Through the 1990s various environmental management strategies and concepts advocating harmonization of economic and environmental concerns have spread across the world. These strategies and concepts have sought to connect the global levels of governance, national policies, business strategies, local environmental agenda, even including consideration of the lifestyles of each individual in highly industrialized societies. The dominance of the discourse of management and productivity in the environmental debate has resulted in the generation of proposals and reports for the constant reform in environmental performance of each social sector and which has been identified with Ecological Modernization (EM). This thesis argues that environmental politics is essentially transnational in its nature. Facing with difficulty, as it does, a state-centric governmental system as the primary form of collective action, it has been argued that it is necessary for local government, NGOs, academia, sometimes governmental agencies, businesses, and even international organizations to generate new form of political practices to address environmental problematique. Thus, this thesis demonstrates the globalizing dominance of the environmental initiatives known as EM, and argues that a distinctive form of environmental politics has emerged in which transnational actors and transnational authority have taken a leading role in addressing the necessary socioeconomic restructuring and `solving' the conflicts of interpretations embedded in the environmental problematique. In demonstration of this transnational restructuring key EM initiatives are examined, reserving special attention to the case of the Zero Emissions initiative undertaken in industrial and local governmental sectors in Japan. This case poses fundamental questions regarding the transnational dynamics of political influence on the environment in modem industrialized societies. The concept of transnational authority would allow us to approach studies of global environmental governance through a focus on the generation of trust, authenticity, validity, or the credibility of the impact of environmental discourses and practices and how they emerge in environmental politics in modem industrialized societies. The thesis thereby sheds new light on the modes of global governance and sustainability
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:404104 |
| Date | January 2004 |
| Creators | Hotta, Yasuhiko |
| Publisher | University of Sussex |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
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