Mikael Klintman

Eco-Standards, Product Labelling and Green Consumerism

This book provides the reader with a broad policy analysis of a main set of tools aimed at realising an increasingly appreciated aspect of late modern democracy: green political consumerism. The authors illustrate and explain how green labels and other eco-standards are created and negotiated within a broad continuum between science and politics, by addressing political, regulatory, discursive, and organizational ‘back-stage’ circumstances. How can ecological complexities along with diverging ideologies and knowledge claims be translated to a plain, trustworthy, and categorical label? Is there a general mismatch between the production and the consumption side of green labels? Is it possible to achieve broad public reflection, debate and participation on various environmental themes through green labeling? Does green labeling offer pathways toward a greening and democratization of society? The authors base their analyses on case studies from different sectors within two different policy contexts: Sweden (as part of Europe) and the USA.

Framings of Science and Ideology: Organic Food Labelling in the US and Sweden

Organic food labelling debates in Sweden and the USA are examined in order to compare two different policy discourse climates on the basis of interviews, documents, and websites of governmental and non-governmental organisations. Framings in the Swedish debates mainly take place through eco-pragmatic metaframing, aimed at consensus, and based on a mixture of undefined scientific and ideological framings. The American examples indicate more adversarial, inter-frame controversies, with polarised framings of science and ideology. The article highlights the different pathways towards frame-resolution. The different opportunities and dilemmas of each are discussed. Increased awareness of the interdependence of ecology and politics need not entail public resignation that policy decisions are inevitably arbitrary.

Arguments surrounding organic and genetically modified food labelling: a few comparisons

This paper compares reasoning surrounding organic food labelling with arguments concerning mandatory GM labelling. Focus is placed on argumentative cross-overs, defined as cases where actors or organizations use a certain type of argumentation for one issue (for example, modes of food production), and shift into using their opponents type of argumentation for a closely related issue (for example, food labelling). The paper is a textual analysis of the arguments across non-governmental organizations, scientists, policy-makers and corporations. Argumentative cross-overs are not only of theoretical interest. They run the risk of, for instance, making consumers assume that all struggles for ‘stricter food labelling’ will lead to more reliable labelling information and to a higher level of consumer empowerment. It is important to call for more nuanced descriptions of food labelling, and to make the public aware of the cross-overs, which often involve vast exaggerations of what food labelling can, or cannot, tell us. Copyright

Transparency through labelling? : layers of visibility in environmental risk management

The aim of this chapter is to move the issue a bit beyond the polarized views of profound critical reflection versus excessive trust in the checking procedures behind standards. We claim that the polarized views are largely due to an over-simplistic understanding of transparency. By comparing practical policy processes surrounding various standards, we aim to provide nuance to the issue of transparency. This study ofpolicy processes, along with examinations of theoretical work in policy analysis, makes clear the limits of merely treating transparency in terms of ‘more’ versus ‘less’. A more thorough understanding of the promise and limits of transparency in policy processes requires, we argue, another dimension, consisting of qualitatively different ‘layers’ of transparency. The basis for our emphasis on this additional dimension is the obvious - yet often overlooked - notion that an examination of standards, which are in turn claimed to disclose hidden, and often physical, risks, needs to take the political context into account as well as the negotiations and framings surrounding the schemes on which the standards are based. Since risks are uncertain, socially and culturally dependent, and since they are evaluated and interpreted in many different ways by actors with diverse ideologies and interests, a more comprehensive transparency must reach far beyond the concrete visibility and direct awareness of the label itself. Based on these claims we find it useful to distinguish between four layers of transparency in relation to standards, certificates and labels: (1) simple, mediated transparency, (2) negotiated transparency, (3) intra-frame transparency and (4) interframe transparency (see figure 1). We maintain, nevertheless, that transparency through standards and labels remains closely related to people’s own direct experiences of risks. Thus, experiences and senses of our environment never loose their relevance even in relation to very abstract, technical and expert-oriented tools. Hence, in addition, direct experience (yet situated, interpreted, etc.) is prevalent at all these four layers. Empirically, this chapter examines how these layers of transparency operate in the context of standardized eco-labelling schemes that are claimed to make invisible risks visible and manageable. (Less)

“Challenges to Legitimacy in Food Safety Governance? The Case of the European Food Safety Authority”

Abstract The ‘old’ forms of governance have been criticized for being neither sufficiently democratic nor effective. The popularity of ‘new’ modes of governance includes the embracing of values — integral to democratic processes — such as legitimacy, public accountability and trust. By relating parts of this ‘old‐vs.‐new’ distinction to March and Olsen’s dichotomy of aggregative vs. integrative political processes, the aim of this paper is to find patterns for how such processes are combined in European food safety governance. The paper focuses on the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA). What forms of participation can be found in ‘new’ food safety governance? How are these forms of participation related to the aims of increasing the legitimacy? The article discusses challenges involved in EFSA’s mixing of integrative goals and the organization’s view of food safety politics, in which aggregative policy processes are conceived as a rough ‘natural state’ which should be tamed.

Human Sciences and Human Interests : Integrating the Social, Economic, and Evolutionary Sciences

Within the disciplines of social, economic, and evolutionary science, a proud ignorance can often be found of the other areas’ approaches. This text provides a novel intellectual basis for breaking this trend. Certainly, Human Sciences and Human Interests aspires to open a broad debate about what scholars in the different human sciences assume, imply or explicitly claim with regard to human interests.DUST JACKET TEXT: Mikael Klintman draws the reader to the core of human sciences - how they conceive human interests, as well as how interests embedded within each discipline relate to its claims and recommendations. Moreover, by comparing theories as well as concrete examples of research on health and environment through the lenses of social, economic and evolutionary sciences, Klintman outlines an integrative framework for how human interests could be better analysed across all human sciences.This fast-paced and modern contribution to the field is a necessary tool for developing any human scientist’s ability to address multidimensional problems within a rapidly changing society. Avoiding dogmatic reasoning, this interdisciplinary text offers new insights and will be especially relevant to scholars and advanced students within the aforementioned disciplines, as well as those within the fields of social work, social policy, political science and other neighbouring disciplines. (Less)

Can we rely on ‘climate-friendly’ consumption?

In policy and research on sustainable consumption in general, and climate-oriented consumption specifically, key questions centre around whether people are motivated and prompted to support such consumption. A common claim in the scholarly debate is that policy makers, in face of fundamental governance challenges, refrain from taking responsibility and instead invest unrealistic hopes in that consumers will solve pressing environmental problems through consumer choice. Although green consumption is challenging, specifically climate-friendly consumption is even more so, due to the particularly encompassing, complex and abstract sets of problems and since climate impact concerns the totality of one’s consumption. Nevertheless, consumers are called to participate in the task to save the planet. This article draws on existing literature on climate-oriented consumption with the aim of contributing to a proper understanding of the relation between consumer action and climate mitigation. It provides a synthesis and presents key constraining mechanisms sorted under five themes: the value-action gap, individualisation of responsibility, knowledge gap, ethical fetishism and the rebound effect. This article concludes with a discussion of perspectives that endorse a socially embedded view of the citizen-consumer. The discussion indicates pathways for how to counteract the constraining mechanisms and open up room for climate-friendly citizen-consumers.

ISSUES OF SCALE IN GLOBAL ACCREDITATION OF SUSTAINABLE TOURISM SCHEMES: TOWARDS HARMONISED RE-EMBEDDEDNESS?

Abstract In efforts to find synergies or, conversely, tradeoffs between the environmental and social pillars of sustainable development policies, geographical scale is often an important issue. This article critically analyzes issues of scale, such as local-global or North-South, to establish and improve international standards of ecologically sound products and processes. The article combines works on scale theory in geography with sociological work on disembeddedness and re-embeddedness. The approach is based on analyses of documents about standardization within the sustainable tourism sector. More specifically, the article analyzes efforts related to the Sustainable Tourism Stewardship Council (STSC). It holds that reducing issues to inherent qualities of local versus global—or to North versus South—runs the risk of obscuring urgent social, economic, and environmental sustainability problems concerning water, sanitation, preservation of cultural heritage, and so forth within countries in the South. Finally, the article presents certain practical policy recommendations for addressing the struggles associated with movement toward harmonized re-embeddedness.

Single Policy and Planning Issues

Three factors are analysed: (1) citizen-consumers’ acceptance of green policy and planning that goes against short-term material benefits; (2) citizen-consumers’ participation in ‘green’ planning; and (3) citizen-consumer environmental activism. Initial citizen-consumer scepticism in 1 to 3 may change into support and engagement. The chapter shows how social motivation can facilitate such change.

Wider Societal Change

The chapter analyses three recent green visions of social thinkers: ecological citizenship, alternative hedonism, and degrowth. It tries to evaluate these visions based on the extent to which they are coherent with various aspects of social motivation. In this respect, all three visions show strengths and weaknesses.