The environmental challenge to nation states: From limits to growth to ecological modernisation

Abstract

The ability of the existing state system to deal effectively with the rising environmental challenge, both domestically and internationally, has been called into question (see Hurrell, 1994). Reform proposals have ranged from a decisive shift in authority upwards to the supranational level - leading to the creation of regional or world government (e.g. Falk, 1971) - to radical decentralisation, which would move power downwards to the sub-state local level (e.g. Schumacher, 1973). As Wapner (1995, p. 45) has pointed out, both supra-statism and substatism ‘locate the causes of environmental harm in the structure of the state-system and see the promise of environmental protection in the form of a reconfigured system of governance’.