The British Journal of Sociology 2013 Volume 64 Issue 1

Life politics, nature and the state: Giddens sociological theory and The Politics of Climate Change1
Charles Thorpe and Brynna Jacobson

Abstract Anthony Giddens The Politics of Climate Change represents a signicant shift in the way in which he addresses ecological politics. In this book, he rejects the relevance of environmentalism and demarcates climate-change policy from life politics. Giddens addresses climate change in the technocratic mode of simple rather than reexive modernization. However, Giddens earlier sociological theory provides the basis for a more reexive understanding of climate change. Climate change instantiates how, in high modernity, the existential contradiction of the human relationship with nature returns in new form, expressed in life politics and entangled with the structural contradictions of the capitalist state. The interlinking of existential and structural contradiction is manifested in the tension between life politics and the capitalist nation-state. This tension is key for understanding the failures so far of policy responses to climate change. Keywords: Climate change; Giddens; life politics; environmentalism; risk; ontological insecurity

A distinctive aspect of Anthony Giddens sociological theory has been his emphasis on the challenge posed to modern societies by ecological issues and by environmentalist movements as an expression of what he calls life politics, raising questions of lifestyle or how we should live (Giddens 1990: 165; Giddens 1991: 9, 2146, 2213; Giddens 1994: 14; OBrien 1999: 278). His 2009 book, The Politics of Climate Change [hereafter Politics] follows from this ecological dimension of his sociological thought. However, Politics represents a shift in the way in which Giddens handles ecological politics. In this book, he rejects the relevance of environmentalism and adopts a narrowly instrumental approach focused on market-oriented policies, bracketing the questions of values and lifestyles raised by environmentalism and other
Thorpe and Jacobson (Department of Sociology, University of California, San Diego) (Corresponding authors email: cthorpe@ ucsd.edu) London School of Economics and Political Science 2013 ISSN 0007-1315 print/1468-4446 online. Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA on behalf of the LSE. DOI: 10.1111/1468-4446.12008

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life-political movements. This shift, we argue, represents a retreat from the reexivity of high modernity that Giddens theorized in his earlier work. Rather, the approach to climate change in Politics reects the characteristic orientation of simple modernization (Giddens 1994: 5, 42, 807): an instrumental approach to nature, faith in technological progress and abstract systems of expertise, and the exclusion of ambivalence and uncertainty. This instrumental and technocratic approach might seem justied by the urgency of tackling climate change, but we argue that Giddens policy prescriptions are too narrow and limited, and that the politics of climate change must meet the deeper challenges of reexivity and the existential and value-questions raised by environmentalism. The recent shift in Giddens handling of environmental issues also serves to highlight the fundamental tension between life politics and the key institutions of modernity the nation-state and systematic capitalist production (Giddens 1990: 174). The problem of whether life politics can be reconciled with these institutions is central to Giddens work, but is not adequately resolved. This tension is expressed in his notion of utopian realism (Giddens 1990: 1545; 1994: 24950). The utopian dimensions of his thought came to the fore when he presented life-political movements as potential heralds of a post-modern order that would involve post-scarcity economics, democratization, and an ecological ethos (Giddens 1990: 16373). But this was tied to his notion of realism, expressed in his view that we remain within modernity an intensied high modernity (Giddens 1990: 1556; 1991: 4, 2732). Giddens has treated realism as demanding acceptance of institutions such as the global market which operate in ways that can run counter to life-political values. Giddens Third Way was not only about moving beyond modern politics split between left and right; it was also an attempt to reconcile life politics with modern institutions of the state and capitalist production and exchange. While left-wing critics of the Third Way have emphasized its accommodation with global capitalism (e.g. Callinicos 2001), life politics potentially destabilizes such accommodation. The inherent tension in Giddens utopian realism can be understood in relation to his central metaphor of modernity as a juggernaut (Loyal 2003: 152). The image, in The Consequences of Modernity, implies relentless dynamism and inertia, especially associated with capitalist growth and technological development, suggesting that these processes cannot be held back: The juggernaut crushes those who resist it. Instead, one must ride the juggernaut (Giddens 1990: 139, 146). However, Giddens also suggested that we should seek to assert collective agency over technological momentum, implying that the juggernaut could be steer[ed] toward alternative futures (1990: 154; see also Craib 2011 [1992] : 77). Giddens embraced life politics as a corrective to productivism, or accumulation for its own sake, and to the compulsive character of modernity, manifested in capitalist accumulation, bureaucratic
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organizations, and technological systems (1994: 1689, 195; 1994b: 90). Unless such a challenge is mounted, these forms of bureaucratic and technological inertia have apocalyptic implications, either in nuclear war or an ecological catastrophe [. . .] as disturbing in its implications (Giddens 1990: 173). Politics is about how to assert agency in the face of possible disaster and it emphasizes the need for a rapid shift in technological priorities. However, in contrast to Giddens earlier thought, here he presents the locus of agency as being political, technoscientic and business elites rather than social movements. He gives little attention to democratic participation and rejects the idea of a grassroots shift toward more ecologically sustainable lifestyles. Ethical questions of how we should live are shut down in favour of pragmatic top-down policy solutions. As he addresses climate change, Giddens detaches questions of risk from the existential dilemmas stressed in his earlier work. Focusing on pragmatic policy xes, Giddens fails to draw deeply on his earlier analyses of the contradictions of the capitalist state, ontological insecurity, reexivity, and the rise of life politics. But these analyses and concepts provide key insights for understanding the depth of the challenge that climate change poses for modern institutions. Drawing on Giddens earlier thought, we argue that the problem of climate change exposes fundamental contradictions in the relationship between the state and capital, which have been exacerbated by globalization processes. It also uncovers the basic existential contradiction of the human relationship with nature that Giddens argued has been repressed in modernity. In climate change, these different forms of contradiction are overlaid on one another, compounding the complexity and intractability of the problem. Risks of climate change need to be understood sociologically in relation to the radical ontological insecurity that arises from the way in which the existential contradiction has returned in a new form. Since climate change is not only a problem of risk, but also poses an existential dilemma, it cannot be merely managed at a technical and pragmatic policy level. The reexive ethical orientation of life politics is essential if society is to cope with the challenge of climate change.

Nature, the existential contradiction, and modernity The human relationship with nature is central to Giddens historical sociology. In this relationship, Giddens identied the fundamental contradiction that exists in all types of society. Human beings emerge from and exist within the world of Being, the world of nature. And yet, the human individual is also a conscious, reective agent and in that sense transcends nature as the negation of the inorganic (Giddens 1981: 2367). This existential contradiction is mediated by society, since it is in society that the human being acquires a second
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nature of culture, language, and social practice (Giddens 1981: 236; 1979: 161). The reproduction of social relationships sustains the accommodations between human beings and nature and the modes of control to which nature is made subject (Giddens 1979: 161). In this way, the existential contradiction acquires a social character as it is externalized in institutions and thus becomes translated into structural contradiction (Giddens 1979: 161). Giddens traced how state power has drawn on symbolic and religious resources that express attempts to handle the existential contradiction (Giddens 1981: 237). In pre-capitalist class-divided societies the states mediation of existential contradiction underpins its mobilization of authoritative resources (Giddens 1981: 96, 100, 1456). When existential contradiction is institutionalized in the state, it is transformed into structural contradiction so that the state is the focus of the contradictory character of human societal organisation (Giddens 1981: 237). With the development of the capitalist nation-state, however, structural contradictions lose their manifest relationship with existential contradiction. Capitalism severs contradiction from its foundation in existential contradiction. Or rather, existential contradiction is suppressed by structural contradiction, in which the state/society relation becomes detached from the intermingling of human social life and nature (Giddens 1981: 238). The fundamental contradiction of the capitalist state is the division between the political and the economic as separate spheres, arising from the capitalist labour contract (Giddens 1981: 128). The economic sphere is insulated from the force wielded by the state, but this separation means that the state relies for its revenue on private accumulation outside its direct control (Giddens 1981: 17781, 20914, 229). Extraction of surplus is achieved through capitalists surveillance and management of the labour process (Giddens 1981: 13540). Class relations within the labour process (1981: 2201) are interlaced with technical control of the natural world: an exploitative attitude to nature [. . .] is associated with social exploitation, directly geared into it (Giddens 1979: 163, emphasis in original). According to Giddens, The instrumental relation to nature that is promoted by the rise of capitalism, fuelled by the accumulation process, becomes one side of the faultline of the contradictory character of the capitalist state (1981: 238). The instrumental relationship with nature that characterizes capitalist production also conditions quotidian life. Giddens argued that de-traditionalized and routinized everyday life is a specic feature of capitalist modernity. Everyday life is shaped by the intersection of internal pacication by the state, the dull compulsion of market forces, and the reach of capitalist production in creating manufactured urban environments which are experienced as being removed from nature (Giddens 1981: 1534). Modern everyday life is thus smoothed of the disruptions of nature, resulting in routinized predictability (Giddens 1981: 173; Giddens 1991: 1356, 1649; see also Shove 2003: 13940,
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1612). However, this routinization combines with a heightened sense of fragility of the individual in their daily life (Giddens 1981: 11, 194; 1991: 167). The rise of capitalism undermines pre-existing sources of ontological security, meaning the ability to take for granted ones experienced reality and the continuity of the present with established patterns and institutions (Giddens 1981: 11, 152; 1991: 534). Modernity erodes the traditional narratives and practices that provided ways of handling the dilemmas that arise from the existential contradiction (Giddens 1981: 154). There is a deep sense of meaninglessness in the wasteland of everyday life (Giddens 1981: 13). As a source of security, modernity substitutes for tradition the instrumental control of nature. Security comes to depend on trust in abstract systems of technology and scientic expertise (Giddens 1990: 923, 1123; Giddens 1994: 80). The inuence of these systems within everyday life, combined with the dull compulsion of economic forces, has the effect of suppressing existential anxieties. Giddens commented on just how far modern civilization has come to rely on the expansion of control, and on economic progress as a means of repressing basic existential dilemmas of life (Giddens 1994: 212). The suppression of existential dilemmas is an aspect of the way in which capitalist modernity subjects human life to automatic forces, as implied by the metaphor of the juggernaut. Automatism can be seen in the dull compulsion of the market and in the unquestioned pursuit of economic growth (Giddens 1981: 11, 124). Giddens argues that under capitalism, economic relations become peculiarly signicant [. . .] as a medium of power (Giddens 1981: 111, emphasis in original; see also 7, 104, 1068, 112). Within capitalism, the power of the dominant class derives fundamentally from its control of allocative resources (Giddens 1981: 210). As social power depends increasingly on allocative control, economic forces become the crucial levers of societal transformation (Giddens 1981: 104, 244). It is a distinctive feature of capitalism that economic growth becomes an imperative built into the social system. Giddens writes that capitalist society is associated with a chronic impetus to technological innovation and economic growth unparalleled in previous history (Giddens 1981: 1212; see also 214). However, this chronic impetus also makes modernity prone to crisis. Giddens writes that Understanding the juggernaut-like nature of modernity goes a long way towards explaining why, in conditions of high modernity, crisis becomes normalised (1991: 184). The domination of nature, manifested in advancing technology, produces new threats, especially in the form of more devastating weapons. The threat of nuclear war has been a key theme in Giddens work (esp. Giddens 1985). At the end of A Contemporary Critique of Historical Materialism, Giddens noted that the whole of humanity now lies in the shadow of possible destruction. This unique conjunction of the banal and the apocalyptic, this is the world that capitalism has fashioned (1981: 252). In subsequent work, Giddens increasingly dealt with risks of ecological disaster
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as an aspect of modernitys apocalyptic potential. In Beyond Left and Right, he argued that An ever-expanding capitalism runs up not only against environmental limits in terms of the earths resources, but against the limits of modernity (Giddens 1994: 10). Modern everyday life is evacuated of moral meaning and yet modernity unleashes technological forces that inspire dread. Such threats are rationalized within the abstract systems of modern science, such as formal risk assessment in which Apocalypse has become banal (Giddens 1991: 183). But Giddens suggested that these threats could not be contained within the parameters of instrumental or technical reason. Modernitys suppression of existential dilemmas reaches its limit. A key aspect of the reexivity of high modernity is the re-emergence of existential problems suppressed by simple modernity. Giddens wrote that New forms of social movement mark an attempt at a collective reappropriation of institutionally repressed areas of life (1991: 207, see also Dickens 1999: 101). He discussed ecological politics in this context. In Beyond Left and Right, he suggested: The ecological crisis [. . .] and the various philosophies and movements which have arisen in response to it, are expressions of a modernity which [. . .] comes up against its own limits. The practical and ethical considerations thus disclosed [. . .] express moral and existential dilemmas which modern institutions, with their driving expansionism and their impetus to control, have effectively repressed or sequestered. (Giddens 1994: 11) The opening up of the moral and existential question of how we should live is the dening feature of life politics (Giddens 1994: 90). The aspects of life hidden by modernity push back as ethical questions which have to be justied, leading to the emergence of new political agendas (Giddens 1994a: 10). Ecological movements link concerns of everyday life (e.g. consumerism and waste) with challenges to systemic features of capitalism and modernity, questioning especially the value of economic growth and the control of nature (Giddens 1991: 208). In this way ecological issues are a signal, as well as an expression, of the centrality of life-political problems. They pose with particular force the questions we must face [. . .] when there are ethical dilemmas that mechanisms of constant economic growth either cause us to put to one side or make us repress (Giddens 1994: 92). Giddens thereby presented life-political movements, including ecology, as carriers of the reexivity of high modernity (cf. McKechnie and Welsh 2002). The emergence of ecological politics demonstrates that modernity is no longer able to bracket the existential contradiction rooted in human beings relationship to nature. A key dimension of the reexivity of high modernity is that we can no longer treat the problem of nature as progressively solved through instrumental control. Instead, how we, as conscious agents, relate to nature becomes again a problem of morality and meaning as well as of
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scientic understanding. In Beyond Left and Right, Giddens wrote, The question of how shall we live? is raised by any attempt to decide what to preserve of nature or of the past (1994: 212). However, the problem of nature returns in a new form in high modernity. Giddens has emphasized that, under conditions of modernity, nature is radically transformed by human activity. In the sense of being a physical environment independent of human action, nature has all but dissolved; the problems of environmental degradation which perturb us today come from the transformation of the natural into the social and cultural (Giddens 1994: 47). The environmental problems of high modernity are problems of the created environment and of a plastic nature moulded by human action (Giddens 1990: 60, 127; 1994: 102). This transformation of nature introduces a new kind of ontological insecurity. While modern science and technology allowed greater control over natural hazards such as disease, ood, and pests, new kinds of unpredictability emerge in high modernity. In Modernity and Self-Identity, Giddens pointed to global warming as an example of this new unpredictability arising not from brute nature but from the unintended consequences of industrial society. We today face high-consequence risks [. . .] about which precise risk assessment is virtually impossible (Giddens 1991: 137; cf. Beck 1995, 2009). We are less assured of the ability to control nature through science and technology, and unpredictability now arises from our very transformations of the natural world. These transformations, in turn, diminish our ability to treat nature as a source of ontological security. Giddens quoted environmentalist Bill McKibbens lament that the new transformed nature offers none of the consolations of the retreat from the human world, a sense of permanence, or even of eternity (McKibben quoted in Giddens 1991: 137). The murkiness of the boundaries between the human and the natural is a key dimension of the radical ontological insecurity of high modernity. Giddens has criticized what he perceives as the fundamentalist tendency in environmentalism to retreat from this insecurity toward a romantic conception of natural harmony (1994: 11, 48). He argued that nature cannot any longer be defended in the natural way. Instead, a contemporary environmentalism must recognize that nature is no longer separate from human action (Giddens 1994: 2056).The point, as Giddens put it in The Nation-State and Violence, should be not so much to rescue nature as to explore possibilities of changing human relationships themselves (1985: 341). Despite his criticisms of environmentalism, Giddens also argued for the positive potential of the reexivity that emerges from the environmentalist challenge to modernity. When environmentalists highlight problems of risk and deep ecologists lament lost natural harmonies, they experience these aspects of modernity as failures, and so questions of the modern relationship with nature return rst of all under a negative sign . But Giddens suggested
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that each, when viewed positively, discloses moral considerations relevant to the question how shall we live? in a world of lost traditions and socialized nature. While pollution and environmental degradation represent modernity under a negative sign, the positive potential of high modernity is for renewed protection of the non-human world (Giddens 1994: 207). Giddens critique of what he saw as backward-looking tendencies in environmentalism was therefore combined with his determination to pursue the positive ways in which environmentalism opens up the question of the human relationship with the non-human world, bringing back questions of meaning and morality, and calling for the assertion of conscious agency over and against the automatism of modernitys juggernaut.

Life politics and the Third Way Giddens social and political theorizing has been inuenced by environmentalists call for a new value-orientation. Giddens suggested that one reason why existing Marxist and socialist thought needed to be revised is that this tradition has incorporated a Promethean approach to nature (1981: 60; Giddens 1994: 53; cf. Foster 1999: 372). The traditional left has remained mired in the productivism of simple modernity (Giddens 1994: 1756). A new approach is required for what Giddens has called the potential emergence of a post-scarcity order, dened as a condition in which economic growth can no longer be regarded as necessarily good, but must be evaluated ethically in terms of its effect on the quality of life (Giddens 1990: 1657; Giddens 1994: 163). Giddens emphasized that scarcity is relative to socially dened needs and to the demands of specic life-styles. Therefore, moving toward a postscarcity condition has less to do with reaching an absolute level of material abundance and more to do with alterations in modes of social life (Giddens 1990: 166). The re-evaluation of our wants and needs called for by life politics is an important part of this. Life politics points us [. . .] beyond circumstances in which economic criteria dene the life circumstances of human beings (Giddens 1990: 165). This shift would involve a new ethical orientation toward nature. Giddens conjectured that An overall system of planetary care might be created, which would have as its aim the preservation of the ecological wellbeing of the world as a whole (1990: 170). Giddens theoretical work in the 1990s drew inspiration from the ways in which life politics called modernitys economic compulsiveness into question. Life politics could be expressed in lifestyle decisions that limit, or actively go against, maximizing economic returns (Giddens 1994: 102, emphasis in original). Giddens endorsed the need for change within everyday life. He wrote that A clear part of increased ecological concern is the recognition that reversing the degradation of the environment depends upon adopting new
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lifestyle patterns. He suggested that Widespread changes in lifestyle, coupled with a de-emphasis on continual economic accumulation, will almost certainly be necessary if the ecological risks we now face are to be minimised (Giddens 1991: 2212). A post-scarcity condition also demands the humanising of technology so as to introduce moral issues into the now largely instrumental relation between human beings and the created environment (Giddens 1990: 170). Against standard discourses of modernization that assume a single path of development targeted toward a high-production and highconsumption economic model, Giddens advocated alternative development taking into account non-material values as sources of happiness and selfrespect (1994: 1638). The global cosmopolitanism emerging from reexive modernization includes an attitude of respect towards non-human agencies and beings (Giddens 1994: 253). While Giddens criticized the way in which the value of economic growth has been taken for granted, he held back from asserting that post-scarcity order would mean an end to growth. Growth would be no longer of overriding importance (1994: 101). But a post-scarcity economy is not necessarily a no-growth economy (Giddens 1994: 178). He suggested that industrial production and the market could be deprived of their compulsive character and shaped by values expressed in life-political movements (Giddens 1990: 165). Giddens presented his utopian realism as shaping, but not operating against structural trajectories of the capitalist economy and the global market. Utopian realist politics seeks to realize life-political values, but in a way that corresponds to observable trends (Giddens 1994: 101). This problem of meshing life-political value-considerations with realism concerning what are taken to be objective economic and social trends remains the fundamental tension in Giddens Third Way project (Finlayson 2003: 12531). Giddens Third Way attempts to reconcile life politics both with the global market and the political structures of the nation-state. This attempt, however, necessarily collides with the structural contradictions of the capitalist state, contradictions that intensify under conditions of economic globalization. These contradictions have crucial implications for whether ecological issues can be adequately addressed within the framework of the Third Way. Giddens emphasized the nation-state as the crucible of power in modern societies (1981: 147, 189). But the capitalist nation-state is also dependent on processes of the accumulation of private capital that are outside its control. The contradictory position of the state in relation to capital is also a contradiction between private appropriation and socialised production . Although capital is under private ownership, the unied or socialised character of capitalism produces much higher levels of societal integration (Giddens 1981: 238). Giddens observed that The capitalist state maintains a monopoly of political and military power within its own bounds, but the world system which it initiates is fundamentally inuenced by capitalistic processes
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operating on a world scale (1981: 197). Increasing global social integration, driven by capitalism as a world system, is not matched at the political level, where power remains strongly tied to the nation-state (Giddens 1981: 202). So the contradictory relationship between the state and private accumulation becomes exacerbated as private capital is increasingly mobile on a global scale (Latham 2001: 31). Giddens writing on globalization can be understood as implying that the structural contradictions of the capitalist state increasingly take spatio-temporal form. In The Third Way, Giddens argued that globalization pulls away from the nation-state, especially weakening the states capacity for economic intervention (1998: 31; Loyal 2003: 155). At the same time, globalization pushes down below the level of the nation-state (Giddens 1998: 31). Giddens argued that globalization acts as a spur for de-traditionalization, individualization, and intensied social reexivity (1994: 42, see also 801, 1101). Together, globalization and life politics call into question routinized domains of everyday life and produce pressures for grassroots democratization as a means for expressing the heightened reexivity of local and global life today (Giddens 1994: 120). Globalization does not overturn the position of the nation-state as a crucible of power, but it does mean that the nation-state now stands in a contradictory relationship with social integration globally and increasing pressure for democratization locally. These contradictions impact the legitimacy of the nation-state since liberal democracy, based on an electoral party system, operating at the level of the nation-state, is not well equipped to meet the demands of a reexive citizenry (Giddens 1994: 10). In The Third Way, Giddens called for a democratizing of democracy (1998: 77) in order to develop political forms that could overcome the contradictory relationship between the nation-state and globalization. Life politics and individualization require that authority [. . .] be recast on an active or participatory basis (Giddens 1998: 66). Giddens asserted that these new conditions required a double democratization: upward in the sense of extending democracy to the level of supra-national institutions and downward in the sense of new forms of grassroots participation (1998: 717, 1467, quoting 72). As it pulls away and pushes down, globalization opens up a spatio-temporal dimension in the structural contradictions of the capitalist state. These structural contradictions come to be combined with existential contradiction as the states ability to repress existential dilemmas is weakened under conditions of reexive modernization. Renewed value-questions of how we should live cannot be handled by modernitys technocracies, bureaucracies and representative politics, and require new forms of dialogic democracy. Giddens argued in The Third Way that Experts cannot be relied upon [. . .] to know what is good for us and therefore that Characterizing risk [. . .] cannot just be left to experts (Giddens 1998: 59, 76).
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Globalization creates pressures for grassroots democratization and awakens life-political concerns. But the demands of life-political movements such as environmentalism often conict with the more economistic interests of the capitalist nation-state, with its dependency on private accumulation within a global market.This opens up the tension in Giddens utopian realism, begging the question of how to reconcile life-political values with economic and powerpolitical interests. In his Fabian pamphlet, extracted in Giddens The Global Third Way Debate, Fabian Society director Michael Jacobs suggested that the key problem with environmentalism is that it is Driven by its values rather than by analysis of the world as it is (2001: 317; Jacobs 1999). Too frequently, environmentalists make utopian proposals that seem to ignore the trends of the modern world (Jacobs 2001: 318). A Third Way approach to ecological problems would aim at environmental modernisation, leveraging the knowledge-economy to solve ecological problems through technological innovation (Jacobs 2001: 32932, quoting 329). Bill Jordan has argued that Jacobs essay exemplies the way in which Third Way thinkers and politicians have tried to reconcile ecological concerns with acceptance of the global market: the Green agenda was dismissed as backward-looking and unsuited to a globalised world, which required ecological policies to be integrated into an advanced technological response to all the challenges of an integrated world economy (Jordan 2010: 71). Jacobs essay pregures the approach that Giddens adopts in his climate change book. In line with his conception of the nation-state as modernitys crucible of power, Giddens emphasizes that climate change must be analysed in relation to the power-political interests of nation-states, and that viable solutions to climate change will be those that nation-states can recognize as being in their interests. Solutions, he argues, will depend a great deal upon government and the state (Giddens 2009: 91 emphasis in original). Following from his insistence that Third way politics should take a positive attitude towards globalization (Giddens 1998: 64), Giddens also attempts to develop a politics of climate change compatible with the global market. He does so, however, by largely abandoning his earlier engagement with life politics and by denying the relevance of environmentalism as a value-perspective. This indicates a breakdown of the attempt to reconcile life politics with the nation-state and global capitalism within a Third Way framework. Giddens abandons the utopian dimensions of his thought in favour of a power-political realist approach to climate change.

Giddenss paradox and life politics Giddens rejection of the relevance of life politics for addressing climate change derives justication from what he calls Giddenss paradox: since the
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dangers posed by global warming arent tangible [. . .] many will sit on their hands and do nothing [. . .] about them. Yet waiting until they become visible and acute [. . .] will, by denition, be too late (2009: 2). This is both a problem of free-riding and of individuals discounting future harms in favour of immediate benets (Giddens 2009: 23, 1012). Despite awareness of climate change, people are generally not spurred to take individual action to mitigate their own contribution to the problem. People drive Sport Utility Vehicles even in the knowledge that they are contributing to global crisis. Giddens sees little chance of the exhortations of environmentalists changing this. He writes that he is quite hostile to attempts to urge people to change their consumption patterns and daily habits in order to reduce their individual carbon footprint. [S]uch endeavours, he argues, are based upon a quite unrealistic assumption that everyone is willing and able to live like the small minority of positive greens (Giddens 2009: 106). These statements demarcate the politics of climate change from the question of how should we live? and the possibility of transforming everyday life as expressed by life politics. Instead, Giddens presents individual choice responding to market signals which governments can inuence by providing positive nancial incentives for adopting more environmentally-friendly products (Giddens 2009: 1067). While governments may edit choice, Giddens accepts the market as the primary mediator of choices in everyday life and, in line with this, sees no possibility of a break within everyday life from modernitys instrumental relationship with nature. Giddens identies the call for people to reduce their consumption with the environmental movements demand that we help save the planet. He argues that this expresses romantic values that are irrelevant to addressing global warming: We must also disavow any remaining forms of mystical reverence for nature, [. . .] tackling global warming has nothing to do with saving the earth, which will survive whatever we do (Giddens 2009: 6, 56). Similarly to Jacobs critique of environmentalism as value-driven (Jacobs 2001: 317), Giddens presents environmentalism as antithetical to modernity and he argues that green ideas are amenable to reactionary politics (2009: 512). He demarcates climate change from green issues, arguing that the fact that climate change can be known and dened only through science distinguishes it from the types of problems that environmentalists more typically address (Giddens 2009: 55). Yet, many of the environmental movements claims depend on science (Yearley 1991; Tesh 2000; Egan 2007). Whether the questions are the effects of agricultural chemicals, radiation from nuclearpower plants, or an oil spills effects on marine life, environmental politics is always deeply interwoven with science. In this way, environmentalism exemplies the reexive character of life-political movements. The value-oriented challenges of life-political movements combine with the way in which abstract systems of expertise call into question previously taken-for-granted features of
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everyday life (Giddens 1990, 1991, 1994). In Politics, however, Giddens insists on a rigid demarcation between a scientic view of climate change and the value-orientation of saving the earth. As well as indicting environmentalism as mystical and anti-scientic, Giddens sees similar anti-modernist sensibilities in environmentalist opposition to capitalist development. He maintains that the green movement is not helpful to the task of integrating environmental concerns into our established political institutions especially due to its history of hostile emotions toward industrial capitalism and markets (2009: 6, 53). Giddens earlier highlighted the tension between nation-state politics and life-political expressions of a reexive citizenry (1994: 10), but in Politics he rejects the environmental movement because it is not well adapted to existing nation-state forms. In these ways, Giddens defends the institutional forms of modernity against the valueoriented challenges posed by life politics.

Climate risk, technology, and the ensuring state The demarcation of climate change from value-considerations informs Giddens treatment of risk. Giddens has previously emphasized that risk is not merely negative but is also an energizing principle linked to the cultural, economic, and technological dynamism of modernity (1998: 63). However, as discussed above, Giddens also treated risk as expressing ontological insecurity and as opening up value-questions suppressed in modernity. Precisely for this reason, the characterization of risk could not be left to experts alone. In contrast, the way in which Giddens applies the concept of risk in Politics suggests a more narrowly economistic conception of weighing costs and benets. Giddens explains that he side[s] with those who are optimistic about humanitys ability to deal with the problems of climate change in the sense that risk and opportunity belong together; from the biggest risks can also ow the greatest opportunities (2009: 228). A cost-benet model of risk is evident in Giddens rejection of the precautionary principle in favour of what he calls the percentage principle according to which there is always a balance of risks and opportunities to be considered (2009: 72, see also 57). Giddens acknowledges that Risks associated with climate change [. . .] shade so far over into uncertainty that they often cannot be calculated with any precision (2009: 174). But if climate risks are highly uncertain, it becomes problematic to argue, as Giddens does, that one can balance risk with opportunity through market means such as assurance bonds and polluter pays mechanisms that entail the ability to assign monetary value (2009: 678; cf. Beck 2009: 1389).2 Uncertainty has, instead, been a motivation for institutionalizing the precautionary principle which seeks to avoid environmental damage by careful forward
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planning and places the burden of proof on those implementing potentially harmful activities (ORiordan and Jordan 1995: 193; see also Raffensperger and Tickner 1999: 89; Wynne 1992). The precautionary principle is, on Giddens view, closely linked with environmentalisms conservationist attitude [. . .] towards nature (Giddens 2009: 57, see also 53). His opposition to conservationism derives from his longstanding view that modernity has brought nature to an end. The value of staying close to nature or conservation, he argues has no direct relevance to climate change (Giddens 2009: 55). The desire to protect animal species from extinction might [. . .] be a worthy one, he writes, but its only connection to climate change is if extinction threatens the ecosystems that help reduce emissions (Giddens 2009: 55).3 Conservationist and environmentalist calls to reduce consumption represent, for Giddens, an attempt to turn back history to a simpler world. Instead, he asserts there can be no overall going back the very expansion of human power that has created such deep problems is the only means of resolving them (2009: 228). Giddens looks for a solution to climate change compatible with his view that the juggernaut of modernity cannot be stopped and must be ridden. He nds this approach in ecological modernization theory (EMT), which envisages sustainability arising from a combination of economic development, technological innovation, and institutional reform (Dryzek 2005: 16779). This represents a marked departure from his more cautious treatment of EMT in The Third Way. There, he remarked that EMT did not adequately acknowledge the conict between environmental protection and economic development (Giddens 1998: 58). Yet, in Politics, he endorses EMT as an approach through which environmental issues could best be dealt with by being normalized by drawing them into the existing framework of social economic institutions, rather than contesting those institutions as many greens chose to do (2009: 70). He also praises EMTs emphasis [. . .] on the role of science and technology in generating solutions to environmental difculties (Giddens 2009: 70). This description of EMT parallels Giddens own arguments for addressing climate change through a surge of technological innovation (2009: 11). Giddens expresses enthusiasm for technologies such as nuclear power and low fuel-consumption hypercars which would allow future economic growth to be decoupled from contributing to climate change (2009: 133, 1401). In this way, his argument aligns with the position of Jacobs and EMT that new technologies enable the dematerialisation of economic activity (Jacobs 2001: 322; cf. York and Rosa 2003). A key way in which Giddens sees technology as assisting with tackling climate change is through increases in energy efciency. He asserts that greater energy efciency ipso facto reduces emissions (Giddens 2009: 107). The idea that energy efciency allows the dematerialization of growth enables Giddens to avoid extending his critique
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of productivism (or what he calls in Politics the fetish of growth) to an endorsement of environmentalists calls for a no-growth society (Giddens 2009: 9, 54). As discussed above, Giddens has been concerned to overcome the automatism of capitalisms growth-imperative, arguing that we are moving toward a post-scarcity society. In Politics he states that we cannot assume that growth is an unalloyed benet and argues that GDP is not necessarily an adequate measure of wellbeing. His view is not that economic growth has to stop, but that it should not be pursued irrespective of its wider consequences and that we should adopt other measures such as the Sustainable Society Index (2009: 656, 71). But he views growth as essential for developing countries even if this process involves a signicant growth in greenhouse gas emissions (2009: 72). Developing countries should therefore have a licence to pollute (2009: 64). The notion of alternative development put forward in Beyond Left and Right is absent in Politics, which instead asserts a development imperative (2009: 9, 64, 72). Giddens looks to Contraction and convergence whereby developed countries reduce their emissions rst, and radically, with poorer countries following suit as they become richer [. . .] Developing nations can increase their emissions for a period in order to permit growth, after which they must begin to reduce them. The two groups will then progressively converge (2009: 645). Since Giddens rules out calling for signicant lifestyle changes, it is crucial for his case that the reductions in emissions are made possible by new technologies. So he seems to take as a normative model the existing material living standards and consumption patterns of developed nations. Although he follows his earlier critique of productivism in the sense of rejecting a view of growth as an unproblematic good, an element of productivism remains in the view that a certain level of production must be achieved before environmental goals can be prioritized. For the spur toward technological energy-efciency and green technology, Giddens looks to a combination of market signals and state action to incentivize consumers and businesses to reduce emissions (2009: 106). He argues that competition will create increased efciency whenever [a] good is exchanged, but the state will have to ensure that externalized costs are brought into the marketplace (2009: 5). Carbon taxes are one method for regulating industry emissions that Giddens advocates (2009: 12, 14955). Such measures would be a component of what Giddens calls a return to planning. However, he emphasizes the difference between this and older socialist or social-democratic models. The kind of active state intervention that Giddens calls for is in line with his earlier conception of the social investment state in The Third Way (2009: 5, 67, 69, 946; 1998: 99128). It is planning not in place of the market, but for the market, using incentives and penalties as means of editing choice, and operating as a catalyst and facilitator of action (2009: 91, 109). The ensuring state facilitates, but also regulates, risk-taking in the
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market (2009: 916; see also Giddens 1998: 100). Giddens suggests that, through taxes, regulations, and incentives, states can promote a shift from energy-intensive practices toward efciency and renewable energy (Giddens 2009: 8, 923). Giddens conceptualizes the ensuring state as having a primarily cooperative relationship with private business and he expresses optimism about the possibility of new forms of mutual action and collaboration between businesses, NGOs and citizens.While he acknowledges that Powerful interests often stand in the way of reform and recognizes the power of business in avoiding emission reduction targets and in lobbying against climate change action, Giddens remains optimistic about the business communitys willingness to cooperate in climate-change mitigation efforts (2009: 11, 93, 11920). He expresses disapproval of the easy demonizing of the industry lobbies, and of big business more generally, that pervades much of the environmental literature and is critical of the left for using climate change as an opportunity to renew the case against markets (2009: 49, 120). There are, he argues, signicant examples of businesses voluntarily moving toward more ecologically sustainable practices. A new generation of business leaders, he writes, is arising which not only acknowledges the perils of climate change, but is active in the vanguard of reaction to it (2009: 121). There is room, however, for scepticism about the depth of such voluntary shifts in corporate practices, and Giddens himself acknowledges the problem of greenwash (2009: 121). Companies often claim to be reducing emissions based on a measure of carbon intensity, while increasing their total energy consumption and emissions. Environmental journalist Fred Pearce writes, The problem is that the atmosphere doesnt recognise this increased efciency. All it does is respond to the extra carbon dioxide in the air by raising temperatures (Pearce 2009). Giddens points to Wal-Marts commitment to reduce its emissions (2009: 121). Yet, critics point out that Wal-Marts business model is highly import-dependent, producing signicant emissions from long-distance container-shipping, and that its big box stores increase car travel by customers (Anderson 2007, Anderson and Waskow 2007: 178; Mitchell 2011). In such cases, while there may be improvements in efciency, the business model is fundamentally carbon-intensive. Corporate interests have also been inuential within the political eld, actively working against progress on climate-change policy. In the USA, oil and gas interests spent over $154 million on lobbying in 2009, including efforts against climate-change legislation (Mulkern 2010). In California, climatechange mitigation legislation (Assembly Bill 32) was enacted in 2006, and Giddens praises it an example of regional climate-change action (2009: 127, 200). However, in 2010, prior to the laws implementation, oil companies and other corporate entities spent millions of dollars supporting a referendum initiative to suspend the law by requiring stringent economic conditions for its
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activation (Roosevelt 2010).4 While this referendum ultimately failed at the polls, it constituted a concerted effort by corporate interests against climatechange policies. Giddens politics of climate change centre on international negotiations between nation-states, cooperation between states and business, and to some extent the role of NGOs in spurring states and businesses into taking action (2009: 5). The key to solving the climate change problem, for Giddens, is the convergence of interests: in the political sphere, the alignment of climate goals with other political goals, such as energy security, and in the economic sphere, alignment of climate action with competitive advantage (2009: 89). While Giddens recognizes that global summits meant to set targets for emissions have largely failed to achieve concrete results (Giddens 2009: 4, 18692, 202; Giddens and Rees 2010), he does not propose truly distinct alternatives to this model. For example, he criticizes the G-8 countries for not making progress on emissions-reduction goals, yet he calls for establishing a body representing the major polluters which would set an example of convergence by showing how emission reductions could be coupled with economic advantage (2009: 2212). The core of Giddens approach to climate change is the notion that the state can shape economic incentives, thereby promoting the convergence of social interests and stimulating technological advances such as in energy efciency.

Conclusion: life politics and climate change Giddens emphasis on technological solutions to climate change is an escape from the unresolved dilemma of how to reconcile his critique of productivism with his view that we must ride modernitys juggernaut: the central tension in his utopian realism. In A Contemporary Critique of Historical Materialism, Giddens argued that capitalism exhibits an unprecedented chronic impetus to both technological innovation and economic expansion (Giddens 1981: 121). In Politics Giddens looks to innovation, especially improvements in energy efciency, to reduce the climatic disruption that accompanies economic growth. But the Jevons paradox indicates that, by lowering costs, improved technological efciency can itself facilitate the expansion of production, increasing overall resource-use and emissions (Foster 2009: 124; York and Rosa 2003: 280; Polimeni et al. 2009; Clark and York 2005: 411; Gould, Pellow, and Schnaiberg 2008: 44). Given capitalisms chronic impetus to growth, the benets of efciency are likely to be swallowed up by the ongoing expansion of production. If technological efciency is no panacea, then there is no solution internal to capitalist modernitys dynamism. The response that is required is not just the application of modernitys science and innovation to modernitys risks, but a more fully ethical reexivity, calling into question our modern ways
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of living and thinking (see also McKechnie and Welsh 2002). This is the kind of broad ethical reexivity that Giddens has argued is characteristic of life politics. However, Politics operates with a highly restrictive value-frame that marginalizes life politics in favour of instrumental and technocratic approaches. Giddens adopts an economistic approach to conceptualizing climate risk as a set of costs and benets and to understanding political action in terms of instrumentally rational action motivated by economic incentives. He suggests that if these incentives can be structured properly, currently divergent interests will tend to converge. Giddens explicitly rejects the salience of an approach that calls on individuals to change their worldview and mode of everyday living. He presents environmentalists call for an ethical reorientation in attitudes as irrelevant to the problem of climate change. This is in contrast to the view expressed in a recent joint report by the Climate Outreach and Information Network, the Campaign to Protect Rural England, Friends of the Earth, Oxfam, and the World Wildlife Fund. This report, titled Common Cause: The Case for Working with our Cultural Values, stresses the importance of deep value-frames in motivating political action (Crompton 2010). The report argues that treating climate change as primarily an economic problem, as in the Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change, may undermine the compelling moral arguments for action (Crompton 2010: 51, emphasis in original). Ingolfur Blhdorn similarly criticizes policy agendas relying on technological xes and incremental reform. He writes: As these techno-managerial approaches reinforce rather than challenge the underlying values and logic governing advanced modern societies [. . .] they may actually themselves accelerate the depletion of the cultural resources on which sustainability vitally depends. (Blhdorn 2009: 4) Politics instantiates such cultural depletion, since a major thrust of this book is toward discrediting the environmentalist valuation of nature for its own sake. Instead, the values that Giddens puts forward in Politics are those that mesh with the instrumentalist orientation of capitalist culture. He argues that with risk comes opportunity and that tackling climate change can be a positive-sum game since it will create economic opportunities. Giddens response to climate change mirrors what Jordan has argued is the broader tendency of the Third Way to base policy on a utilitarian rational-actor model of society as composed of individuals organized through market incentives and contractual regulation (Jordan 2010: esp. 3, 4362). Politics reinforces an instrumental frame of rational self-interest congruent both with market individualism and with the pursuit of national self-interest by states.
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Politics participates in what Giddens previously referred to as modernitys suppression of existential dilemmas. The value question of how should we live? is suppressed in the book, as Giddens rejects the relevance of change in everyday modes of living and instead prioritizes elite action (by policymakers and enlightened corporate leaders), asserts an imperative of economic development, and calls for More of the same in the sense of the pursuit of scientic and technological development (2009: 6, 93). Politics therefore responds to climate change in the technical-instrumental mode of simple modernization, abandoning the insights of high-modern reexivity. This reexivity has to do not only with the way abstract systems of expertise impinge on everyday life, but also the ooding back of repressed existential concerns, and their expression in life politics. Environmentalisms reconsideration of the human relationship with the broader living world manifests modernitys inability to keep existential dilemmas and associated value-questions at bay. The contradiction basic to human existence of being both in nature and transcending it is no longer effectively suppressed in the pursuit of economic growth and scientic-technical advance and mediated through the structures of the state. A key dimension of highmodern reexivity is that it has become apparent that the instrumental control of nature through science and technology produces new hazards and uncertainties. This occurs in a context of the wasteland of everyday life with few patterned ways of mediating existential problems (Giddens 1981: 13). For this reason, the re-emergence of these suppressed dilemmas calls modern everyday life into question, presenting life-style as a value problem. Giddens insists that there is no going back either to tradition or nature. Nature has ended in the sense that it can no longer be taken for granted. But this does not provide grounds for suggesting that nature has ceased altogether to be a meaningful category (Dickens 1999: 1024). Giddens recognition that capitalist accumulation [. . .] is not self-sustaining in terms of resources and reference to environmental limits in terms of the earths resources suggest that it is still possible to speak of natural resources as an external condition for human economic activity (1990: 165; 1994: 10). And his discussion of problems of deciding what to preserve implies that it does still make sense to think of natural ecosystems as an evolved inheritance to be conserved rather than a product of human activity (Giddens 1994: 212). Problems of pollution are not just problems of our created environment but of how what we create interacts with features of the physical and biological world that human beings have not created and do not control. For example, in the case of global warming, humans transform nature by burning fossil fuels, but do not create or control the heat absorption characteristics of carbon dioxide or the interactions between the Earths atmosphere and oceans. Climate change therefore represents a complex interaction between nature and technologized second nature. The effects of climate change on weather patterns (producing oods, droughts, and
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storms) exemplify how nature returns in a way in which what is natural and what is unnatural is problematic. This lack of distinctness of the boundary between the human and non-human nature is a key dimension of the ontological insecurity of high modernity. While some forms of environmentalism, notably deep ecology, do try to derive values from pure nature, this is just one part of the more complex way in which ecological politics foregrounds and contests problems of how to value nature, and how to decide what to preserve. Giddens wrote that nineteenthcentury romanticism gave rise to Antecedent forms of todays green movements (1990: 161). But environmentalism has developed beyond these origins. Contemporary environmentalism operates not only with romantic valuerepertoires, but also with scientic knowledge-claims which it mobilizes even while contesting technocratic authority (Yearley 1991; Fischer 2000; Egan 2007; Tesh 2000). Environmentalist movements challenge the demarcation of risk debates within the boundaries of technical knowledge, and insist on the moral and aesthetic value-dimensions of these issues (McKechnie and Welsh 2002; Wynne 2002). In doing so, these movements carry an awareness that environmental issues are not just about better management of pollution, but are also existential troubles that require ethical reection concerning the place of human beings in relation to the physical and biological world of nature (see also Jordan 2010: 823). Modern ecological problems such as climate change re-open the existential contradiction under conditions in which this is no longer adequately mediated by social institutions but becomes a pressing source of ontological insecurity, calling forth new modes of reexivity. While the existential contradiction appears in new form, it continues to be related in complex ways with structural contradictions of the state. Action on climate change is mired in the structural contradictions of the capitalist state. One can see in climate change the contradiction between socialized production and private appropriation, especially in the sense in which productions externalities are socialized in the form of pollution while prot is privately appropriated.The dependence of the state on private accumulation is a signicant obstacle to international agreement as states are unwilling to agree to climate regulation that could adversely affect the competitiveness of their national economies (see also Jordan 2010: 1423). Giddens sociological theory provides a conceptual framework for understanding the social dimensions of climate change as a problem in which the suppressed existential dilemma of the human relationship with nature returns and is made manifest, but is also deeply entangled with contradictions of the capitalist state. Existential dilemmas that return in high modernity are expressed in life politics. However, this opens up a new contradiction between this form of politics and the forms of participation institutionalized in the nation-state. Giddens proposals for democratizing democracy were in recognition of the need for new institutionalized forms of participation enabling the
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expression of life politics. However, life-political questioning of values at the level of everyday life largely goes without institutional articulation, falling between the structures of the state and the market. Giddens approach to the politics of climate change is symptomatic of this gap, as he abandons the life-political component of the Third Way in favour of a technocratic and managerial approach in which the key actors are businesses, politicians and ofcials. In Politics, citizens are relegated to a role in support of policymaking. Giddens writes that, while generating widespread political support from citizens is necessary,for better or worse, the state retains many of the powers that have to be invoked if a serious impact on global warming is to be made (Giddens 2009: 91).The problem with this state-centered conception of politics is that it fails to express and articulate the active stance towards the conditions of their existence that Giddens has argued is characteristic of a society of high reexivity (Giddens 1994: 87). The signicance of environmentalism, as a life-political movement, is precisely the way it calls into question conditions of existence taken for granted in modernity. The challenge environmentalism poses is to re-evaluate our everyday practices and social and economic organization in light both of a scientic understanding of environmental harms and of an ethical reformulation of the place of humanity in the natural world. The lack of integration of environmentalism into orthodox politics stems from the contradiction between the dominant structures of the capitalist state and the forms of reexivity carried by life-political movements. This contradiction between life politics and the capitalist state is key for understanding the failures so far of policy responses to climate change. (Date accepted: November 2012)

Notes
1. The authors would like to thank Jennifer Nations for her input at an early stage of this work, and Ingmar Lippert for comments on an earlier draft. We are also very grateful to this journals anonymous referees for their enormously helpful feedback. 2. The notion of balancing risk and opportunity is, in general, problematic when applied to environmental problems. When one makes a monetary investment in a venture, potential losses are nite (limited to the amount invested), while the opportunities may be virtually innite. With the
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environment, this calculation is reversed: potential losses are innite and they may be irreversible as in the case of extinction. There may also be a long time-delay before environmental harms become fully evident and chains of causality are often extremely complex. 3. The connection between conservation and efforts to mitigate climate change is, in fact, highly signicant, since emissions from deforestation make up 17 to 20 per cent of annual global greenhouse gas emissions (Secretariat of the Convention on Biological
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emission controls until unemployment drops to 5.5 percent or less for [a] full year http://www.voterguide.sos.ca.gov/ propositions/23/ (Accessed May 5, 2011). See also Campaign Finance: Yes on 23, California Jobs Initiative, a Coalition of Taxpayers, Employers, Food Producers, Energy, Transportation and Forestry Companies, Cal-Access, http://cal-access.ss.ca. gov/Campaign/Committees/Detail.aspx?id= 1323890&session=2009&view=general (Accessed June 14, 2012).

Diversity and Deutsche Gesellschaft fr Internationale Zusammenarbeit 2011: 11). The United Nations Global Biodiversity Outlook Report argues,The linked challenges of biodiversity loss and climate change must be addressed by policy-makers with equal priority and in close co-ordination, if the most severe impacts of each are to be avoided (Secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity 2010: 11). 4. The measure, Proposition 23, would have suspended implementation of the

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