Daniel Hausknost

Marit Hammond

Half a century ago, many democratic states started to respond to environmental pressures that had arisen in the wake of rapid industrialization. They set up environmental ministries and agencies and issued legislation to control the pollution of air and water and to manage industrial processes, wastes and toxic substances. This was the birth of the environmental state. With planetary ecological challenges like climate change spiraling out of control and dwarfing the environmental state’s classical tasks of environmental management, new questions about the transformative capacities of the state are becoming acute today. How large is the state’s capability to transform enhanced industrial societies into sustainable post-carbon societies? Do its new environmental functions empower the state to prioritise ecological goals over economic growth? Can the state’s environmental management capabilities be radicalised to turn it into a ‘sustainability state’? Can democracies be enhanced to enlarge the state’s transformative capacities? The Political Prospects of a Sustainability Transformation: Moving Beyond the Environmental State explores these and other questions from a variety of theoretical and empirical angles, covering the fields of democratic theory, theories of the state, political economy, political sociology, rhetoric and political philosophy. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the journal Environmental Politics.

Moving Beyond the Environmental State

The Political Prospects of a Sustainability Transformation

Ingolfur Blühdorn

Felix Butzlaff

Michael Deflorian

Mirijam Mock

Auch wenn die Dringlichkeit einer sozial-ökologischen Transformation zur Nachhaltigkeit längst von praktisch allen Seiten anerkannt wird - moderne Gesellschaften verteidigen ihren Wohlstand und Lebensstil entschiedener denn je. Beharrlich wird eine sozial und ökologisch zerstörerische Politik der Nicht-Nachhaltigkeit betrieben. Die Konjunktur des Rechtspopulismus signalisiert, wie sehr das ökologisch-demokratische Projekt vergangener Jahrzehnte brüchig geworden ist. Und die Corona-Pandemie verschiebt die Prioritäten erneut in Richtung Wachstumspolitik und Konsumstimulation. Dieser Band stellt grundlegende Annahmen der Nachhaltigkeitsforschung und Umweltsoziologie in Frage. Er skizziert neue sozialwissenschaftliche Forschungsperspektiven, um die eigenartige Fortdauer der Nicht-Nachhaltigkeit zu erhellen.

Warum die ökologische Transformation der Gesellschaft nicht stattfindet

Nachhaltige Nicht-Nachhaltigkeit

Daniel Hausknost

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