Ecological modernization
Ecological modernization is an optimistic school of thought in the social sciences that argues that the economy benefits from moves towards environmentalism. It has gained increasing attention among scholars and policymakers in the last several decades internationally. It is an analytical approach as well as a policy strategy and environmental discourse (Hajer, 1995).
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 be favourably 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 can not only 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.
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