Environmental policy and the limits of neo-institutionalism

Over the last two decades, trends in environmental policy have focused on institutional development, amounting to incremental improvements within a technocratic government paradigm revolving either around a centralist, science-driven, top-down governance style or else around a de-centralized, flexible, market-driven framework of ecological modernization, leaving the citizenry largely reduced to a role of passive recipients and consumers (Bäckstrand & Lövbrand, 2007). However, civil society involvement in the environmental policy field has recently increased in frequency and intensity, ranging from street protests to more stable and organized configurations in the form of Civil Society Organizations (CSOs), but with one common denominator: the resolution to challenge the current state of affairs and the oligarchization of politics that continues to dashing the hope of billions for a safeguarded habitable biosphere for us and for the generations to come. In this paper it is suggested that environmental politics will need to move beyond the delegation-control logic and open up to move from popular consultation to civic involvement mechanisms in the spirit of Nancy Fraser’s “participative parity”, and from the refinement of accountability and transparency indicators to notions of co-responsibility and the public right to knowledge. Promising attempts for new forms of socio-ecological agency (Manuel-Navarrete & Buzinde, 2010) can be found in mediated forms of social movements and CSOs clustering processes and in the construction of common platforms for dialogue, where culturally diverse agents engage in “kaleidoscopic dialectical processes” (Rehbein, 2010) towards ever-increasing levels of understanding and learning of both sustainable practices and the up-building of collective agency.