ABSTRACT
In developing a theoretical approach suitable for assessing the liberal and neoliberal approaches to sustainability, this book has brought together two elements of Karl Polanyi’s oeuvre – the substantive economy and the fictitious commodities – into a systematic framework of ‘embeddedness’. This approach offers a means for understanding economy-ecology processes in capitalism which is quite distinct from that found in orthodox economic theory. The framework of ‘embeddedness’, based on the ‘forms’ and ‘norms’ of integration, provides an alternative basis for understanding the nature of sustainability problems and for establishing criteria by which to judge the ‘ecological’ credentials of theories and policies geared towards resolving them. The model is dynamic, emphasising movement and change in the economic process rather than equilibrium. Its focus on social structure is also political: power is linked to economic processes through their embeddedness in institutions that are organised and regulated by the political and cultural context. Embeddedness provides a basis for an ecological political economy oriented towards ecological sustainability and gives substance to the critique of neo-liberalism and the fallacious ‘state versus market’ perspective which underpins the economic sustainability position. Both of these dimensions are necessary if the current trajectory of environmental governance is to be challenged with an alternative and progressive reformist project. The goal of a liberal reformism seeks to reclaim sustainability from the current trajectory of ‘environmental neo-liberalism’. That trajectory is headed towards the libertarian ‘second-best’ world of privatised commons, leaving a degraded international environment in its wake. However, little service has been done in furthering the development of an ‘ecological liberalism’ because of the conflation of ‘liberalism’ with the current ‘neo-liberal’ phenomenon. This stems, in part, from the obfuscatory and contradictory qualities of liberalism itself. But it is also aided by the practitioners who perpetuate its story as a set of abstract idealist principles based on limited state power and freedom of the autonomous individual. The conflation of liberalism and neoliberalism is a problem not just because it limits possible ‘green options’ in ‘throwing out the liberal baby with the neo-liberal bathwater’. There is a broader significance in the need to challenge neo-liberalism from within liberal ranks and to do so with an awareness of what can properly be called ‘liberal’.
