3. National Differences in Environmental Politics

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Politics of Sustainable Development

• 3. National Differences in Environmental Politics

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Why is it that

• faced with the same facts about nature,
  Americans, for instance, fear cancer more than
  the British, the French tolerate nuclear power
  better than their German neighbors, and Americans
  are more receptive to biotechnology than Danes,
  Norwegians or Germans
• Sheila Jasanoff, 1999

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What National Culture Does

• Provides discursive frameworks
• colors the ways we think and talk
• Sets institutional conditions
• shapes the ways we work and interact
• Establishes habitual dispositions
• affects the ways we behave and act

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Where do Discursive Frameworks Come From?

• national mentalities (Spengler)
• patterns of belief (Benedict)
• cultural traditions (Williams)
• cognitive regimes (Foucault)
• metaphysical biases (Jamison)

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For example

• Swedish imperialist bias
• Nature to be colonized, systematized, ordered
• Danish pragmatic bias
• Nature to be cultivated, regulated, planned
• American pastoralist bias
• Nature to be tamed, utilized, transformed

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Institutional Conditions

• policy, or decision-making style
• modes, or traditions of governance
• principles of public accountability
• forms of public participation

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For example

• Sweden Denmark USA
• centralized decentralized federal
• bureaucratic consensual conflictual
• formal informal legal
• hierarchical populist
  mixed

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Habits, or customs

• due to habitus, upbringing (Bourdieu)
• material, or class basis of behavior
• due to lifestyle, personality (Douglas)
• traditional, or cultural basis for action
• due to identity, experience (Bauman)
• importance of context and situation

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Movement legacies,

• or national differences in terms of how
  environmental politics, and the experiences of
  the 1960s and 1970s have been appropriated, or
  remembered.
• in Sweden dilemmas of polarization
• in Denmark the paradoxes of success
• in USA the power of the past

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in Sweden

• nuclear debate highly contentious
• strong industrial resistance to greening
• state-supported sustainable development
• focus on environmental integration

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In Denmark

• effective opposition to nuclear energy
• importance of wind energy industry
• ambitious state policies in the 1990s
• influential political backlash in 2000s

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in USA

• fragmented, diversified movement
• strong institutionalization in 1980s
• weak processes of incorporation in 1990s
• nationalism and traditionalism in 2000s