Giorel Curran

Ecological modernisation and climate change in Australia

Ecological modernisation (EM), in both theory and practice, has much to commend it. Its main strengths lie in its promotion of win–win solutions to ecological risk and its utilisation of the very institutions of modernisation to foster industrial and ecological adaptation. EM is usefully conceptualised into its weak and strong forms, with distinctions also drawn between ecological modernisation and ecological restructuring, but even weak ecological modernisation may trigger ecological restructuring. Governments, particularly those governing energy-intensive economies, are increasingly caught up in this dynamic, to which they respond in different ways. A critical EM framework is used as a lens through which to consider Australias climate policy, focusing on the sectoral politics that shape its modernisation–restructuring dynamic.

Modernising climate policy in Australia: climate narratives and the undoing of a Prime Minister

Australia came very close to legislating an emissions trading scheme as part of a climate policy package in 2009. This climate policy was driven by a new Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, who had made addressing climate change his signature policy commitment both before and after the 2007 election that brought the Australian Labor Party to power. His climate policy was underpinned by two main interrelated narratives: ecological modernisation and climate justice. In this paper I consider the story of the Rudd governments climate policy experience through an ecological modernisation lens. In the end, it was the seeming disjuncture between political rhetoric and policy outcomes that brought the Rudd prime ministership down. The telling of the Rudd climate story through these narratives reveals some of the limitations of (mainstream) ecological modernisation as a major environmental management approach, as well as highlighting the vagaries of political leadership.

Changing Policy Mindsets: ESD and NCP Compared

National Competition Policy (NCP) and Ecologically Sustainable Development (ESD) share a number of common characteristics. They are both meta policies, broad in their scope and sweeping in their ambitions. Both emerged in the early 1990s and both depended on high levels of political commitment and co-ordination for their success. However, while NCP prospered, ESD stalled. This article examines the changing fortunes of the two policy initiatives by looking for differences in policy scope, monitoring, incentives and funding arrangements. These differences, attributable in part to levels of political and policy commitment, help to explain ESD s relatively weaker outcomes vis-a-vis NCP.

Reclaim the Streets

Reclaim the Streets (RTS) enacts the holy grail of anarchism: unity between means and ends. In reclaiming space from an avalanche of capitalist encroachments, it creates a ‘temporary autonomous zone’ (TAZ) and a politics of ‘pleasure’ that celebrates identity, creativity and autonomy. Its radical ecology roots influenced its original conception as an anti-roads and anti-car movement, but it was to become much more than this. One of its prime challenges was to the dominance of cars in urban streets. But the car culture it opposed was emblematic of how capitalism colonized public space by corralling its use and curtailing its function. RTS wanted to return the public spaces consumed by the car culture back to the communities it rightly belonged to. Employing Situationist ideas and strategies, it sought to ‘subvert the dominant paradigm’ by counterposing starkly oppositional activities — dancing and partying — to those of the sombre car and business culture. In this way it resisted and challenged a globalization that imposed a monocultural blueprint of the ‘good life’. In liberating public space from not only cars but also from the encroachment of a hollow materialism into all reaches of life, RTS represents a modern-day anti-enclosure movement.

Mainstreaming populist discourse: the race-conscious legacy of neo-populist parties in Australia and Italy

Curran examines the political legacy of far-right neo-populist parties in Australia and Italy. She argues that assessments of their ‘success’ need to extend beyond the electoral decline or organizational implosion of the parties themselves. An important measure of their impact is the influence they have exerted on mainstream political discourse and styles of communication. That they have been successful in having such an impact is well illustrated in the politically expedient adoption of race-conscious, anti-immigration and anti-asylum policies in Australia and Italy. Curran examines the influence of Pauline Hanson’s One Nation party and Umberto Bossi’s Lega Nord (Northern League) on the mainstreaming of populist discourse in these two countries. She focuses on some of the populist themes and styles embraced by the Australian political leader John Howard and his Italian counterpart Silvio Berlusconi, and she concludes that, regardless of their political fragility or outright demise, these far-right neo-populist parties have been successful in injecting populist themes and prejudices into the mainstream political discourse in their respective countries.

The Greening of the Grey: National Competition Policy and the Environment

Concern for environmental degradation is now widespread, and has penetrated key policy institutions such as the National Competition Council (NCC) - the body overseeing National Competition Policy. While the NCCs primary focus is on promoting competition, it acknowledges the importance of environmental considerations. Such a body thus represents the contemporary Ecological Modernsiation approach to environmental policy-making. Ecological Modernisation posits that there can be a reconciliation and synthesis between economic and ecological goals. This paper investigates this claim by exploring the relationship between competition and the environment in the three areas of electricity, regulatory review and rural water.

25 years of Ecologically Sustainable Development in Australia: paradigm shift or business as usual?

The term sustainable development (SD) emerged officially on the world stage in 1987 with the release of the World Commission on Environment and Development’s Report – Our Common Future – authored by committee chair Gro Harlem Brundtland (WCED 1987). The report provided one of the first official statements on SD, identified some of its core goals and principles and urged the world to respond. The WCED definition of SD is still widely used: SD is development that ‘meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs’ (WCED 1987, p. 263). Arguing that the world could no longer ignore the impacts of unsustainability on both ecology and society, it sought to embed the notion of SD as a permanent feature in global conversations about economic futures. Global endorsement by many governments and political leaders across the world soon followed, including in Australia. This endorsement responded to the World Commission’s identification of political commitment as critical to the SD enterprise; indeed, as the report observed, ‘in the final analysis, sustainable development must rest on political will’, since the ‘bodies whose policy actions degrade the environment’ need to be made ‘responsible ... to prevent that degradation’ (WCED 1987, p. 263). As a meta-policy SD provided the overarching normative and political architecture of sustainability; it was up to the different governments to action it. Sustainable development, or its abbreviation ‘sustainability’, is now one of today’s major buzzwords. It is as familiar a part of the vernacular in Australia today as it is in a host of other countries across the globe. In Australia, the notion of sustainability was introduced in earnest 25 years ago through the prism of ecologically sustainable development (ESD). ESD represented a significant development in the Australian environmental management story. As a meta-policy, ESD was more than a suite of policy proposals designed to address specific environmental issues; importantly, it also represented a new way of thinking about, and a new decision-making approach to, the particularity of the Australian environmental challenge. The addition of the ‘E’ – ‘ecologically’ sustainable development – into Australia’s version of SD, also indicated a determination to tighten the term’s generality by giving it a stronger environmental focus. As a new policy ‘mindset’ ESD sought to usher in broad ranging changes to Australia’s institutional and decision-making culture – considered critical to embedding the changes necessary to achieving SD (see Curran & Hollander 2002). In response to then Prime Minister Hawke’s discussion paper ‘Our Country, Our Future’ (Hawke 1989), a collaborative forum made up of a diverse range of stakeholders was established in 1989 Australasian Journal of Environmental Management, 2015 Vol. 22, No. 1, 2–6, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14486563.2014.999728

Political modernisation for ecologically sustainable development in Australia

This article considers Australias ecologically sustainable development (ESD) trajectory through the prism of ecological modernisation (EM). As a ‘meta policy’ ESD offered the important animating principles and wide-ranging objectives of environmental reform, with the operational specifics provided by EM theory and practice. EM proposes two key interrelated strategies for achieving sustainable development: the modernisation of production and its practices and the modernisation of the political sector and its institutions. This article focuses on the latter, particularly on the political commitment to ESD at the political elite level. In considering key moments in Australias political modernisation story, the article finds that, despite important developments and innovations, the ESD and EM experiment in Australia has had limited success in significantly and permanently shifting the government business relations of sustainability in ways that would respect the spirit and goals of ESD. This can in part be explained by the limited capacity of a reform process such as EM to shift the political dynamics of ESDs environment–development relationship.

Murray Bookchin and the domination of nature

Bookchins social ecology explores the narrative of domination and hierarchy. He argues that todays environmental crisis reflects a link between the human domination of nature and the domination of human by human. Hierarchy, as the pivot of such domination, is viewed as a psychology which permeates and corrodes not only social life (as reflected in class, gender, ethnic and other relations), but nature as well. Bookchin, seeking to replace hierarchy with cooperation by devolving power and autonomy to the individual in community, produces an eco‐anarchism. Bookchin argues for the interpenetration of the human and the natural, seeing humans as ‘nature rendered self‐conscious’. Since evolution is viewed as a dialectic privileging participation, differentiation and spontaneity, community becomes both the means and ends of an ecological society. The critique in this paper explores the autonomy‐community tension in Bookchin as well as the broad political implications of Bookchins framework of social change.

Is renewable energy still green? Shaping Australia’s renewable energy enterprise in an age of ecological modernisation

ABSTRACT Renewable energy (RE) illustrates well the logic of ecological modernisation (EM). This logic has successfully transformed RE from a fringe idea owned by largely environmental actors to a mainstream one embraced by a broader constituency. This mainstream embrace inevitably (re)shapes the renewables enterprise. Not all renewables actors today are driven by environmental goals. Instead, key actors, particularly in corporate or community domains, nurture competing norms and aspirations. How the renewables project is envisaged and the goals it is directed to serve can thus differ considerably. Understanding these differences is important since transformations in the energy domain will not only impact climate protection but shape social futures in significant ways. The analysis proceeds in two interrelated steps: first, empirically – conducting an exploration of some of the main projects and actors in the contemporary Australian RE space; and second, theoretically – considering these empirical developments through an EM lens.