Ecological Modernization - Origins and Key Elements

Origins and Key Elements

Ecological modernization emerged in the early 1980s within a group of scholars at Free University and the Social Science Research Centre in Berlin, among them Joseph Huber, Martin Jänicke and Udo E. Simonis. Various authors pursued similar ideas at the time, e.g. Arthur H. Rosenfeld, Amory Lovins, Donald Huisingh, René Kemp, or Ernst Ulrich von Weizsäcker. Further substantial contributions were made by Arthur P.J. Mol, Gert Spaargaren and David A Sonnenfeld (Mol and Sonnenfeld, 2000; Mol, 2001).

One basic assumption of ecological modernization relates to environmental readaptation of economic growth and industrial development. On the basis of enlightened self-interest, economy and ecology can favourably be combined: Environmental productivity, i.e. productive use of natural resources and environmental media (air, water, soil, ecosystems), can be a source of future growth and development in the same way as labour productivity and capital productivity. This includes increases in energy and resource efficiency as well as product and process innovations such as environmental management and sustainable supply chain management, clean technologies, benign substitution of hazardous substances, and product design for environment. Radical innovations in these fields not only can reduce quantities of resource turnover and emissions, but also change the quality or structure of the industrial metabolism. In the co-evolution of humans and nature, and in order to upgrade the environment’s carrying capacity, ecological modernization gives humans an active role to play, which may entail conflicts with nature conservation.

There are different understandings of the scope of ecological modernization - whether it is just about techno-industrial progress and related aspects of polity and economy, and to what extent it also includes cultural aspects (ecological modernization of mind, value orientiations, attitudes, behaviour and lifestyles). Similarly, there is some pluralism as to whether ecological modernization would need to rely mainly on government, or markets and entrepreneurship, or civil society, or some sort of multi-level governance combining the three. Some scholars explicitly refer to general modernization theory as well as non-Marxist world-system theory, others don’t.

Ultimately, however, there is a common understanding that ecological modernization will have to result in innovative structural change. So research is now still more focused on environmental innovations, or eco-innovations, and the interplay of various societal factors (scientific, economic, institutional, legal, political, cultural) which foster or hamper such innovations (Klemmer et al., 1999; Huber, 2004; Weber and Hemmelskamp, 2005; Olsthoorn and Wieczorek, 2006).

Ecological modernization shares a number of features with neighbouring, overlapping approaches. Among the most important are

• the concept of sustainable development
• the approach of industrial metabolism (Ayres and Simonis, 1994)
• the concept of industrial ecology (Socolow, 1994).