The environmental state and the glass ceiling of transformation

Journal Paper by Daniel Hausknost
Environmental Politics
November 2019

Summary

What are the capacities of the state to facilitate a comprehensive sustainability transition? It is argued that structural barriers akin to an invisible ‘glass ceiling’ are inhibiting any such transformation. First, the structure of state imperatives does not allow for the addition of an independent sustainability imperative without major contradictions. Second, the imperative of legitimation is identified as a crucial component of the glass ceiling.

A distinction is introduced between ‘lifeworld’ and ‘system’ sustainability, showing that the environmental state has created an environmentally sustainable lifeworld, which continues to be predicated on a fundamentally unsustainable reproductive system. While this ‘decoupling’ of lifeworld from system sustainability has alleviated legitimation pressure from the state, a transition to systemic sustainability will require deep changes in the lifeworld. This constitutes a renewed challenge for state legitimation. Some speculations regarding possible futures of the environmental state conclude the article.

Introduction

In the first half century of its existence, the environmental state has pursued a rather selective agenda: in the domestic realm, many of its activities and measures have been impressively effective, resulting in the maintenance or improvement of environmental quality in several advanced industrialised countries – notably in Western Europe – despite enormous increases of economic activity. On the systemic level of the global biosphere, however, environmental states around the world have not reduced but massively increased the negative impact of their production and consumption activities (Steffen et al. 2015, Fritz and Koch 2016). That way, citizens of many environmental states have come to enjoy both, a relatively safe, healthy and clean environment as well as a lifestyle of high consumption, mobility and material abundance that proves to be spectacularly unsustainable. Thus, the state seems to have fulfilled a double function of protecting many of its citizens from direct environmental harm and of protecting their material standard of living (with numerous problems of environmental inequality and injustice still remaining); but it has failed so far to alleviate those environmental burdens that are dispersed in time and space and whose negative effects are mediated through several ecosystemic feedback loops (Raymond 2004). The prime example of that category of burden is the emission of greenhouse gases, which usually do not harm anyone at the source directly, but whose negative effects return to the emitter (and everyone else) with long delays in the form of potentially catastrophic climate change. Other (and systemically related) examples include the rapid loss of biodiversity, the acidification of the oceans and the derailment of the global cycles of nitrogen and phosphorus (Rockström et al. 2009).

However, it is these global and systemic environmental consequences of human activity that pose the greatest challenge to humanity today and that may become a matter of survival for our species (Hamilton 2010). It becomes ever more apparent that meeting this challenge will require substantial societal transformations that go deeper than the securing of environmental quality in wealthy societies or the relative decoupling of environmental impact from economic growth. Instead, a near complete elimination of fossil carbon from human activity and a massive reduction of overall environmental throughput are required. Consequently, states today are charged with the task of facilitating what is variously called a low-carbon transition, sustainability transition or socio-ecological transformation of society (Foxon 2011, Geels 2011, Haberl et al. 2011). The important question to ask is thus whether they have the capacity and ability to initiate and steer transformations of that kind or if their transformative capacities are structurally constrained to a certain type of environmental reform that is unlikely to bring about deep socio-ecological change. Put differently, what are the chances of the real existing environmental state to develop into a fully-fledged ‘sustainable’ or ‘green’ state that makes the socioecological transformation of society one of its core imperatives and that has the means, capacity and legitimacy to carry out this role? Does the green state logically follow from the environmental state in terms of a gradual intensification or expansion of its eco-political agenda, or is there a more fundamental barrier between the two, a categorical difference that rules out that sort of developmental logic? Finally, has the environmental state so far perhaps even helped to entrench and sustain a type of society that is fundamentally unsustainable? What, then, would be the prospect of a purposive socioecological transformation to occur?

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