Abstract
This book draws on the increasing interest in the role of civil society activism in addressing environmental degradation at local, regional and global scales. It considers a range of accounts of the nature and prospects for active citizenship, including its participating actors, ethical basis, conditions of existence, strategic objects and institutional targets.
Part 1 is mainly concerned with conceptual issues. It includes an interesting and informative account of the ‘bench mark’ work of Andrew Dobson on environmental citizenship, together with a wide-ranging account of cognate literature. Often, the discussion takes off from a detailed case study – most helpfully the well-known ‘Love Canal’ case, and its relationship to the wider environmental justice movement. The main outcomes of the discussion in these chapters are: that we should be concerned with obligations and duties, not just entitlements and rights; that informal obligations are more important than is often recognised; and, perhaps more significantly, that environmental issues are always intertwined with questions of social justice, and should be addressed as such.
Part 2 includes 5 chapters that are more centrally concerned with exploring – often in considerable detail – the practice and culture of socio-environmental activism. One important theme in these chapters that links with part 1 is a claim that neo-liberal globalisation is in process of unleashing forces that degrade environments, social injustices and human rights abuses. However, these forces operate beyond the reach of national states, and so of the formal processes of regulation that have hitherto characterised environmental and social policy, at least in the western democracies. For Smith and Pangsapa this shifts the priorities of activism from seeking to establish formal controls through state action to the formation of movement coalitions aimed at cultural change and ‘self-regulation’: a shift from ‘government’ to multi-layered and often informally adopted ‘governance’.
Given the rather crucial role of capitalist corporations as transnational actors with immense causal power in relation to both environment and social justice, this poses the vexed question of how corporate governance can be reached and harnessed to these normative concerns. This topic is addressed in chapter 5 of the book. Chapters 6 and 7 provide detailed and very illuminating case studies of the intersection of human rights, labour rights, ethnic and cultural identities, with an enormously wide range of what might be identified as ‘environmental’ issues. The geographical focus of both chapters is south-east Asia, with the emphasis on Thailand and bordering countries. The interweaving of issues and the vital importance of the formation of diverse civil society coalitions are insightfully illustrated and analysed. The final chapter is a rather ‘mixed bag’ of philosophical discussion, conservation issues in the UK and some methodological reflections.
For this reader the great value of this book lies in its case studies – and most especially those presented in the excellent chapters 6 and 7. The discussion in part 1 includes some useful references to the existing literature (with the notable exclusion of reference to neo Marxian/ critical political economy approaches), but is often rather vague and not well integrated. Perhaps chapter 5 was, for me (unsurprisingly), the least satisfactory. The authors claim to have been profoundly influenced by the New Left, but that their ‘provocative’ starting point evokes the ‘gut reaction’ of treachery from ‘fellow travellers’ (p.139). This starting point is an optimistic view of the prospects for civil society activists to transform the culture and practice of transnational corporations in favour of self-regulation for positive environmental, labour and human rights standards. The problem with the treatment they give on this question is not that it represents some kind of political backsliding, but that it is astonishingly sloppy. There is little or no engagement with the extensive journalistic and academic literature that is broadly sceptical of the claims of corporate social and environmental responsibility. At one point, a ‘case study’ of the ‘greening of business’ appears to be a page-long box derived entirely from the company's own website. As elsewhere in the book, there seems to be a good deal of inconsistency between the exposure of corporate malpractice and the general line of optimism about the openness to transformation of corporate culture.
More seriously, what this chapter – and the book as a whole – lacks is any recognition of the wider scale and structural dynamics of globalising capital accumulation, whose destructive effects are largely independent of the ‘culture’ of particular firms or sectors. This is presumably because the authors appear to take neoliberal globalisation and the displacement of state power as entrenched and beyond challenge – to do so would be ‘unconstructive’ or ‘unrealistic’. These may have seemed to be reasonable assumptions a year or so ago, but the scale of our current financial, ecological and economic crisis constitutes a profound challenge to them. Most obviously, the indispensable role of national states in responding to the global banking crisis and now in addressing recession has been demonstrable. Key prescriptions of neoliberalism have been breached in practice under pressure of events, offering opportunities, as well as an urgent necessity, for more radical interventions in public debate about global futures.
Despite these criticisms, this book is certainly to be recommended for the richness of its case studies, and for its sustained arguments favouring activist coalitions that engage creatively with the complex interactions of inequality and ecological degradation.