ABSTRACT
There is a strongly pronounced tendency in environmental sociology and politics to discuss questions concerning how to deal with ecological problems more or less in isolation from broader societal and politico-economic changes. Even global environmental problems such as climate change or – in our example – the erosion of biological diversity are generally discussed in relative separation from the structures and processes of societal production and reproduction and the problems and conflicts involved in them. And even where such a connection is in fact made, the dominant tendency is to discuss international environmental problems in the context of the formation of cooperative mechanisms and instruments to deal with common threats. The way in which environmental problems are intertwined with global and national distributional problems, as well as with connected power relations, usually remains underestimated or even ignored. Such an approach, however, increases the threat that the problems
involved become abbreviated. This is particularly obvious in the issue areas we deal with in this book. The problem area ‘‘regulation of biodiversity’’ is characterised by a high degree of overlap between global environmental and distributional conflicts (Go¨erg 1999b). In order to make clear the manner in which these problems are intertwined, the following section shall first, explain the concept of societal relationships with nature, focusing on the constitutive interdependence of the societal process with nature. Furthermore, working within and indeed expanding upon this objective, this study centres on the emerging political-institutional terrains of international and Mexican biodiversity politics. However, this process can only be understood if the national and international societal developments are taken into account. Political economy and questions of hegemony are therefore decisive in order to understand the complex nature of international and national regulatory projects as well as non-intended societal regulations. Due to this fact, the second part of this chapter shall present and discuss the most important elements of the regulation approach. The manner in which this approach perceives the new phase of capitalist development will be outlined in order to enable us to focus, third, on the special meaning of knowledge and, fourth, on central characteristics of the emerging
post-Fordist relationships with nature. In the fifth section, the transformation of the state and the state system will be dealt with. The aim here is to describe and further develop certain concepts of materialist state theory which will be important for the following empirical analysis. In this sense, following some general theoretical remarks on the state and political institutions, we will introduce, with key emphasis, the concept of the ‘‘internationalisation of the state’’ and of ‘‘second order condensations of societal power relations’’. Chapter 1 will end with some remarks on the methodology applied in the empirical investigations.
