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The study of social and political aspects of the natural environment in Western Europe has been a major growth area since the early 1970s. All social science, disciplines, in particular history, geography, economics, psychology, sociology, and political science, have seen the development of major environmental research fields, although the relative importance of each discipline has varied between countries and over time. Cross-national variances are generally the result of specific disciplinary traditions; variations over time are mainly the outcome of changes in the importance of particular environmental discourses.
There are important differences in the conception of ‘the environment’ between different social science disciplines. While the interaction between human society and the natural environment is the most common element, many approaches, in particular within geography and environmental psychology, also include the entire physical (e.g., the built environment) and social environment.
The terms used to delineate this field of activity have also reflected major social and political changes. The label ‘environmental’ to define an area of policy or politics first came into use in the 1960s in the USA and subsequently also became popular in Western Europe. Radical critiques of environmentalism led to in-creased references to ‘ecology,’ ‘ecological,’ and less frequently, ‘ecologism.’ Since the success of the German Green Party on an anti-nuclear, ecological platform in the early 1980s, the term ‘green’ has come to be used in a wide variety of settings, in the 1990s referring to virtually any activity that had previously been labeled ‘environmental.’
The great variety and scope of social science work in this field escapes easy compartmentalization and makes it difficult to do justice to all approaches involved. There are four broad areas of research that are crucial to the agenda of environmental sociology and political science, but that can also be used to discuss the contribution of other disciplines: environmental philosophy and political theory, environmental attitudes and behavior, social movements and green parties, and environmental policy.
1. Environmental Philosophy And Political Theory
Political theorists took a relatively long time to take up the challenge of modern environmental politics. Up to the late 1970s, ‘ecological thought’ had barely been recognized as a subdiscipline of political thought and philosophy. Ecological ‘thinkers’ mainly came from outside academia, or at least from outside the realm of political theory and philosophy. However, this period of relative neglect was followed by a major expansion in the 1990s when ecological political thought became a major area of academic activity in Western Europe, particularly in the UK and The Netherlands. The aim was to establish a theoretical basis for ecologism as a separate political theory with a distinct identity rather than as an extension of established traditions such as liberalism, anarchism, or socialism. One of the major inspirations was the work on deep ecology and ecocentrism that had emanated from North America and Australia. Among its important European antecedents were the writings of the Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess (Dobson 2000).
The main challengers of ecocentric political theory in Western Europe are various approaches broadly associated with a libertarian vision of socialism; anarchism, and more recently, liberalism also play a role. Following on from the politics of the student movement, a revival of interest in Marxist thinking in the 1970s also extended to ecological questions. The ideas of the Frankfurt School, anarchist approaches as well as more traditional Marxist views dominated continental theoretical debates in the 1970s and 1980s. Continental theoretical discourses gave more prominence to sociological theories rather than environmental ethics. The work of Ulrich Beck and his theory of the Risk Society (Beck 1986) was particularly influential. However, the resonance of Niklas Luhmann’s (1986) equally sweeping, if rather more pessimistic, attempt to employ systems theory to devise a theory of ecological communication was mainly limited to the German-speaking academic world.
Apart from the formulation of a green theory informing current political practice, the history of ecological thought is a major research area. West European historians, philosophers, economists, and sociologists have devoted considerable attention to the study of environmental aspects of the work of philosophers, scientists, economists, social theorists, and other writers preceding the arrival of ‘modern’ ecological thinking (Pepper 1984, Wall 1994). In particular, from the perspective of the ‘sociology of science,’ the history of ecology as a scientific discipline has been of great interest, involving also the role of scientific ‘ecologists’ in the definition of research and political agendas. The link between ‘ecology’ and other political ideologies has been another major focus of debate. Among the most contentious topics is the analysis of the history and current development of ecological thought in the context of authoritarian political traditions, including the ideology of the German Nazis (Bramwell 1989, Ferry 1992).
However, rather underdeveloped is the political sociology of environmental ideology and knowledge, analyzing, for example, why particular theories or knowledge claims have greater resonance than others in certain countries and specific historical periods. Among the few studies addressing these issues is Jamison et al.’s (1990) analysis of the changing ‘knowledge interests’ of environmental groups.
2. Environmental Attitudes And Behavior
Environmental attitude research started as a serious academic activity in the 1970s. The first wave of studies was mainly policy oriented, intended to measure the degree of environmental concern and support for environmental policies that had started to be formulated and implemented in most European countries in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Sociologists were at first mainly interested in the socio-demographic background and political orientation of ‘environmentalists.’ Most of the political analysis of environmental concern in the late 1970s and 1980s was inspired by Ronald Inglehart’s theory of ‘postmaterialist value change.’ This analysis interpreted the rise of environmental concern as part of a far broader ‘silent revolution’ that was producing a new political agenda dominated by ‘left-libertarian’ issues (Lowe and Rudig 1986).
The 1980s and early 1990s saw a major expansion of environmental attitude research. With the rise of global environmental issues and green consumerism, research priorities focused on the multidimensional nature of public attitudes, the role of ‘environmental knowledge,’ the conditions for behavioral change to save the environment, and the acceptance of specific environmental policies. In particular, the perceived gap between expressed environmental concern and the reluctance of the public to engage more deeply in environmental behavior or to accept stronger environmental policy measures, such as higher energy prices, became a key topic. In theoretical terms, the role of post-materialism as a guiding concern waned, and other approaches, in particular rational choice theory, became more important. More attention also began to be paid to public discourses and personal narratives of environmental questions, with focus groups and qualitative studies becoming a more popular research tool (Diekmann and Jaeger 1996, Macnaghten and Urry 1998).
Research about environmental attitudes and behavior has also played a major role in other social science disciplines. Within environmental psychology, a wholly separate research tradition on environmental attitudes was established, grounded in a more holistic approach to human interaction with the socio-physical environment, with particularly interesting contributions to the analysis of the perception of different environmental problems and the barriers of environ-mental consumer behavior (Pol 1993).
A key research focus for sociologists, psychologists, and other social science disciplines has been the concept of risk. ‘Risk perception’ and ‘public attitudes to technology’ became major research topics in the wake of environmental protest against nuclear power and other ‘big’ technologies, particularly in Germany. Following on from the analysis of public perception of risk was the development of ‘risk communication’ strategies, aimed at increasing public acceptance of specific technologies (Renn and Zwick 1997).
Also in the economic sciences, the analysis of environmental attitudes and behavior has played an important role, in particular in cost–benefit analysis based on the allocation of monetary values to environmental goods. This is done with surveys asking hypothetical questions about the public’s willingness to pay for particular goods, as well as the analysis of existing behavior to elicit ‘revealed preferences’ about trade-offs between environmental and other goods. Such contingent valuation methods became particularly influential in UK policy discourses in the 1990s, but they also attracted strong criticism on ethical and methodological grounds (Foster 1997).
Social science research on environmental attitudes and behavior has attracted other controversies. Research on risk perception and risk communication has been attacked for its instrumentalization to manipulate public opinion to increase the public acceptance of particular technologies. The rise of relativist, ‘social constructionist’ approaches in the environmental social sciences has offered contradictory opportunities to use research results to influence political debate. For example, a ‘cultural theory’ of environmentalism which sees environmental concern as a response to cultural change rather than to ‘real’ environmental problems could be seen as undermining the legitimacy of environmental groups. Other approaches, particularly from the sociology of science, have targeted the claims of science in legitimating public policy, seeking to establish the credibility of lay persons facing environmental threats to make relevant knowledge claims (Lash et al. 1996, Redclift and Benton 1994).
3. Social Movements And Green Parties
Environmental concern and green consumer behavior do not directly engage the individual in the political process. This is different where people support particular pressure groups and parties, or join in protest activity, to campaign for specific environmental policies or for a general green worldview. The analysis of environmental politics thus includes environmental political behavior at the individual level, but it also focuses on the behavior of groups and parties.
The politicization of the environment in Western Europe was chiefly the role of a new generation of protest movements that started to emerge in force in the 1970s. This new phenomenon attracted the academic attention of a fairly wide range of social scientists. At first, descriptive case studies of specific incidents of protest or environmental conflict were the main approach. But by the late 1970s and early 1980s, the notion of ‘new social movements’ had emerged as the dominant paradigm. The 1980s and 1990s saw a very substantial development of this field. The cross-national comparison of environmental social movements became a major focus; the reception of key elements of US social movement theory, in particular the ‘Resource Mobilization’ approach, led to more sophisticated research designs and theoretically informed empirical studies.
Methodologically, the study of protest events became a very influential approach, particularly for cross-national comparisons. Another key feature of empirical research was the study of individual movement participants and group members, their social backgrounds and motivations. Studies of environmental groups as organizations, based on national and cross-national surveys of such groups, focused inter alia on network formation and interrelationships with other political actors (Dalton and Kuechler 1990, Della Porta and Diani 1999, Rootes 1999, Rucht 1991).
One of the most significant aspects of the politicization of the environment is the rise of ecological and green parties. After party formation in the 1970s and 1980s, such parties entered parliament in most West European countries during the 1980s and 1990s (the main exceptions being Norway, Denmark, and Spain); by the late 1990s, green parties had entered national government in Italy, Finland, France, Germany, and Belgium.
Green parties have attracted substantial research efforts, both in the form of major national case studies and cross-national comparisons. Much of the cross- national analysis has focused on the influence of aggregate factors such as electoral systems and economic conditions on the green parties’ development. There is also a wealth of empirical national and cross- national studies on green ideology, the internal structure of green parties, their members and activists, and green voting (Delwit and De Waele 1999, Kitschelt 1989, Richardson and Rootes 1995).
4. Environmental Policy
The social sciences continue to play a fairly marginal role in the general academic literature on environmental policy, with approaches from the natural sciences and technical disciplines dominating the field. Within the social sciences, most of the publications addressing questions of environmental policy come from geography, economics, and the legal professions, while sociology and political science play a more minor role.
In Western Europe, environmental policy started to become an important research topic in the early 1970s. The policy optimism of the early years was often disappointed, and one important research theme was the question of the implementation deficit that prevented policies being as successful as intended. Also popular were cross-national comparisons between ‘leaders’ and ‘laggards’ in environmental policy innovation, often involving the USA and one or more European countries, or, somewhat later, the UK and Germany.
The 1970s and 1980s also saw increasing environmental policy activism within the European Union (EU), and the study of policy development and implementation of EU policy became a major growth area. With the rise of global environmental issues and the creation of international environmental regimes in the 1980s and 1990s, the international level became an important focus of policy research, with international relations approaches playing a more influential role in the literature.
The 1980s and 1990s brought a major shift in the debate about policy instruments, away from traditional ‘command-and-control’ regulation to new economic instruments. Policy discourses became increasingly dominated by economic ideas. With the 1992 Earth Summit, the idea of ‘sustainable development’ was placed firmly on the policy agenda, and many European countries played a lead role in furthering this debate at local, national, and EU levels (Rudig 1999).
Environmental policy research in Western Europe is well established but there remain many key challenges to be addressed. One of the them is the lack of interdisciplinary work, with public policy specialists, international relations experts, sociologists of science, and many other social science disciplines researching in parallel without taking much notice of each other. Some of the shortcomings of research are related directly to this failure to break down disciplinary boundaries. One such area that has received comparatively little attention is issue-making and agenda building processes. The application of discourse analysis to public policy research is likely to play an important role in future research (Fischer and Hajer 1999), as are studies of social movements. The role of science and the media could make an important contribution toward improving the understanding of the formation of environmental policy agendas.
With the increasing role of European and international environmental policy processes, the interlinkages between the international, EU, and national policy processes is a major research challenge. In the past, the study of international relations, EU politics, and national public policies has been addressed by separate academic communities; in the environmental field, major attempts have been made to combine international and national processes—for example, in research on the effectiveness of international environmental regimes. In Western Europe, in particular, environmental policy is a ‘multilevel’ process, and the study of the interlinkages between EU and national as well as subnational policy processes has become a major research area (Weale et al. 2000).
Finally, the question of the impact of environmental policy has to be addressed. In Western Europe, there is a large body of empirical material on differences in policy approaches in different European countries (Hanf and Jansen 1998, Janicke and Weidner 1997). Comparative environmental policy impact studies in Western Europe suggest that economically successful nations also had successful environmental policies. The only institutional element associated with environmental policy success is a general feature of economic policy making—neo-corporatism. There is, however, no firm evidence so far on the relative effectiveness of particular environmental institutions and policy instruments (Rudig 1999).
5. Conclusions
Social science research on environmental issues is thus well established in Western Europe. In terms of the wider political discourse, environmental economics and other ‘policy’ oriented approaches have had the most impact. Within a purely academic ambit, green political theory has been the most outstanding success story. Environmental sociology and political science have established very strong research traditions, but have tended to struggle to be recognized as ‘relevant’ knowledge producers by environmental activists and policy makers alike. In an area defined increasingly by highly technical, ‘scientific’ policy discourses, the social sciences face a stark choice between either leaving the field to other disciplines, or successfully challenging the legitimacy of rival knowledge producers, thus establishing the reflection about the social and political premises of environmental thought and action as a key element in the protection of environmental public interests.
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