ABSTRACT
Ecological modernisation is emerging as a fashionable new term to describe recent changes in environmental policy and politics.1 Its growing popularity derives in part from the suggestive power of its combined appeal to notions of development and modernity and to ecological critique. Yet competing definitions blur its usefulness as a concept. Does ecological modernisation refer to environmentally sensitive technological change? Does it more broadly define a style of policy discourse which serves either to foster better environmental management or to manage dissent and legitimate ongoing environmental destruction? Does it, instead, denote a new belief system or systemic change? Indeed, can it encompass all of these understandings? In this chapter, I want to examine current uses of the term in relation to the tensions between modernity and ecology which it evokes and suggest ways of diminishing its ambiguity.
