Environment in a global economy

Ever since the emergence of the environmental crisis in industrialised countries, companies and producers have been blamed for both their significant contribution to environmental deterioration and for their limited efforts and responsibilities in decreasing and preventing environmental disturbances. But with the literature in the 1990s on ecological modernisation, on governance, on partnerships, on corporate social responsibility and the like, it has become commonplace to say that environmental protection is no longer the privileged domain of formal state policies and politics, and that increasingly private market actors become involved in environmental protection. Although private producers and multinational companies are still major contributors to environmental problems, they can no longer be considered just passive environmental actors that move only when forced to do so by states and civil society. Companies and the private sector have developed their own agenda, approaches and organisational modes to engage – more or less successfully, more or less actively – in the environmental arena.

With the information revolution and globalisation the context in which and the way how companies operate has transformed considerably, as the wide literature on, among others, post-Fordism, the networked economy and the consumerist turn has illustrated. In this chapter, I especially will explore how these new conditions and structures of the networked economy have dramatically influenced the involvement and practices of market actors in environmental governance.