, affluenza contributes to and is reinforced by a dysfunctional
and self-destructive economic and ecological system. One of the key
drivers in this system is the transnational corporation, an entity that wields
disproportionate economic and political power in relation to its
accountability. While much of the emphasis in policy discussions is on
how individuals can respond to the challenges posed by environmental
catastrophe and climate change, we argue that a new form of constitutional
corporatism is required – one that limits the freedoms of large corporations
to exercise political, social, economic and environmental influence, and
which will make them accountable again to people and governments. In
the absence of limits to the influence and actions of the major
corporations, the political and ecological future of the planet is bleak.

Affluenza
The problem of affluenza is best approached by thinking about it in
relation to the two global crises that characterized the year 2008: climate
change, and the major financial crisis. The difference in response to these
2 Chapter 22

two problems reveals a major problem in human psychology. The problem

of climate change met until recently with corporate and government
denial, confusion, and disorientation. Responses to scientific warnings
were widely held by scientists to be inadequate to the problems faced in a
world with rising sea levels, failing crops, water scarcity, drought,
intensifying storms and the other damaging effects of a changing climate.
Thanks to some extreme weather events (which may or may not be
associated with anthropogenic climate change) and to increasing attention
in the media, public opinion and beliefs on the issue have changed during
the last ten years. The idea of contracting industrial countries’ carbon
emissions, aiming for convergence, if not equity, across the globe in per
capita emissions, now appears to have achieved some credence in both the
mainline media and also in the mainstream social and political movements
of the rich industrial countries. Even semi-technical talk about carbon
taxes, emissions trading schemes and emissions caps has entered the
standard vocabulary of politics. Both of the candidates in the 2008 United
States’ presidential election seemed to agree that a reduction on carbon
emission levels was necessary. Under the Kyoto protocol, the base year for
several significant greenhouse gases is 1990, and targets for emissions
reductions are set to that year. Both candidates wanted to see a target for
emissions that would commit the United States to emitting at least 60 per
cent less of these gases in 2050 than in 1990. The European Union, which
– unlike the United States – has an agreed set of Kyoto targets, is already
committed to huge reductions in greenhouse gases. As a result, Europe in
2006 released slightly less greenhouse gas than in 1990, with the 15
European Union nations having reduced their emissions to 97.4 per cent of
the 1990 levels. Oil and gas rich Canada, by contrast, increased its
emissions of greenhouse gases by 25 per cent over the period 1990–2005,
the United States released 16 per cent more in the same period, while in
Australia (where rapid and extensive land-clearing also contributes to
increasing gas emissions) the increase was 22 per cent.
What do these figures tell us, in the context of international
discussions, increasing media coverage, and changing popular perception
of the problem of climate change? We conjecture that the formerly
widespread situation of denial that human beings were responsible for
climate change has now given way to one in which there is anxiety
without much action. At national, regional and global conferences, human-
induced climate change continues to figure as a major preoccupation, but
so far relatively little has been done to address the problem of carbon
emissions, and expenditure on mitigation has been relatively modest. This
contrasts sharply with the talk and action related to a second crisis that hit
 Beyond Individual Responsibility 3

the world in 2008. That crisis was more directly concerned with material
goods, pleasure and wealth, and – perhaps unsurprisingly – action was far
more immediate. This second crisis was the collapse of financial markets
around the world. It started with the failure of the sub-prime loans market,
which then triggered a cascade of credit freezes, market shocks, takeovers
and bankruptcies that not only led to the partial nationalization of
previously private companies and banks, but also to further use of the
language of catastrophe. Terms like “meltdown” and “Armageddon” were
used by journalists to capture the sense of panic associated with the
massive downward movements in stock markets. Government injections
of liquidity into national financial systems all over the world showed that
even in an era of intense globalization and unparalleled corporate power,
the nation state was alive and well, and capable of taking significant
economic, financial and political action. National governments took major
roles not only in internal political and economic matters, but also in ways
that affected the global economy. This should be a lesson for those
theorists who have been somewhat premature in declaring the death of the
nation-state (Hobsbawm 1990, Appadurai 1996). Another lesson, much
more practical, was also learned. Philosophical and political theory has
laid out conditions for a healthy and flourishing industrial society.
Thinkers have advocated the importance of many factors including
environmental sustainability, social justice, open and democratic decision-
making, appropriate social welfare arrangements and the importance of
education and training. But the financial crisis drew clear attention to the
importance to all advanced economies of a reliable and responsible
financial sector.
In striking contrast to the lacklustre response to climate change, the
funds voted to restore financial health and build up confidence in banks,
finance houses and companies around the world were enormous and
appeared with impressive rapidity. In the months following the 2008
crisis, the economies of the United, States and Europe paid $10.2 trillion
in order to bail out banks, prop up financial institutions and stimulate
recovery. This kind of expenditure puts a new perspective on climate
change and the costs of its amelioration. Late in 2009, the World Bank
issued a report indicating that the cost of protecting developing countries
from a two degree increase in average global temperature would be in the
region of $75 to $100 billion per year for the period 2010 to 2050. Before
the crash of 2008, such a sum would have seemed to large to be realistic as
a cost that should be born by the industrial world. By comparison with the
expenditure that shored up the world financial system, the sum now seems
modest: $100 billion, after all is only one per cent of $10 trillion. There is
4 Chapter 22

little evidence, so far, of even this amount of support being provided to

control and provide amelioration for climate change.

Positive Feedback
The difference in response to the two crises shows that at both global
and national levels there is an asymmetry in thought, sentiments and
action about the two challenges. The financial collapses led to co-
ordinated and urgent political action to try to save heavily indebted
financial systems, even in the face of criticism from voters concerned
about giving financial help to those who had been the agents of the
collapse. Headlines complained about rewarding bad behaviour and the
spotlight turned on the huge salary payments and share allocations
received by chief executives. Despite these doubts, the G7 finance
ministers came together to endorse huge spending that put real money into
collapsing systems.
By contrast, very little by way of real resources, or real amelioration
has been pumped into the declining and seriously stressed global
environment. This asymmetry requires some explanation. Many scientists,
conservationists and philosophers found it baffling that it was so hard to
get species loss, water scarcity, pollution, climate changes and other
environmental crises onto the public agenda in the first place. They have
wondered why there was such a successful degree of evasion, denial and
procrastination about these things. Can it be because we can see our
money suddenly lose value, while we do not in the same way see the slow
disappearance of species or experience a sudden reduction in
environmental resources? In the case of individual people, unfitness and
failing health creep up in cumulative ways that avoid triggering alarms.
Bankruptcy, or massive financial losses can – like a heart attack – happen
of a sudden and trigger just the panic and fear that was evident at the time
of the financial crisis.
There are other possible explanations too. One is that both the
ecological and the financial crises are products of a single system of
positive feedback loops. Positive feedback occurs in a system when part of
the output from a process is fed back into the same process, thus
amplifying its effects. For example, in some models of climate change,
increasing global temperatures are imagined as causing melting of the
permafrost in polar and alpine regions. If melting permafrost releases
carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere, then this may lead to
further global warming. According to this conjecture, there is a positive
 Beyond Individual Responsibility 5

feedback between increasing global temperature and release of methane

and carbon dioxide. Unless there are negative feedbacks elsewhere in a
system, positive feedback will have destabilizing and destructive effects
leading to ever more rapid and sometimes unpredictable change. Such
feedback damage is intensified by a feature of contemporary industrial
society which appears to have favoured the development of a peculiarly
single-minded kind of actor, one whose basic hedonistic features are
exploited and perverted so as to feed the continual operation and growth of
the system. These features are of course central features of human nature,
ones which are fed and exaggerated by the system under which many
people now live. Globalization has effectively strengthened this already
robust structure of positive feedback loops by rapidly expanding its
territory of persuasion. Common labels for such a system are
“consumerism” and “capitalism”. Both labels miss a crucial aspect of the
system, one better captured in the popular label affluenza (De Graaf, Wann
and Naylor 2005) and its popular definition as an dysfunctional condition
characterized by addiction, anxiety, depression and ennui (James 2007).
There is a line of sociological theory that argues the consumer society
actually feeds off individual vulnerability – this is an idea captured in
Stephen Pfohl’s idea that the shopping mall is a kind of “parasite café”
(Pfohl 1990). According to this theory, individual consumers are infected
or parasitized by the system of commodities within which they live their
lives, measure their status and seek ever more elusive satisfactions.
Affluenza refers to the involuntary nature of both people’s exposure to,
and damage by, the socio-economic structures in which they live: such
structures are like tram lines along which people’s lives run, and from
which they find it hard to break free. The condition is suffered to a high
degree by the affluent in their addictive pursuit of capital and consumer
goods, at the cost of destroying social welfare, the environment and
individual health.
Affluenza is a product of a system that is rich in available resources,
hence one able to thrive and multiply on the addictions cultivated in
consumers. At the same time, these addictions are focused by the system
on a range of pleasures and satisfactions that are relatively narrow in
comparison to the capacities of normal human beings. So narrow are these
satisfactions that things which used to be regarded as free, essential goods
for human well-being, such as communion with nature, the building of
trust with others, and self-realization through meeting challenges are now
marketed as “extraordinary experiences” to be obtained through
commercially guided adventures such as wilderness adventures, white-
water rafting and eco-tourism (see Arnould and Price 1993). Since such
6 Chapter 22

“extraordinary experiences” are only for a minority of consumers, the

result for most people is the atrophy of higher sensitivities, a loss of the
richness of lived experience and its replacement by repetitive satisfactions
based on material goods. This the one of the great harms of consumer
society, which has not only provided a host of gadgets and commodities
on which to focus inflated and deranged desires (about which more in a
moment), but has also managed to commodify (at least to some degree)
the experiences that were previously some of life’s freest and most
shareable goods. Alongside this are symptoms of addiction – typically a
failure to recognize the scale of the problems that are faced, optimism
about the ability to get out of deeper and deeper problems, borrowing from
the future, and an unrealistic and exaggerated sense of future profits and
satisfactions.

Figure 22-1. Loops in the system of reinforcing atrophy

What would the interlocking system of positive feedback be like if this

model of contemporary consumer society is correct? Figure 22-1 shows
several of the loops in the system of reinforcing atrophy. Corporations
with increasing wealth and power create via advertising hope and desire
for a better life and a belief in the products that are going to provide just
such improvement for the individual. The pursuit of these desires leads to
increasing consumption but at the same time also promotes discontent and
dissatisfaction. To get more and more goods and services, the individual
has to make more money, hence spend more time working. The ideal
 Beyond Individual Responsibility 7

“citizen” of the affluenzic society is someone for whom buying and

acquiring material goods and marketable services is an all-consuming
passion. Of course, as Hannah Arendt repeatedly emphasized, the pursuit
of private goods and the discussion of how best to obtain them is not a
proper concern of the public realm in a healthy society, hence our use of
quotes around the word “citizen” in the last sentence (see Arendt 1958,
1968). While we agree with Arendt’s analysis, our concern in this chapter
is to look at a further problem with the expansion of what she calls “the
private realm”, and its domination of contemporary life. When consuming
is all important, then things are ranked in terms of the private preferences
of individuals seeking satisfaction and public goods are diminished.
Additional reinforcement to extend working hours and earn more is the
natural desire to do the best for those near and dear to us, especially when
governments with reducing power provide fewer public goods such as
health care and education. Securing the best education for the children
from kindergarten to university, the best and safest prams, keeping pace
with friends’ and neighbours’ family expenditures – these are all lures that
encourage people in working longer hour to fund more purchases in a
world where more and more goods have become privatized. The
imperative to consume thus gives rise to reduced time for other activities,
including, paradoxically, reduced time for consumption itself.
The reduction in time available to individuals, as we shall see, in turn
reinforces the drive to consume more. If consumption were an ordinary
desire, focused on ordinary things, it would be unlikely to have the
paradoxical effect of driving people to devote more time to work, when
what they rationally want is more time for enjoying the other things they
desire. However consumption is not an ordinary desire, but a pathology: it
appears to be addictive, in just the way described in popular books about
affluenza (see James 2007), and also in the way pointed out years ago by
eco-psychologists. In work published in the 1990s, Chellis Glendinning
argued that the consumption of, and dependence on, technology is a
damaging addiction at the heart of industrial life (Glendinning 1995). The
pleasures of such consumption seem not to be intrinsically satisfying.
Consumer goods, as such, are always updateable, upgradeable, upscalable.
To update, upscale and upgrade is always possible – so long as you have
the money to do so. It is the fate of any consumer product to become
unsatisfying and therefore need replacement. Consumer goods are not
meant to last or provide long lasting satisfaction. On the contrary, the ideal
commodity is something that people initially lust after, and then quickly
become dissatisfied or bored with, and therefore soon seek a better
replacement.
8 Chapter 22

There is an interesting ontology surrounding the idea of the commodity

itself. What is it for something to be a commodity? We think there are two
conditions that are necessary for something to be successful commodity.
First, it must be intrinsically deficient, in that either it fails to satisfy a
function completely, or it is readily made obsolete. Typical examples of
incompleteness are found in cosmetics, for example, where a multiplicity
of skin care products are prescribed by manufacturers for a range of skin
problems and nourishing needs. Instead of applying a single product
nourishes and protects, consumers are expected to experiment with
different with different layers of serum, toner, moisturizer, and so forth.
Planned obsolescence has been the subject of critique since the 1930s and
theorists have distinguished various types of obsolescence. For example,
some mechanical parts have a designed lifetime, and then fail, requirement
replacement by a new part. In other cases, a fully functional piece of
machinery is still in good shape after years of use, but comes into
competition with newer and supposedly better models. In the computing
industry, the upgrading and replacement of software by newer versions
ensures that operating systems and programs that are adequate for many
purposes are no longer supported because they have become incompatible
with current industry standards.
There may be other forms of intrinsic deficiency apart from
incompleteness and manufactured obsolescence. These two alone provide
plenty of opportunity for the marketing of new products, the promoting of
competition among products many of which serve extremely similar
purposes and the development of brand diversity in the market place. In
addition to them, however, is what René Girard has called “mimetic
desire”. According to this theory, marketing shows us a “model” who is
associated with a commodity. A famous sporting personality advertises a
shaver, or a car, a beautiful and scantily clad woman stares lovingly at a
watch or a camera. The consumer wants to be like the model, or to be
associated in some way with the model, and the advertising dupes him (or
her) into thinking that buying the product will bring about that
assimilation. Alas, after purchasing the shaver, the watch, the camera or
the car, life is very much as before. The consumer does not become the
model, and the acquired object loses its shine. Never mind, though, for
there is always another object, associated with another model to whom the
consumer can aspire, and maybe this time purchasing the object will bring
about the desired change. But that, too, fails to happen. And so the cycle
continues, based on the illusion of false hope and belief.
This problematic condition is represented by another loop in our
complex diagram, one that links discontent, desire, hope and belief in an
 Beyond Individual Responsibility 9

endlessly frustrating cycle of addiction. It is consumers’ dissatisfactions

with what they currently have, and their desire for, and belief in, better
prospective products that maintain the flow of the market. It follows that
successful product marketing must not only create desires and beliefs but
must also create dissatisfaction by building its seeds into the very
consumer products themselves. Accordingly, we have an everlasting cycle
that runs from discontent through to desire, hope, belief, and then back to
discontent. For many people, the cycle of yo-yoing emotions from the low
ends of disappointment and boredom to the high ends of excitement,
hopefulness and optimism is a psychological equivalent to a physical
addiction resulted from drug abuse. In all forms of addiction, the highs are
short lived, and when they give way to the lows the addict is compelled to
seek the highs again to ease the pain, the void and emptiness inside.
Affluenza apparently promotes addiction. The highs it offers and the lows
it generates co-ordinate and feed into each other, so that the addict is
locked into the cycle.

A self-destructive system

The system of interlocking feedback loops we have described can

simultaneously explain the two meltdowns, ecological and financial. The
opposite of atrophy is hypertrophy, the excessive growth in the economy
and the overconsumption of material goods that leads to environmental
destruction. The entire project of contemporary industrial and economic
developments is one big scheme of borrowing with no security. We
borrow from the planet’s future reserves (the ecological goods and
services that would be of value to humans and members of other species
yet unborn) in order to satisfy our present desires for, and addictions to,
consumption and profit making. We justify these huge borrowings on the
basis of capital that we hope we have in reserve – a faith in human
resourcefulness and the technologies that we hope we are going to invent
for paying back all our debts. Furthermore, our borrowings from future
generations are security-free, meaning that if we are unable to pay back
the principal (let alone the interest) and if the natural environment goes
bankrupt as a result, then there is no immediate loss to us. In short, we are
simultaneously the borrower, the creditor, and the broker, all of whom will
be long gone by the time the ecological meltdown occurs and the
contemporary industrial bubble bursts. Exactly the same kind of
unsustainable borrowing and lending in finance sectors all over the world
has already produced very similar kinds of consequences: abuse of credit,
10 Chapter 22

hugely inflated prospective returns, reckless underestimation of

investment risk, and finally the bankruptcy of giants that have been
previously thought to be unsinkable. While the financial system has now
been bailed out, at least for the time being, the associated cycles of
environmental destruction may well produce breakdowns that we have
little chance of fixing.
Seen in this way the two crises are strikingly similar from a
psychological point of view: the sacrifice of the future in pursuit of short-
term prospective gains which will themselves fail to satisfy us, so that we
make further borrowings against the future to pursue yet further illusory
gains, and so on. Put concisely we seem to have described a system of
future abuse, both ecologically and economically. Note that there is a
certain cleverness to the way the future eating is carried out. People take
the ecological resources now that will be lost to future generations of
humans, and to future generations of plants and animals. In the economy,
people at the rich end of town speculate not with their own money but
with the mortgages, pension funds and savings of those at the poorer end
of town. In each case, the addictions involve gambling beyond the means
available, and some people gambling away wealth that belongs to other
people. Gambling itself is another highly addictive form of activity. When
different forms of addiction are pulled together and causally intertwined as
they are in the system of affluenza, they grow on, feed off, and justify each
other. When individuals in the system experience the lows of one
addiction, they can quickly fix it by resorting to the highs of another
addiction. There are no limits to the availability of the many forms of
highs – except that every one of them is transient, intrinsically
unsatisfying, and invariably brings the individual back to the lows of pain,
emptiness and frustration.
Richard Sennett has coined the phrase “corrosion of character” to
apply to the atrophying of values and ethics within organizations (Sennett
1998). The atrophying we have in mind, however, is widespread and
occurs throughout the societies we inhabit, not just inside organizations. It
involves a withering of sensitivity to everyday sources of pleasure that are
characteristically human. As sensitivity withers, we become less and less
able to appreciate the very joys that are central to a fully human life.
Indeed, the better the consumer, the narrower the kinds of desires that
person should have. Here is the real price of the consumer society. Only
the kinds of desires that can be satisfied by marketed goods and services
are encouraged as proper for cultivation by consumers. Once other, non-
market desires and sensitivities wither away, then sources of enjoyment
become increasingly limited. However, unlike the bodily changes due to
 Beyond Individual Responsibility 11

ageing and disease – ones that are often irreversible, ones that we have to
cope with as best we may – the changes induced by consumerism are
potentially reversible and able to be resisted. Without such resistance,
though, and in a world where commodities are a prime source of value, the
other sources of value become increasingly reduced and increasing wealth
is not accompanied by additional happiness (see chapter 4 of Frey and
Stutzer 2002). To an extent, then, our diagnosis supports E.F.
Schumacher’s gloomy view that “the result of the lopsided development of
the last three hundred years is that Western man has become rich in means
and poor in ends” (Schumacher 1977, 58).
We recognize that the model of interlocking systems that lead to the
two different forms of future abuse is highly oversimplified and may be
wrong. The diagnosis we have suggested for the problems of the money-
based consumer society is not intended to blame individuals for the
problem. Addiction is normally seen as a problem for the person addicted,
not something that is due to wider socio-economic realities. Individuals,
we claim, act according to what is offered in their surroundings. In a
society where most goods have to be purchased, and where experience
itself is increasingly commodified, advertising and the desire to conform
to wider social expectations themselves drive the behaviour of most
people. Asking individuals to change their behaviour may actually not be
very helpful when the problematic elements in the situation are due to
larger forces at work. We have so far suggested that among these forces
are structures within industrial societies that encourage certain kinds of
individual behaviour and which prey on all-too-human vulnerabilities.
There are other matters too that lie beyond individual action and control.

Constitutional Corporatism
At the end of David Guggenheim’s 2006 film, “An Inconvenient
Truth” Al Gore suggests a number of ways to help to save the earth. This
include changing to energy-saving light bulbs, walking more and driving
less, recycling more, keeping your vehicle tires fully inflated, washing
clothes in cool water, planting a tree, and so on. The focus is on actions
that individuals can take. These, though valuable, ignore the structural and
institutional facts of environmental destruction just discussed. Think about
replacing traditional incandescent light bulbs with energy efficient ones.
Australia has 0.32 per cent of the global population but produces nearly
1.5 per cent of global carbon emissions, a total of 560 million tonnes of
carbon dioxide equivalent per year. The country is the first in the world to
12 Chapter 22

force domestic consumers to purchase energy efficient light bulbs, which

will reduce carbon emissions by an estimated 2 to 4 million tonnes each
year – well under one per cent of emissions. Every little helps, but action
on light bulbs can a distraction from action on serious inefficiencies in
industrial and transport energy use, especially in a country which relies on
poor quality brown coal for much of its electricity production, and which
is also the largest exporter of coal in the world. In a set of institutional
structures that rely on corporations, governments and advertising to
control, manipulate and direct individual behaviour, each person has only
a limited part to play in a wider scheme of environmental disaster.
Another reason for switching perspective, away from a focus on
individuals is also that our analysis raises a problem that individuals
themselves cannot solve. In policy discussions, there is frequently appeal
to rationality – as if the issue were just one of making human beings
behave more like some ideally rational actor. Our model shows why
appeals to rationality, self-control, care for biodiversity, the triple bottom
line and the other solutions usually given for the environmental ills of the
age are all likely to fail. Our vision of the present global system is of a
beast with a tendency to addictive consumption of both human and
environmental resources, and self-perpetuating growth that leads
ultimately to catastrophe. If there is to be hope for the future, then we need
to find some ways of building limits into a system that threatens to run
beyond control.
While the major focus of philosophical and ethical theorizing has been
on individuals and their own moral responsibility, a minority of thinkers
have looked at other features that set the agenda for individual action.
Some philosophers have speculated about the religious and philosophical
worldviews that structure thought and behaviour, and there are well-
known contributions to environmental philosophy and politics by thinkers
who have tried to identify features in our world views – perhaps
anthropocentrism or patriarchy – which might explain our current
predicaments. Chellis Glendinning’s views on our addiction to technology
are another minority view, as is David Korten’s attack on the corporatized
world (Korten 2001). Korten’s claim is that the global economy has
become like a malignant cancer, advancing the colonization of the planet's
living spaces for the benefit of powerful corporations and financial
institutions. He is not opposed either to the corporations as such or to the
financial sector as a whole. Rather, he regards the global economic system
overall as having made what were once useful institutions into instruments
of a market tyranny that feeds on life in an insatiable quest for money.
While we have speculated earlier on the compulsive nature of status-
 Beyond Individual Responsibility 13

seeking, addiction to consumer pleasures and the dominance of affluenzic

modes of behaviour, Korten places blame on a deregulated global
economic and rogue financial systems that put making money, particularly
in terms of shareholder returns, well ahead of commitment to
sustainability, community building or any other large social interest.
Although we differ in emphasis from him, Korten’s analysis is
complementary to ours and adds depth to the suggestions already made.
Unlike Korten, however, we propose a solution that focuses on one
item in the system – namely the corporations themselves. Companies,
governments and non-government organizations are all important players
in the system, and each of them can be seen as having important roles in
amplifying or dampening some of the forces that propel the system to
destruction. We propose that one way of dampening some of the positive
feedback within the system we have described can be achieved by limiting
the power of the corporation, and by going back to earlier understanding
of corporate charters. An analogy may be helpful in this case. Think of
how democracy glimmered for a while in ancient Greece, and then was
tried at various times throughout Europe – but only as occasional
experiments. Although the democratic ideal was known, the practice itself
was lost for the most part for more than a millennium.
Something good – like democracy – is vulnerable to loss, can easily be
destroyed, and can be recovered only with difficulty. But the loss of
democracy was not permanent, and a recovery was made. From Magna
Carta in 1215 to the passing of the United States’ Constitution in 1787
there was a prolonged struggle to regain democracy, often involving a
series of negotiations and struggles with the tyrannical power of
monarchies. In the nearly six centuries of struggle, what was happening
was a gradual limiting of the power of tyrants and the result was that in
those democratic countries where a republic was not established an
accommodation was made, often in the form of a constitutional monarchy,
where the absolute power of the ruler was limited through government
limitations on that power.
Constitutional corporatism – an accommodation that may have to be
reached through prolonged struggle against corporate power and influence
– would likewise seek to use legal instruments, both nationally and
internationally, to limit the powers of corporations. In opening up this
possibility for exploration, policy theorists, political scientists and
philosophers would be recognizing that the fears expressed by earlier
writers and thinkers were well founded. There is dispute about whether
Abraham Lincoln himself wrote in one letter that “I see in the near future a
crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the
14 Chapter 22

safety of my country. … corporations have been enthroned and an era of

corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country
will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the
people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is
destroyed” (quoted in Shah 2002). But there is no doubt that Adam Smith
looked with concern at the possible monopoly and secrecy powers that
corporations might wield (Korten 2001). More recent writers have given
readable accounts of the rise of the corporation and the way in which
legislation abetted the abandonment of the originally restrictive – and
socially responsible – charters under which early corporations operated
(Hartmann 2004).
As economic entities of enormous scale and influence, corporations are
able to set their own agendas aimed at securing huge wealth for their chief
executives and senior management, good returns for their shareholders,
and control over their suppliers and potential competitors. It may seem to
be a simple idea to limit their role in amplifying the destructive features of
contemporary economic systems. But even though the idea seems simple,
its implementation is likely to be very difficult. Many corporations are
adept at avoiding tax, participate in the funding of political parties, bring
influence to bear in the awarding of contracts, and fail to give any lasting
benefits to the countries within which they operate. These all look like
behaviours that need to change if environmental destruction is to stop. The
direction in which change has to be made may seem clear, but the steps
towards the final goal are not yet determinate. If the corporation is the
problem, then we need to understand a great deal about it, and to study in
detail how problematic organizations manage to operate, survive and
expand. But it is not clear that there is yet agreement for undertaking
research into the complex “wicked problems” of corporations and their
power (Norton 2005, Brennan 2005). Governments are often unwilling to
interfere with corporations given not only the huge influence of the private
sector but also because of the dangers associated with changing to
something new. The 2008 financial crisis did not lead to action to change
the financial system in any fundamental way, but rather to shore it up and
keep it running. Controlling or limiting the power of the big corporations
raises the spectre of an intervention that may make things go worse rather
than better – and this fear is acute in countries with a horror of socialism
or communism (seen as the obvious alternatives to free market capitalism).
In many contemporary democracies, drastic change is not up for
discussion. Political power operates over relatively short periods of time,
and governments have to face re-election before long-term policies have a
chance to be evaluated. The pressure on governments is thus to favour
 Beyond Individual Responsibility 15

incremental and gradual change, change which is small rather than

dramatic. As far as environmental conservation is concerned, this looks
like bad news. It is likely to be business as usual as far as the voters’
consumption patterns are concerned, and there will be no incentive to
contemplate large-scale changes to the economic system or the massive
corporations that dominate it. By contrast, in countries where capitalism is
not the predominant mode of thought, there may be fertile soil for new
thinking, and opportunities for exploring a greater role for government in
developing new experiments in constitutional corporatism. Successful
experimentation in these countries may be our best hope for a sustainable
future.

Acknowledgments
An earlier version of this paper was delivered at a seminar at La Trobe
University, Australia, in May 2009, and the authors are grateful to
members of the audience for helpful comments and suggestions. They are
also grateful to Carolyn Brennan for suggestions that changed the structure
and argument of the paper in several places.
16 Chapter 22

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