ABSTRACT
Ecological modernisation is today’s preeminent approach to environmental reform. It believes that ever-expanding technological innovation offers the impetus, and the market the tools, for the successful decoupling of the negative environmental impacts of development from development itself. This would ensure continued, but now environmentally benign, economic growth. Both the environment and the economy would thus be winners. This reassuring co-benefits paradigm helps explain ecological modernisation’s widespread appeal. Yet without an effective political modernisation to accompany it, and a wider understanding of the causes and consequences of environmental problems, ecological modernisation can only go so far in arresting environmental decline.
