NEOLIBERALISM AND SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT

The basic contention of this chapter is that the apparently politically neutral notion of sustainable development (SD) amounts to neoliberal environmentalism. It is not by chance that the problem of climate change has arisen precisely in the period dominated by the SD approach. As noted in the previous chapter, leading neoliberal states present climate change within a broader political construction of security. Within this construction even the most positive relations between the physical environment and human flourishing (in such areas as nutrition, and so forth) are cast as contexts of mutual struggle and risk calculation. The paradigm of sustainable development, while it admits of many variants, at base represents environmentalism under the aegis of neoliberalism. It follows from this that the way in which climate change is predominantly represented means that the genuine social problems it entails cannot in any real sense be tackled. In short: climate change is a salient symptom of neoliberal environmentalism. But it is a symptom pointing to a fundamental social pathology for which neoliberalism can offer no credible therapy.

In saying this I do not, of course, intend to deny that the historical origins of climate change go back to the early Industrial Revolution of the mid-eighteenth century. While there were reactions to the process of early industrialisation in politics and literature, there was no pervasive sense that the basic functions of the physical environment as a whole were imperilled. The recent adoption of the term ‘Anthropocene’ (see Steffen et al. 2007; Davis 2010; Zalasiewicz et al. 2011), whatever its analytical usefulness, is powerfully indicative of the fact that this sense does indeed characterise the present age. My core argument in this chapter is thus twofold: first, that it is precisely under global neoliberal governance that the problem of climate change could emerge; and, second, that the SD terms on which this problem are set ensure that the underlying issues of social organisation will not be tackled.