ABSTRACT
Integration is one of those concepts that have accompanied the development of environmental discourses and policies from its initial stages in the late 1960s up till the present, whether it is in the form of organisational, procedural or substantial integration. The idea or concept of environmental integration refers to the integration of environmental objectives/goals, environmental policies and/or environmental agencies with other goals, policies and agencies. In the quest for environmental integration special attention is usually paid to the integration of environmental with economic objectives and interests, not in the last following the often quoted tensions between the two. The call for integration by environmentalists resounded as much in the 1972 Blueprint for Survival, in the Brundtland report (WCED, [1]), as more recently in the report of the Group of Lisbon [2]. In all these – and many other – documents environmental integration has always a positive connotation: more integration is believed to be better for the environment. The better the environment (that is: environmental authorities, environmental goals and environmental procedures) is integrated with, among others, economic and social equivalents, the more successful a society is in preserving the environment and maintaining a high environmental quality. All solutions to environmental problems are then believed to go via integration, as integration lets environmental interests also count in non-environmental social practices and institutions. The fact that integration has been on the political agenda of the environment for such a long time, and still continues to prevail in environmental discourses all over the world, points at the difficulties of actually integrating environmental objectives, policies and organisations with economic counterparts. But rather than stressing the difficulties and often quoted failures of environmental integration, I will challenge in this article the fundamental idea that environmental integration is always beneficial for protecting the environment and for realising environmental objectives and goals. In a number of cases, articulating environmental organisations, procedures and goals next to economic or social counterparts will help us much further, than integrating the two. In assessing the value of environmental integration processes and practices for environmental protection this paper looks at a limited number of examples and experiences of environmental integration. The objective is not so much to review and evaluate systematically the various attempts at environmental integration. I have a
more limited and specific objective: the cases I present and analyse serve to put the plea for environmental integration into perspective and to balance the sometimes ‘blind’ calls for only more integration. Using an ecological modernisation perspective I will especially argue for keeping a strong environmental foothold in all integration processes and point to potentially ‘detrimental’ consequences of environmental integration for the preservation of the environment. So rather than systematically evaluating a representative sample of environmental integration practices and attempts, I will deliberately be biased by concentrating on the possible drawbacks of environmental integration. Though selective, the examples and analyses are far from marginal and trivial. After an introduction on ecological modernisation and integration I will analyse examples of environmental integration at three different domains: sub-national and non-state environmental integration practices, nation-state policies, and environmental integration at the supra-national level. 2. ECOLOGICAL MODERNISATION AND INTEGRATION
2.1 ECOLOGICAL MODERNISATION
Ecological modernisation theory is a perspective that helps us to analyse how modern society transforms following the growing importance attached to environmental interests and ideas. Basic premise in ecological modernisation theory is the centripetal movement of ecological interests, ideas and considerations in social practices and institutional developments, which results in a constant ecological restructuring of modern societies. Ecological restructuring refers to the ecology-inspired and environment-induced processes of transformation and reform going on in the central institutions of modern society. Institutional restructuring should, of course, not be interpreted as a new phenomenon in modern societies, but rather as a continuous process that has accelerated in the phase that is often labelled late, reflexive or global modernity. The present phase differs from the pre-1980s, however, in the increasing importance of environmental considerations in these institutional transformation processes in industrial societies. In that sense, environmental interests and ideas are to some extent catching up with economic interests as triggers of institutional transformation. Within ecological modernisation theory this has been conceptualised on an analytical level as the growing autonomy, independence or differentiation of an ecological rationality and ecological institutions vis-à-vis other rationalities and institutions (cf. Mol, [3] and [4]; Spaargaren, [5]). Environmental interests and ideas are increasingly articulated ànd institutionalised, (relatively) independent from other interests and ideas. In the domains of policies, politics and ideologies some notable environmental articulation and institutionalisation took already place in the seventies and early eighties. The construction of governmental organisations, departments, laws and planning dealing specifically with environmental issues date from that era. While in the seventies a separate green ideology – materialised and institutionalised
in for instance environmental NGOs and environmental periodicals – started to emerge, it is especially in the 1980s that this ideology became more and more independent from, and could no longer be interpreted in terms of, the old political ideologies of socialism, liberalism and conservatism, as for instance Cotgrove [6], Paehlke [7] and Giddens [8] have emphasised. But the crucial transformation, which makes the conceptualisation of growing autonomy, independence and differentiation of an ecological rationality and ecological institutionalisation especially relevant, is of more recent origin. After that ecological rationality and ecological institutions have become relatively independent in the political and socio-ideological domians in the 1970s and 1980s, this process of growing independence extends to the economic domain of production and consumption in the late 1980s and 1990s. In this economic domain we witness the articulation and institutionalisation of environmental interests and ideas, relative independent from economic ones. And as – according to most scholars – this economic domain and economic rationality proves especially consequential to ‘the ecological question’, this last step of ecological differentiation and articulation is the most decisive one. The consequence will be that – slowly but steadily – economic processes of production and consumption will be and are increasingly analysed and judged as well as designed and organised from an economic and an ecological point of view. Some first profound environmentally motivated institutional changes have started to appear from the late 1980s onward in the economic domain of production and consumption. Among these changes are the widespread emergence of environmental management systems in industrial production and utilities, the introduction of economic valuations of environmental goods via among others eco-taxes, the use of environment-inspired liability and insurance systems, the increasing importance of environmental goals among public and private utility enterprises such as natural resource saving and recycling, and the articulation of environmental considerations in economic supply and demand. The fact that we should analyse these transformations as institutional changes includes their semi-permanent character. Although the process of ecology-induced transformation should not be interpreted as linear and irreversible as was common in the modernisation theories in the 1950s and 1960s, the changes have some permanency and are not easily reversed.
