Neo-liberalism, Ecological Modernisation and the Future of Local Economic Development

1
Neo-liberalism, Ecological Modernisation and the
Future of Local Economic Development

• David Gibbs
• University of Hull
• d.c.gibbs_at_hull.ac.uk

2
Introduction

• Sustainable development and the local level
• Environmental issues into the mainstream?
• Climate change, resource scarcity, peak oil
• Neo-liberalism and the free market
• Political twists and turns

3
Ecological Modernisation

• An optimistic view - technological solutions
• Modernisation of societal institutions
• EM as theory and pragmatic policy
• The circular economy
• De-linking material flows from economic flows

4
EM - Advantages for Business

• greater business efficiency due to reduced
  pollution and waste production
• avoiding future financial liabilities, such as
  the potential cost of contaminated land clean-up
• improved recruitment and retention of the
  workforce due to the creation of a better work
  environment
• potential for increased sales of more
  'environmentally-friendly' products and services
• the sale of pollution prevention and abatement
  technologies.

5
EM - Political Programme

• restructuring of production and consumption
  towards ecological goals, including the
  development and diffusion of clean production
  technologies
• decoupling economic development from the relevant
  resource inputs, resource use and emissions
• exploring alternative and innovative approaches
  to environmental policy, such as 'economising
  ecology' by placing an economic value on nature
  and introducing structural tax reform
• integrating environmental policy goals into other
  policy areas
• the invention, adoption and diffusion of new
  technologies and production processes.

6
EM - A Critique

• Absolving business of its environmental
  responsibilities/greenwash
• Little detail of institutional changes needed -
  under-theorising the state?
• Lacks a theory of power relations

7
EM - A Critique

• requires confronting the fundamental underlying
  processes (and their associated power structures,
  social relations, institutional configurations,
  discourses and belief systems) that generate
  environmental and social injusticesAlternative
  modes of production, consumption, and
  distribution as well as alternative modes of
  environmental transformation have to be explored
  if the discursive spaces of the environmental
  justice movement and the theses of ecological
  modernisation are to be conjoined in a programme
  of radical political action Harvey, 1996 401)
• This assumes EM can and should challenge existing
  political structures

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Changing Public Policies Neo-liberalism and the
State

• Strong EM a challenge to neo-liberalism
• EM largely hopeful about neo-liberalism
• Changing environmental regulation central to
  neo-liberal capitalism
• Ecological rationality gaining purchase?
• or mobilising ecological forces in the service
  of neo-liberal hegemony?

9
Changing Public Policies Neo-liberalism and the
State

• Green capitalism is nothing less than a major
  strategy for ecological commodification,
  marketization and financialization which
  radically intensifies and deepens the penetration
  of nature by capital - it is an integral part of
  the larger project of neo-liberalism.
• Capital has won an ideological victory over an
  environmental-cum-socialist politics.
• New areas for capital accumulation natural
  foods, carbon credits, recycling are all signs
  that liberal environmentalism is dead.
  Actually, it is only dead as an anti-capitalist
  movement it is very much alive, thriving and
  profiting as a multi-million dollar enterprise in
  the board rooms of the same capitalist powers
  that it once challenged.
• Smith (2007)

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Neo-liberalism and Local Economic Development

• Past LED strategies
• Responding to neo-liberalism?
• Competitive local economies - mobile investment,
  city marketing, new technologies, skilling the
  workforce etc.

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Future Prospects for LED

• Policy framework to date counters initiatives on
  climate change etc.
• Need for complementary economic framework
• Environment as a commodity for consumption
• Sustainable local economies and wider scales

12
The Future of LED

• Local experimentation
• See work on strategic niche management
  alternative technology niches
• Climate change and resource constraints may force
  change?
• Contestation may decentre neo-liberalism
• EM as a catalyst?
• EM as new technology, new products, changed
  consumption more viable?
• Other visions of the local unspecified - empty
  romanticism?