P OL I T I C A L S T UD IES: 2002 VO L 50, 659682

Environmental Transformation of the State: the USA, Norway, Germany and the UK
John S. Dryzek
Australian National University with

Christian Hunold
Drexel University

David Schlosberg
Northern Arizona University

David Downes
Victoria Department of Education

Hans-Kristian Hernes
University of Troms

Modern states underwent two major transformations that produced rst, the liberal capitalist state and second, the welfare state. Each was accompanied by the migration of a previously confrontational movement into the core of the state. In the creation of the liberal capitalist state, the bourgeoisie could harmonize with the states emerging interest in economic growth. In the creation of the welfare state, the organized working class could harmonize with the states emerging interest in legitimating the political economy by curbing capitalisms instability and inequality. We show that environmental conservation could now emerge as a core state interest, growing out of these established economic and legitimation imperatives. This examination is grounded in a comparative historical study of four countries: the USA, Norway, Germany, and the UK, each of which exemplies a particular kind of interest representation. We show why the USA was an environmental pioneer around 1970, why it was then eclipsed by Norway, and why Germany now leads in addressing environmental concerns.

The modern state embodies residues of the social movements that gave it form. In Europe, the social movement of the bourgeoisie against aristocracy, monarchy, and theocracy helped create the liberal state. Later, the social movement of the organized working class against unrestrained capitalism helped create the welfare state. We investigate the prospects for a third transformation: the development of a green state made possible by the incorporation of environmentalism. At present there are no green states in the terms we dene. But our inquiry is not merely speculative. It is grounded in a comparative history of the environmental movement since its emergence in the late 1960s and its relation to the state in the USA, Norway, Germany, and the UK. These four states are selected because each represents the best approximation to an ideal type of orientation to civil society. Our classication of states has two dimensions. On the rst, states are either exclusive or inclusive towards social interests. Exclusive states limit effective representation to a chosen few, denying access to others. Represented interests might cover substantial numbers for example, a union federation but their ordinary members have little voice. Here we are concerned only with open and developed societies, where exclusive states nd it
Political Studies Association, 2002. Published by Blackwell Publishing, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA

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Table 1: Classifying States

Inclusive Passive Active Pluralism: USA Expansive corporatism: Norway Exclusive Legal corporatism: Germany Authoritarian liberalism: UK 197990 and beyond

necessary to welcome at least some actors, if only large corporations. Inclusive states are open to a wider range of interests, though equality of access and inuence is not required. On the second dimension, states are either passive or active in their orientation to who gets represented. An active state is prescriptive when it comes to the character of interests that are organized in civil society and take political force. Thus an active state tries to affect both the content and power of political interests. In contrast, a passive state is agnostic when it comes to the range of organizations and movements active in civil society, and does not try either to promote or impede the capacities of particular groups. Combining the two dimensions produces four ideal state types, as shown in Table 1.1 A passively inclusive state accepts any mix of groups and movements generated by social forces. This acceptance might involve access for interest group lobbyists to legislatures and administrative agencies, or the ability of a movement to organize as a party to contest and win seats in elections, or integration of activists into established party organizations, or receptiveness on the part of the legal system. The most pervasive contemporary kind of passive inclusion is a pluralism in which a variety of interest groups can utilize multiple points of access to the state. An actively inclusive state, in contrast, does not simply accept the mix of interests generated by social forces. Rather, government ofcials anticipate and organize interests into the state to secure a desired pattern of interest articulation. Among developed states, active inclusion is associated with expansive corporatism. Traditionally, corporatism involved tripartite concertation in policy making by the executive branch of government along with encompassing business and labor federations (see Schmitter and Lehmbruch, 1979), which rein in their members in exchange for a share in policy making. Expansive corporatism moves beyond the traditional form to include in addition groups such as womens and environmental organizations. Traditional corporatism exemplies the passively exclusive state form, in that once labor and business have been organized into the state, other interests are left out. Exclusion is passive because the state simply leaves these interests alone, providing few channels of inuence but otherwise doing nothing to undermine them. Parliament is often inconsequential, so public policy does not respond to election results. An actively exclusive state attempts to prevent the formation and impede the operation of social movements that oppose its agenda. Within developed open

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societies, the best examples are states under the inuence of market liberal ideology. (Obviously, dictatorships in less developed societies are mostly actively exclusive.) Market liberalism supplies a public choice theory of politics that interprets motivation in self-interested material terms. Thus organized interests are believed to seek benets for themselves at high cost to taxpayers or to the efciency of the economy, and so merit destruction. The initial targets are normally trades unions, but attacks can be extended to other movements and organizations. The USA is the best example of a passively inclusive state, its pluralism presenting comparatively few obstacles to, and every incentive for, social movements to organize as interest groups to lobby government. (The radical literature by authors such as Connolly, 1969, claiming that the USA falls far short of pluralist ideals, leaves our comparative classication unmoved.) Norway is an actively inclusive state that organizes concerns that in other countries would motivate social movements. Germany is passively exclusive. While some countries are more corporatist than Germany, there are no better approximations to passive exclusion, which in Germany is buttressed by administrative secrecy and a legalistic, organic, unitary notion of the public interest that sees opposition as illegitimate obstruction. The UK in the 1980s is the best example of an actively exclusive state, where government deliberately tried to undermine the conditions for association in civil society. These categorizations are enduring but not immutable. The USA and Norway are unchanging since the 1960s. Germanys passive exclusion changed somewhat in the 1990s, though limited increases in points of access and the Greens entry into the federal governing coalition in 1998 actually left most of the apparatus of legal corporatism intact. The UK sees more signicant changes with time, becoming in the 1990s something of a dual state with both actively exclusive and passively inclusive faces. We will attend to such changes, which complicate but do not vitiate our analysis. We use this framework to explain why the USA was around 1970 an environmental pioneer, but has now lost that status; why Norway is among the greenest of states, but unlikely to become any greener; why transformation to a green state is now most plausible in Germany; and why the UK was long not in the running (though that may nally be changing). These comparative performance judgments require empirical corroboration. The problem is that there are no widely accepted summary indicators of environmental performance (of the sort we can use, for example, to measure welfare state development). Countries face different sorts of environmental problems, and some (for example, Japan) are adept at exporting environmental stress in a way that would not show up in summary indicators. That said, our ranking of the four countries in the 1990s is corroborated by three recent summary assessments. Jahn (1998) computes an index of environmental performance based on pollution levels (air, water, soil, and solid waste) and changes in these levels over a previous decade. For 1990, out of 18 OECD countries, Germany ranks second, while Norway, the UK, and USA rank tenth, fourteenth, and fteenth respectively. Scruggs (2001) computes a performance index based on rates of change in pollution levels between 1980 and 1995. Among 17 OECD countries, Germany ranks rst, while Norway, the USA, and UK rank tenth, twelfth, and thirteenth.

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Table 2: Comparative Environmental Performance Rankings, 1990s

Our ranking Germany Norway UK USA 1 2 3 4 Jahn index 1 2 3 4 Scruggs index 1 2 4 3 Lafferty and Meadowcroft 2= 1 2= 4 WEF index 3 1 4 2

Note: 1 = Country ranked rst of the 4 countries here, 2 = second, and so on.

Using more in-depth and nuanced comparisons of government engagement with the idea of sustainable development over the 198798 period, Lafferty and Meadowcroft (2000, p. 412) classify Norways response as enthusiastic, Germany and the UK as cautiously supportive, and the USA as disinterested (they mean uninterested). They recognize that in 1990 Germany was a pioneer, but that a rigid statist approach to policy and a preoccupation with the consequences of unication in the 1990s meant that it slipped back. However, they believe Germany was on the comeback trail in the late 1990s even before the formation of the SDP/Green coalition in the fall of 1998 (p. 419). We agree with Lafferty and Meadowcroft that the assessment of performance and, we would add, potential must be done in a way that goes beyond summary indices to look at policy commitments (and, we believe, problem solving beyond the state). The USA was a pioneer in the 1970s because of the content of its policies, irrespective of immediate improvements in quantitative performance. These comparisons are summarized in Table 2, along with the ranking of potential for environmental transformation that we will develop in this paper. For the sake of completeness, we also present a 2001 ranking of environmental sustainability done for the World Economic Forum by researchers at Yale and Columbia Universities in which we have little condence.2 The latter aside, these studies conrm our placement of the UK and USA in the laggard category in the 1990s, and Germany and Norway as leaders. But our case studies must dig beneath this surface. The key in each case is the degree to which environmental conservation can become part of the core business of the state, as opposed to just another area of government activity. To answer this question, we need an account of just what that core consists of, and how it came to be that way. So we begin with a brief (inevitably stylized and oversimplied) history of the state.

A Brief History of the State

The early modern authoritarian state had three core tasks: to keep order internally, compete internationally, and raise the resources to nance these rst two tasks (Skocpol, 1979). These can be termed the domestic order, survival, and revenue imperatives. State imperatives can be dened as the functions that governmental

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structures have to carry out to ensure their own longevity and stability. Such imperatives will always be in the interests of public ofcials, overriding any competing preferences they may have. In the early modern state, revenue was raised via extractive taxation from a fairly static economic base. With the development of capitalism, a growing economy enabled revenues to increase without any increase in rates of taxation, while simultaneously promoting social order by increasing the size of the economic pie. Thus a fourth imperative developed from domestic order and revenue: the economic one of securing economic growth (what Marxists call accumulation). This development enabled entry of the bourgeoisie into the state from the critical public sphere it had previously constituted (Habermas, 1989), for its interest in prots was now in harmony with the economic growth imperative. The further development of capitalism produced an organized working class that threatened the stability of the political economy. At rst this challenge was met by repression. Eventually the welfare state developed to cushion the working class against the dislocations of capitalism. Thus a fth imperative developed from the domestic order one: what post-Marxists (e.g. Offe, 1984) would call legitimation. This development enabled entry of the organized working class into the state, for its dening redistributive interest could be attached to the legitimation imperative. Contemporary states engage in many activities not captured by these ve core functions. However, these ve imperatives domestic order, survival, revenue, economic and legitimation dene the core of the state. This core is a zone of necessity. It features only limited democratic control, because democracy connotes indeterminacy in policy content. Lindblom (1982) refers to an imprisoned zone of policy making conditioned by the need to maintain the condence of actual and potential investors our economic imperative. When it comes to foreign and security policy, it has long been recognized that reasons of state often prevail over popular control (Smith, 1986). The periphery of state activity is more indeterminate, hence potentially more democratic. It matters a great deal to a social movement whether or not it can connect its dening interest to a core imperative. If it can, there are in principle no limits to the degree to which the movement can penetrate to the states core (be it as a political party, interest group, or party faction). Clearly the entry of rst the bourgeoisie and then the working class into the state was a good bargain for the class in question, because each could connect its dening interest with an emerging imperative. If such a connection cannot be made, then a movement is likely to receive symbolic or marginal rewards as a result of its engagement with the state. Whenever the movements interest comes up against the core, the movement loses; it is co-opted (Saward, 1992). Many contemporary social movements have little prospect of securing such a connection to the core. Movements such as that for civil rights in the USA, racial or ethnic equality elsewhere, and feminism have had sporadic success in linking to the legitimation imperative especially when they have demonstrated a destabilizing capacity. This situation long characterized environmentalism, locked in a zero-sum conict with the economic imperative with a predictable losing outcome

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Table 3: Three Transformations of the State

Kind of state Early modern Liberal capitalist Keynesian welfare Green Movement incorporated None Early bourgeois public sphere Unions, socialist parties State imperatives Domestic order, survival, revenue Domestic order, survival, revenue, economic growth Domestic order, survival, revenue, economic growth, legitimation Domestic order, survival, revenue, economic growth, legitimation, conservation

Environmentalism

whenever it approached the states core, alleviated (as we will show) only by a transient connection to legitimation in the USA. We will show how this situation can change in that the dening interest of environmentalism can be linked to the economic and legitimation imperatives more securely. Thus contemporary environmentalism has historical signicance that other movements have yet to demonstrate though we invite analyses that parallel our own (for example, for feminism). The emergence of the economic imperative enabled democratization of the modern state through inclusion of the bourgeoisie in the core, creating the liberal capitalist state. The emergence of the legitimation imperative further democratized the state by including the organized working class in the core, creating the welfare state. The emergence of an environmental conservation imperative would further democratize the state by including environmentalists in the core, creating the green state.3 These three transformations are summarized in Table 3. However, the prospects for the third transformation vary substantially across our four kinds of states. Our story begins with the USA.

How the USA Became an Environmental Pioneer, then Fell Behind

When modern environmentalism arrived in the late 1960s it did so in a manner that challenged the core economic imperative. Aside from the inchoate idealism and anti-materialism of the rst Earth Day in 1970, the discourse was predominantly one of limits and survival. This discourse crystallized in the efforts of the Club of Rome, which sponsored the Limits to Growth study carried out by a team at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Meadows et al., 1972) which soon sold over four million copies worldwide. The basic message of the book was that exponential human economic and population growth would eventually hit limits imposed by either the xed quantity of the worlds resources or the carrying capacity of the ecosphere. It is hard to imagine a more direct challenge to the states economic imperative. Thus the limits discourse did not have any profound

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impact on the policies of states let alone on the identied need for coordinated global action. Yet the early 1970s did see a massive burst of environmental policy innovation. The USA was the trailblazer in setting up a federal Environmental Protection Agency, in passing a National Environmental Policy Act to force all government agencies to consider the environmental effects of their plans using environmental impact assessment, and in legislation such as the Clean Air Act and Water Pollution Control Act. This comprehensive embrace of (moderate) environmentalism on the part of the federal government suggested that environmentalists were welcomed into the core of the state. How could this happen, in the face of the evident conict between early 1970s environmentalisms dening interest and the economic imperative? The answer is that environmentalism could be linked to the legitimation imperative. The USA in the late 1960s saw a movement against the Vietnam War, a radicalization of sections of the civil rights movement for racial equality, which along with movements for womens liberation and radical environmentalism aligned with an anti-system counterculture. To contain this destabilization, the Nixon administration sought to make peace with the environmental movement, and so pull it away from those parts of the counterculture more explicitly interested in undermining the US political system. The Nixon administration, enthusiastically supported by Congress, sought to regain legitimacy for the political economy without acceding to more radical counter-cultural demands. The environmental movement did not by itself threaten legitimacy, but the discontent manifest in the numerous movements of the time was widely perceived as a threat (Crozier et al., 1975). The imperatives of the state and the environmental movement were not identical, but the threat to legitimation from the anti-war and New Left movements could be met by inclusion of a different but related movement environmentalism. By identifying his administration with the environmental cause, Nixon explicitly sought to distinguish between the antisystem New Left and counter-cultural activists and the consensus-seeking effort to x the system (Gottlieb, 1993, p. 109). In his State of the Union address in 1970, Nixon argued that the environment is an issue of common cause which would allow the nation to move beyond factions. He hoped to pull the environment movement from the grasp of the New Left, and succeeded brilliantly. The USA was the leader in environmental policy in this era, and many other countries copied its policy initiatives, such as a national regulatory agency for pollution control, impact assessment, a council of environmental advisors (modeled on the US Council on Environmental Quality), and professional resource management bureaucracies. However, the copies rarely had the power of the original precisely because nobody else faced an urgent legitimation threat. Matters changed quickly with the passing of this threat and the arrival of the energy crisis in 1973. The inclusion of the movement in the state in the form of a set of interest groups persisted, but the economic imperative and the necessity to secure energy supplies now came to the fore. From 1973 onward, from the construction of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline to George W. Bushs 2001 withdrawal from the Kyoto

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Protocol on greenhouse gas emissions, when environmentalists encountered the economic imperative, they normally lost (though some legislative momentum was retained in the mid 1970s, and of course environmentalists had many successes in the periphery of the state). We do not have the space to go over every issue, but instead simply examine the peak of environmentalist inclusion achieved during the Clinton presidency. In the initial days of the new administration, about two dozen environmentalists were hired directly from environmental groups (Dowie, 1995, p. 178). Beyond positions in Interior, Agriculture, and the EPA, they were also appointed in the State Department, Ofce of Management and Budget, and the National Security Council. Other sympathetic appointees included Bruce Babbitt (former head of the League of Conservation Voters) as Secretary of the Interior and Carol Browner at the EPA. Audubon lobbyist Brock Evans is famously quoted as saying I cant tell you how wonderful it is to walk down the hall in the White House or a government agency and be greeted by your rst name (Dowie, 1995, p. 179). Yet these appointments belie a deeper problem in an administration that featured access without inuence. In 1992 Clinton campaigned on proposals to raise fuel economy standards in cars, and to elevate the EPA to cabinet-level; he backed down on both. He proposed a tax on energy use; Democratic friends of the oil and gas industry persuaded him to drop it. Babbitt at Interior proposed to protect rangelands by raising grazing fees on government lands closer to their true market value, and to reform antiquated and costly mining laws. But he was defeated on both grazing and mining. Babbitt also created a new National Biological Service; it was eviscerated within two years. Other setbacks included an Everglades protection plan that allowed sugar growers to continue destructive pesticide use, and the rst move toward a repeal of the Delaney Clause specifying zero tolerance for carcinogens. All this occurred in the rst two years of the Clinton administration, while the Democrats still controlled Congress. This kind of co-optive outcome is secured by the passively inclusive character of the American state. It is very difcult for movements to resist the lure of organization as an interest group and subsequent devotion of energies to fundraising, lobbying, participation in public hearings, and litigation. Correspondingly, the USA long featured less in the way of a green public sphere at a distance from the state of the sort we will shortly describe for Germany. The emergence of the US environmental justice movement in the 1980s and 1990s might appear to contradict this summary judgment. However, this movement arose largely in response to a kind of passive exclusion practiced by the established major groups in association with government; local activists felt that they and their concerns were excluded by the majors and the state, and so developed alternative forms of action (Schlosberg, 1999). When environmental justice advocates succumbed to the lure of passive inclusion and moved into government, they typically encountered frustration (Dryzek et al., 2003, Chapter 3). The rise of the environmental justice movement did not coincide with any legitimation crisis, and so could not change the character of the state in the way its predecessor did around 1970. Moreover, in the US, environment and economy remain cast in zero-sum conict, precluding connec-

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tion to the economic imperative of the sort we will shortly describe for Norway and Germany. These problems prevent the articulation of environmental interests in such a way as to enable their eventual connection to core state imperatives, but this will take a comparative perspective to reveal. With the pioneering US role in environmental policy now a distant memory, more interesting possibilities exist in states with different sorts of orientations to social movements. These states, notably Germany, are better placed to take advantage of some emerging changes to imperatives that are in principle common to all states. Before turning to the experience of these states, we consider the content of these changes.

Ecological Modernization and Risk Society

Ecological modernization posits that the basic system of capitalist production and consumption can be rendered less wasteful, more efcient, and so more sustainable. In this light, pollution represents inefcient usage of materials. Pollution prevention pays further because a clean and pleasant environment means highquality inputs to production, happy and healthy workers, and opportunities for prot in clean technology. Thus economic growth and environmental conservation can be mutually supportive.4 In this basic or weak form (Christoff, 1996), ecological modernization promises continued economic growth without disruption to the liberal capitalist political economy. On this view, mature movement groups can discard radical critique, informal organizational structures, and protest politics in favor of pragmatism and professionalization, taken seriously by government and business. Continued scientic uncertainty does however mean reliance on the precautionary principle, in which any possibility of signicant and irreversible environmental damage is met with preventative action. Weak ecological modernization is a moderate social project (see Mol, 1996 for a defense) that has permeated policy making in several West European countries, beginning in Germany and the Netherlands in the 1980s. Ecological modernization is resisted in the USA, where policy discourse features an old-fashioned stand-off between economy and environment. Rather than asking more fundamental questions about how to balance and integrate economic growth and ecological sustainability, policy-makers are mired in efforts to defend or attack the regulatory system that has been in place since the 1970s (Bryner, 2000, p. 277). This situation is solidied by the conservative majority in Congress and the policy positions of the George W. Bush administration (for exceptions to this rule, see Gore, 1992; Lovins and Lovins, 1999). With few exceptions (such as Resource Advisory Councils for range-land management), the politics of land management and wilderness protection still pits old adversaries against one another (loggers, miners, and ranchers on one side, environmentalists on the other). The environmental justice movement may have, in the words of its most visible campaigner, Lois Gibbs, succeeded in plugging the toilet on waste disposal, but this has not led to the creative redesign of production processes to minimize waste generation.

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A stronger version of ecological modernization questions the structure of the political economy and argues the need for a discursive and democratic negotiation of the terms of an ecological modernity (Christoff, 1996). This strong form has made limited headway in Germany. Weak or strong, ecological modernization is attractive to many environmentalists because it allows their concerns to be taken seriously in a world where economics is the rst concern of government; in our terms, it enables attachment of environmental values to the core economic imperative. The risk society thesis, popularized by Ulrich Beck (1992), argues that politics in developed societies is increasingly about the production, selection, distribution, and amelioration of risks. Such risks relate to nuclear power, genetically modied organisms, food safety (as in the Mad Cow Disease/BSE issue in Europe), and toxic chemicals. To Beck, the degree to which this new politics supplants the class politics of industrial society heralds a reexive modernity where society confronts the unintended consequences generated by the combination of science, technology, and economics that has driven progress. Progress itself is called into question, especially if dened in technological terms, along with faith in economic growth and scientic rationality. For Beck, reexive modernization is furthered by a decentralized subpolitics where non-governmental actors constitute political spaces where problems can be solved without exclusive reliance on the state. Examples include both confronting corporations directly through boycotts and protests, and working cooperatively with corporations to minimize risks. In our terms, risk society connotes a legitimation crisis of the political economy. Environmentalists therefore have the opportunity to connect those aspects of their dening interest that can be expressed in terms of confronting risks with the legitimation imperative of the state. Ecological modernization enables connection of environmental values to the states economic imperative, while risk issues enable connection to legitimation. These two developments could make environmental conservation an additional imperative. There is in fact considerable overlap between strong ecological modernization and subpolitics of the sort Beck postulates. The conceptual continuum of ecological modernization maps on to a continuum of strategies practiced by environmental movements, with the weak version corresponding to moderate action, the strong version to more radical, discursive politics. However, the mediating inuence of state structure will make some strategies from this continuum more available to particular groups than others. Hence the mix of movement strategies will vary across different national contexts, as will the content of public policies. Ecological modernization is not available to all states equally, as we will show. The mix of groups emphasizing action within the corridors of the state and those seeking to establish more autonomous public spheres should then vary crossnationally. Such spheres are concerned with public affairs, but are separate from, and often confront, the state, while not seeking any formal share in state power of the kind sought by interest groups and political parties (Isaac, 1993). This last feature is consistent with the denition of new social movements as self-limiting (Cohen, 1985).

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Actively Inclusive Norway: Weak Ecological Modernization, No Subpolitics

Our framework predicts that environmentalists facing an actively inclusive state are well placed to participate in weak ecological modernization. However, they also face the greatest challenge in achieving and sustaining strong ecological modernization and associated subpolitics. For actively inclusive states cultivate groups that moderate their demands in exchange for state funding and guaranteed participation in policy making. Conventional and routinized forms of engagement will dominate environmental politics. These expectations are borne out for Norway. Norway is an organizational society (Selle and Strmsnes, 1998, p. 5). There is consensus that the third sector should receive nancial support from government. By 2000, 19 groups were receiving operating and project grants administered by the Ministry of the Environment. Total funding has expanded consistently over the years. The main beneciary has been the Norwegian Society for the Conservation of Nature. The law that set up operating grants for environmental groups was very much a lex Naturvernforbundet. Project grants are distributed in accordance with governments priorities (for example, sustainable consumption in the early-mid 1990s), and the grant species what must be done with the money. Thus environmental groups do not in general constitute an autonomous public sphere; they are arms of the state. They not only implement government policy, but also help to make it (Smillie and Filewod, 1993, p. 217), reinforcing Rokkans (1966) description of Norway as a plural corporatist state. Norway is the country of a thousand committees (Klausen and Opedal, 1998). Committees are set up by cabinet, and are used to generate proposals for parliament, traditionally a rubber stamp for committee decisions. They can be permanent or short-lived, and environmental groups are represented on both be it a temporary committee that oversaw the introduction of green taxes in 1991, or the permanent Fisheries Management Board. Committees are central to sectoral corporatism. The fact that committees generally work behind closed doors means that ordinary members of groups have little inuence. Groups rely on government rather than their members for nance, so it is not surprising that Norways environmental organizations have a signicantly lower member support base than those in neighboring countries. The largest group, the Society for the Conservation of Nature, has just 28,000 members, whereas its equivalents in Sweden (which has about double the population) and Denmark (with about the same population) exceed 200,000 members (Selle and Strmsnes, 1998). Unlike the USA and UK, the moderation of the established Norwegian groups has not been met by a resurgence of radical activism in the 1990s. The only time Norway saw such activism was in anti-dam protests at Mardla (1970) and Alta (1980). In both cases Norways hydropower complex prevailed, dams were constructed, and the movements faded. New groups did appear in the 1990s, but of a very odd sort. The Environmental Home Guard was established to support the governments sustainable development agenda, but has no members, only participants who promise to behave in environmentally sound ways. The most visible group became the Bellona Foundation,

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which seeks only money from supporters, not inuence from members, and also engages in consultancy work for business. Bellona is really more of an environmental enterprise than a movement, but in the absence of any possibilities for the development of activist organizations independent from the state, this organizational form may be the only available response to the incorporation and decline of the older groups. Surprisingly for an electoral system featuring proportional representation, Norway has only a tiny and inconsequential green party, perhaps because environmentalists recognize that the committee system is where the action takes place, not parliament. So the overall picture is of a movement small in numbers, activism, and autonomy. The moderation of the movement is highlighted by the lack of any domestic opposition to the main blot on Norways environmental record, commercial whaling. Still, the public perception that Norway is leading most other European nations in environmental policy (Sverdrup, 1997, p. 74) is in many ways correct, as conrmed by the comparative performance studies cited earlier. The days when the hydropower complex dened part of the core of the state from which environmentalists were excluded are long gone. As bets the home of Gro Harlem Brundtland, sustainable development has been pursued seriously since the late 1980s, and Norway has pioneered the application of green taxes to environmental bads. There is no core of the state off limits to environmentalists, who have secured participation in crucial policy-making committees not just via the Environment Ministry (to which their German counterparts are conned). Norway is rightly regarded as a leader when it comes to ecological modernization. The cooperative relationship between business, environmentalists, science, and government is well placed to oversee the project (though there is some business resistance to green taxes; Kasa, 2000). However, ecological modernization in Norway is weak and set to remain a moderate, top-down project. No signicant actors raise critical questions about the structure of the political economy or the basic direction of public policy, no social movements constitute an autonomous public sphere that can act as both a source of ideas and a reminder of the seriousness of concerns. These absences are reinforced perhaps guaranteed by the Norwegian state structure. The risk society thesis does not appear to play out at all; that is, issues of environmental risk do not affect the legitimacy of the political economy, and so do not provide opportunities for political innovation such as Becks subpolitics. Norway is in the end a thin democracy where policy is made in committees behind closed doors with no opportunities for grassroots inuence. To see how matters can be different, let us turn to Germany.

Passively Exclusive Germany: Stronger Ecological Modernization and Subpolitics

Germany is the best example of a passively exclusive state. Germanys dominant policy style is legal corporatism, with extensive cooperation between government and various private associations granted public standing by law (Lehmbruch and Schmitter, 1982; Offe, 1981). In keeping with the Prussian administrative tradition, groups without this privileged status received no access and no information

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from a public bureaucracy hostile to freedom-of-information requests. The paternalistic behavior of civil servants is rooted in the countrys Rechtsstaat legalistic tradition (Dyson, 1980; Loughlin and Peters, 1994), where law expresses the states will. The public interest is specied in terms of abstract legal norms rather than societal interests, regardless of what citizens may demand or need. State and society are regarded as an organic whole, such that conict among competing interests is unrecognized, and opposition is seen as obstruction. The participatory revolution (Kaase,1984) launched by new social movements in the 1970s reacted against this organic view. Passive exclusion meant that the modern environmental movement emerged as participatory and oppositional citizens initiatives groups. By 1972 these groups had formed the Federal Association of Citizens Initiatives for Environmental Protection (BBU), an organization closely identied with the environmental movements radical wing as well as the peace movement. Die Grnen, formed in 1979, advocated (initially at least) participatory and anti-institutional values. The BUND (Bund fr Umwelt und Naturschutz Deutschland), established in 1975, remains the largest environmental organization in Germany, and was instrumental in the large anti-nuclear protests in the 1980s. Opposition to nuclear power became the new environmental movements focal point. Conventional lobbying channels yielded little response as neither Parliament nor the Executive was willing to engage in a debate and none of the major political parties was prepared to adopt an anti-nuclear position (Kitschelt, 1986, p. 70). The movement was excluded by the technocratic government described by Wagner (1994, p. 266) as an opposed totality which could not be won over, but only fought against. Movement protest peaked in 1983, when environmental, peace, and womens groups carried out over 9,200 protest actions (Balistier, 1996). Moderate organizations such as the German League for Nature Conservation and Environmental Protection predate new social movement protest, but they have had a low prole, and only ever achieved limited and conditional access to the state. In keeping with a unitary view of the public interest, they had access only if they could assist in a scientic search for the truth. Access to the bureaucracy (more important than parliament in a corporatist system) increased with the establishment of a federal Ministry for Environment, Nature Conservation, and Nuclear Safety in 1986. However, this Ministry functioned as a classic co-optive device, featuring access without inuence, given that it has only ever been peripheral to policy making. The social movements had their successes in the 1970s: a proposed reactor at Whyl was never built, and public opposition to the planned nuclear reprocessing facility at Gorleben was so erce that the conservative Lower Saxony state government gave up on the project, against the wishes of the SPD/FDP federal government. The major parties came to adopt increasingly green policies, including antipollution legislation, partly to head off the electoral appeal of the Greens, but partly to defuse protest. Public policy actions here are consistent with the idea of a risk-induced legitimation crisis. Ecological modernization begins as both a discourse and policy practice in the 1980s, when environmentalists were still excluded from the state and especially from its core.

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Beginning in the 1980s, stricter government regulations have dramatically reduced acute forms of water, air, and soil pollution (Jnicke and Weidner, 1997). Nuclear energy has suffered serious setbacks, culminating in the SPD/Green governments 1999 plan for gradual phase-out. This plan owes a lot to prior movement activity. Critics argue that parliamentary representation has brought mostly symbolic gains at the cost of taming the Greens radicalism. Inclusion does of course favor groups with moderate agendas (Tarrow, 1994). The pragmatists who control the party today reject ecoradical goals and embrace the aim of ecologically modernizing the countrys social-market economy (Zittel, 1996). Green MPs today have a more polished look than the diverse group of nonconformists who wore jeans and sweaters on the oor of parliament in 1983. Fundis viewed the partys professionalization as evidence for the iron law of oligarchy in action (Tiefenbach, 1998), while Realos saw political efcacy and electoral credibility (Offe, 1998; Raschke, 1993). At issue is an ecological transformation of industrial society not its abolition. The movements earlier battle with industry turned into a critical dialogue rooted in ecological modernization discourse. Organizations willing to support ecological modernization have gained some access to the state, whose passively exclusive character they have diluted. However, according to one activist we interviewed: As a rule, environmental groups havent gured prominently in ministerial decisions. I am not optimistic that this is about to change: business simply has greater inuence. Business lobbying organizations are so strong that environmental groups even well-funded ones like NABU can hardly keep up. The continuing upper hand of business in environmental policy debates derives from the fact that individual rms must often implement the policies demanded by environmentalists, who in turn must show their reasonableness. A veteran environmental scientist and Social Democrat member of parliament summarizes the challenge: The situation is completely different today: local environmental calamities and protests and the spirit of unruliness are gone. But environmental calamities reach all areas of life. Keeping them politically alive requires scientic proof that there is no necessary contradiction between ecology and the economy. If you can piggyback the issue of the environment on to the dominant issue of the economy, the environment will have a chance again. For all intents and purposes, it is no longer possible to argue for the environment against the opposition of business (von Weizscker, interview, 1999). Pragmatic environmentalists can claim the state and certain sectors of the economy now accept environmental policies that do not go too far in violating economic constraints. Nuclear power is a dramatic case in point, given that this is an area where the movement and the economic imperative long conicted. Following forty years of federal support for nuclear energy, after 1998 environmentalists suddenly had the federal government on their side up to a point. However, it was Economics Ministry ofcials and nuclear industry representatives who negotiated

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the terms of ending the program, with environmentalists and the Environment Ministry sidelined. This situation conrms Katzensteins (1987) earlier observation concerning the remarkable continuity of Germanys legal-corporatist policy making processes across changing governments. Thus passive exclusion persisted, and so did protest. Radicals such as the BBU still operate outside policy making. The anti-nuclear movement has shown that it can still mobilize large numbers of activists. This mobilization required, for example, 30,000 police to be activated in 199597 to protect the route of trains returning spent fuel rods to Germany for long-term storage from reprocessing plants in the UK and France (Kolb, 1997). The protests persisted even after the Greens had achieved the planned phase-out of nuclear power. Part of the bargain was that the Green Party would then acquiesce in renewed shipment of reprocessed wastes. But several groups not only the radical BBU, BUND and Greenpeace, but also the moderate DNR and NABU refused to accept this position, and organized nonviolent protests against the shipments in 2001 (Hunold, 2002). The oppositional public sphere is now mostly specic to the anti-nuclear movement, more limited than that of the 1970s and 1980s (see Rucht and Roose, 1999). But in comparative perspective, it remains large and vital. Moreover, the role of movement groups in subpolitical activity has been supplemented by a burgeoning sector of for-prot environmental consultancies, to which public agencies and rms interested in ecological modernization can turn for information and advice. One of the movements responses to the states exclusionary strategy of the 1970s and early 1980s was to establish environmental policy institutions of its own. The Working Group of Ecological Research Institutes alone comprises approximately eighty institutes (Hey and Brendle, 1994, p. 133). Thus, the Institute for Applied Ecology, founded in 1977, sought to meet the demand for scientic and technical data that could be used to support plaintiffs challenging environmentally questionable industrial facilities in the courts. Additional independent ecological research institutes were established in subsequent decades. Examples include the Wuppertal Institute for Climate, Environment, and Energy and the Potsdam Institute for Climate Research. Any oppositional public sphere accompanying passive exclusion need persist only so long as the dening interest of the movement in question cannot be assimilated to a state imperative. The public sphere in question can outlast the subsequent conjunction of interest and imperative and the fact that old habits of legal corporatism die hard in Germany means that it does. However, it need not persist once the conjunction has happened, as the movement can then enter the state without merely being co-opted into the states periphery. In Germany we do eventually see such conjunction with the onset of ecological modernization and the increasing salience of risk issues. But is then, the only difference between a passively exclusive state like Germany and inclusive states like the USA and Norway that we just have to wait longer for inclusion in the state? We believe the difference is much more signicant. Consider the concise history of the state with which we began. Each historic wave of inclusions that of the bourgeoisie which produced the liberal capitalist state, that of the organized working class which produced the welfare state was preceded by a lively oppo-

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sitional public sphere where the category in question honed its arguments and political skills. We have argued that a passively exclusive state is much more conducive to the development of such a sphere than its more inclusive alternatives. So even if the members of the public sphere in question are destined for eventual inclusion in the state, it matters enormously whether they are included as more critically competent former members of a social movement (as in Germany), or as individuals with a background only in a moderate professionalized organization (as in Norway and the USA). A more conventional but, we believe, supercial explanation of Germanys environmental performance would emphasize the electoral success of the Green Party, in turn made possible by Germanys system of proportional representation. However, such an explanation would be inconsistent with the understanding of Greens themselves. Our interviews show that Green politicians and environmental activists are today acutely aware of how much the success of their agenda has depended on pressure based on mobilization in civil society. The paradox the Greens face is this: the better the policy results politicians manage to negotiate, the more difcult it is to organize protests, even though further environmental policy progress requires continued public pressure (Hermann, interview, 1999). The arrival of the Greens in the governing federal coalition in 1998 did not signal a sea change in policy, except (arguably) on the nuclear issue. Within German state structure, the important arena is often the bureaucracy rather than parliament, and this has not been reached by Green electoral success. Moreover, many of the most interesting developments we describe are subpolitical in Becks terms, beyond the reach of party politics. Germany has, then, experienced stronger ecological modernization than our other three countries. This experience in turn has now enabled more effective connection of environmental movement interests to core state imperatives than in the USA and Norway. Ecological research institutes for their part are at the center of a dialogue between expertise and counter-expertise that Beck sees as central to the ecological democracy of risk society. These developments were facilitated by the passively exclusive character of the German state, which provided the space and impetus for a green public sphere to develop. Ironically, strong ecological modernization is advanced as exclusion diminishes with the increased access of environmental groups to the state and the entry of Greens into government though, as we have indicated, many of the exclusions associated with legal corporatism live on. How long will this combination of circumstances persist? Our analysis might suggest that this condition is unstable, because it depends on the recent experience and memory of an autonomous green public sphere. If so, Germany may lapse into passive inclusion of the American sort, with an associated weakening of ecological modernization. Alternatively, Germany could develop an environmental corporatism that includes a green elite, but passively excludes others. The persistence of the anti-nuclear movement supports this interpretation. The latter would not necessarily be a bad outcome, possibly constituting a further turn of the historical spiral in which passive exclusion means a revitalized public sphere. But that is to look too far into the future.

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Actively Exclusive Britain

Our analysis of Germany points to the positive impact and legacy of passive exclusion when it comes to meaningful incorporation of environmental concerns into the core of the state. To conrm that it is passive exclusion that is operative, we need to look at a case of active exclusion. Actively exclusive states are rare, but they can be found in connection with market liberal experiments, especially in the Anglo-American world since 1980. The best example is the UK in the era when Margaret Thatcher was Prime Minister (197990). Unlike our other three countries, the UK has no plausible claim to leadership in environmental affairs in the modern environmental era that begins in the late 1960s. In the 1950s it was something of a leader in anti-pollution legislation, but was eclipsed by the USA around 1970, then left behind by its North European neighbors (Weale, 1997). Prior to the Thatcher era, the British governments response to environmental policy was informal, accommodative and technocratic (Lowe and Flynn, 1989, p. 257). Institutional access was unpromising in a comparative light for example, to an Environment Ministry that in reality had the environment as one of the least important aspects of its portfolio (compared to local government and housing). Groups had some access to government, though only by discretion, not right, if they could demonstrate scientic competence, and a moderate, accommodative kind of environmental lobbying was the norm. When it came to issues such as the construction of the motorway network and nuclear energy, the movement had zero inuence. The authoritarian liberalism of the Thatcher government involved suppression of dissent in civil society and an individualization of social life to undermine the conditions for public association and action. Commitment to a market agenda therefore involved a stronger, more centralized state (Gamble, 1988, p. 183). Information about government activity was curtailed, and civil servants who leaked information were prosecuted. Secret Cabinet committees made key decisions (Hillyard and Percy-Smith, 1988, p. 54), excluding even other Cabinet members. In the early Thatcher years, doors were shut on environmentalist access to government, which was pursuing a relentlessly developmentalist agenda (though the main targets of government attacks in the interests of this agenda were the trades unions). By 1986 Thatcher was deriding environmentalists as part of the enemy within (Porritt, 1997, p. 62), and the market ideologue and anti-environmentalist Nicholas Ridley was Secretary of State for the Environment. The security services were deployed to harass activists. For example, members of Friends of the Earth involved in making the case against nuclear power at the 1985 Sizewell B Public Inquiry were bugged by MI5, the counter-intelligence service (Lamb, 1996, p. 106). The 1986 Public Order Act diminished freedom of political action by making protest organizers responsible for the actions of participants. Active exclusion diminished following Thatchers departure in 1990, after which Britain became something of a dual state in the terms we have established. On the one hand, it welcomed moderate groups into dialogue, especially around issues of sustainable development. The key turning point here was Thatchers own sudden

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recognition of the reality of global environmental problems in a landmark speech to the Royal Society in September 1988. On the other hand, radical activists continued to be hammered by active exclusion. The Criminal Justice and Public Order Act of 1994 criminalized kinds of protest that were until then either legal or at most subject only to civil action. The Act created the offences of aggravated trespass and trespassory assembly, and specied increased police powers to control those intending, let alone engaging in, such actions. Unlike Germany in the 1970s and 1980s, active exclusion in the UK in the 1980s did not produce a ourishing oppositional public sphere. British environmental groups did grow in numbers of members and supporters; between 1981 and 1991 total membership of the established groups doubled (Rootes, 2000; see also Weale, 1997, p. 97). Most of this increase came in 198890 as environmental issues underwent an upsurge on the international political agenda. The established environmental groups developed better links with each other (Grove-White, 1991, p. 34). But numbers of members and the continued search for ways to make a difference tell only part of the story. Much of the action was defensive. Tony Burton, Policy Director at the Council for the Preservation of Rural England, reects on the late 1980s: I suppose it was best to describe it as re-ghting. We were in the business of damage limitation in relation to government policy at the time ... the opportunity to even think positively or over the long term was very very difcult (interview, 1999). What is peculiar about the UK throughout the 1980s and into the early 1990s is the lack of any new social movement form of environmentalism. Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace represented the radical end of the spectrum of British environmental groups at the beginning of the 1990s, but they were neither very democratic nor participatory in practice (Doherty, 1999, p. 278). As Rootes (1992) points out, there is a British exceptionalism that needs explaining. Elsewhere in Western Europe, a low degree of protest politics was accompanied by either a very low level of environmental group membership (as in the Mediterranean countries) or a movement that had strong access to the state (see also Doherty, 1999, p. 278). Only in the UK do we see minimal protest politics coexisting with relatively high membership of environmental groups and no access to the state. The plot thickens inasmuch as the breadth of support for post-materialist values was just as strong in the UK as elsewhere in Northern Europe. Moreover, given that the modest consultative channels that did exist were suddenly blocked in 1979, one might have expected groups to then explore oppositional action in the public sphere. British exceptionalism when it comes to environmentalism in the 1980s is matched by the exceptionalism of its state. The UK in this era was the only European outpost of radical market liberalism, with an authoritarian, actively exclusive state to match. Our argument here turns on the degree to which this kind of state undermined democratic authenticity in civil society in general, and in the environmental movement in particular. In part this is a matter of the state increasing the costs associated with radical action. A more important factor is that the actively exclusive state undermines the conditions that enable collective interests to be felt and

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articulated to begin with. Mechanisms here include the radical individualization and marketization of society, and the associated redenition of citizenship in terms of obligation and responsibility, not political involvement. Only when we put active exclusion in comparative perspective does its deleterious impact on civil society become apparent. Our other exclusive state, Germany, featured more advances in democratic authenticity in the 1980s than did the UK. Equally revealing is what happens when the exclusion is later ameliorated. In Britain after 1988, leaders and activists in movement groups heaved a sigh of relief and accepted governmental invitations to participate in renewed consultations, especially around sustainable development. This turn actually led to paralysis of the mainstream groups as, in the words of one of our interviewees, they became barnacle-encrusted as opposed to muscle-bound with their new commitments. If anything there was a retreat in democratic authenticity in civil society in the early 1990s, though this was soon ameliorated by the development of an anti-roads movement, which Doherty (1999, p. 276) believes is the rst arrival of the new social movement form in Britain. The major negative effect of active exclusion may be in just how little groups are prepared to settle for once it is lifted. In Germany, in contrast, after the waning of confrontation, oppositional civil society leaves a strong democratic legacy. There was no ecological modernization in the Thatcher era, as the government subordinated environment to economy. Come the 1990s, environmental groups could re-enter the corridors of power as the excesses of market liberalism eased. But the British government did not adopt ecological modernizations components as policy (Weale, 1997, p. 105). Various roundtables, commissions, and committees on sustainable development established in the 1990s produced little policy substance. Policy making continued to be dominated by a requirement to demonstrate scientic proof of a hazard prior to response the antithesis of the precautionary principle (Hajer, 1995). Road building continued to be the focus of transportation policy, lip service to alternatives by the Blair Labour government after 1997 notwithstanding. Subpolitics in Becks terms is not completely absent from Britain in the 1990s. The most prominent example is the 1995 case of the Brent Spar, a redundant oil storage platform in the North Sea. The Shell Corporation proposed to dispose of the platform in deep waters of the North Atlantic, and received approval from the British government. After a Greenpeace-led occupation of the platform and consumer boycott of Shell, the company backed down and agreed to dispose of the platform on land. The British government, prepared to use force to dislodge protestors, reacted angrily to the Shell decision. Grove-White (1997, p. 17) believes that the Brent Spar controversy essentially rewrote the rules in British environmental politics, illustrating the mounting signicance of public opinion for emerging new concerns about corporate social responsibility. An editorial in The Independent (21 June 1995, p. 20) similarly concluded from the campaigns success: It is now clear that neither governments nor big business are strong enough to withstand a new phenomenon: an alliance of direct action with public opinion. However, it was in Germany that the boycott of Shell was most effective and which arguably was decisive in forcing Shells hand.

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The UK did eventually see three developments that indicated a belated arrival of some elements of ecological modernization. In 2000 the government suddenly embraced solar photovoltaic energy as a technology that would both reduce greenhouse emissions and provide economic opportunities (Paterson, 2001, p. 13), as well as talking up the idea of offshore wind farms. In 2001 a Climate Change Levy came into force, imposing a per-kilowatt charge on energy generated by fossil fuels used by business and government bodies. The charge was opposed by the Conservative Party and the Confederation of British Industry, and its implementation was accompanied by the negotiation of a complex system of discounts and exemptions. More radical still, a 1998 report of the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution entitled Setting Environmental Standards recommended abandoning the traditional British secretive and informal approach to regulation. The report recommended that the whole process of analysis, deliberation and synthesis should take place in a context in which the articulation of public values should be included at all stages of the policy process (Weale, 2001, pp. 3623). In its discursive democratic prescriptions, the report is actually consistent with strong ecological modernization. However, the governments response was lukewarm, and at the time of writing it remains unclear whether any of its recommendations will be adopted. As the UK slowly shook off the legacy of active exclusion in the 1990s, radical green public spheres began to emerge, in opposition to genetically modied organisms as well as road construction. This arrival of social movement activism suggests that the kind of oppositional politics necessary for a strong version of ecological modernization to gain ground was now present. However, this activism was mostly in areas where the state still shows its actively exclusive face. Ecological modernization policy momentum is entirely in the area of pollution control, where there is no oppositional movement activity, without which radical proposals such as the 1998 Royal Commission report are unlikely to be implemented. Britain has still seen no state transformation as witnessed in Norway and Germany. The continuing inuence of the partial and ineffective inclusion that long characterized the UK remains detrimental when it comes to anything like strong ecological modernization. The shock of active exclusion that characterized the 1980s was unfortunate in that it demonstrated to environmental groups that a return to the traditional alternative was not so bad. Our conclusion about the destructive impact of active exclusion on the prospects for ecological modernization remains rm. It remains to be seen whether the UK can escape this legacy.

Conclusion
If we array our four countries according to the degree to which they have achieved strong ecological modernization and associated subpolitics, and by implication the degree of connection this reveals between environmental movement interests and core state imperatives, then Germany is in front. Germany has reaped the benets of a history of passive exclusion, whose legacy may be persistent and positive in these terms. Here our categorization of states becomes more dynamic, because Germany advances on these criteria while its passive exclusion is modied though certainly not abolished. Actively inclusive Norway may be ranked second, but only on the dimension of ecological modernization, which it has pursued in weak form.

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But nothing stronger can be envisaged for Norway, and no subpolitics is apparent. Recent developments place the UK third, as it struggles to escape the legacy of active exclusion. In the USA, national politics still features an old-fashioned standoff between economy and environment. The USA featured by far the strongest connection between environmental values and core state imperatives around 1970, but that peak and American leadership are distant memories. More conventional explanations for these differences might emphasize differences in the commitment of public opinion to environmental values, or variations in the strength of organized interests. Both explanations fail. There are no signicant differences when it comes to public opinion across our four countries (see, for example, Daltons (1994, pp. 5173) analysis of Eurobarometer surveys, which show little difference between public support for environmental values and actions in the UK and Germany over time). And environmental interest groups are far stronger in the USA than in Norway throughout, but this has not prevented Norway leaving the USA well behind on any performance measure. We began with a contention that an emerging connection of environmental values to both economic and legitimation imperatives to constitute a green state with a conservation imperative could constitute a development on a par with two prior transformations of the modern state. Our conclusion is that this connection with environmentalism is contingent on the presence of an active oppositional public sphere, if only as a recent memory (as in Germany). Ecological modernization in its weak form does not require such an oppositional sphere, as Norway shows. Yet we would hesitate to describe a state pursuing weak ecological modernization as a green state. Anything stronger and more secure requires an effective and autonomous public sphere as both a memory and a presence. (Accepted: 2 April 2002)

About the Authors

John Dryzek, Social and Political Theory Program, Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University, Canberra ACT 0200, Australia; email: jdryzek@coombs.anu.edu.au Christian Hunold, Department of History and Politics, Drexel University, 3141 Chestnut Street, Philadelphia, PA 19104-2875, USA; email: hunoldc@drexel.edu David Schlosberg, Department of Political Science, Northern Arizona University, PO Box 15036 Flagstaff, AZ 86011-5036, USA; email: David.Schlosberg@nau.edu David Downes, Ofce of Higher Education, Department of Education, Employment and Training, 2 Treasury Place, East Melbourne, Victoria 3002, Australia. Hans-Kristian Hernes, Department of Political Science, University of Troms, 9037 Troms, Norway; email: hansh@isv.uit.no

Notes
For advice and comments we thank Peter Christoff, Richard Couto, Andrew Dobson, Robyn Eckersley, David Marsh, James Meadowcroft, Chris Rootes, and Leslie Thiele. This research was nanced by the Australian Research Council (grant A79802823). 1 This framework was originally developed in the context of democratic theory and democratization by Dryzek (1996a, b).

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2 It is hard to know what to make of an index that rates Brazil and Russia as more sustainable than Italy and Belgium. Norway, the USA, Germany and the UK are ranked second, eleventh, fteenth and sixteenth among all the countries of the world. See http://www.ciesin.org/indicators/ESI/rank.html. 3 The third transformation differs from its predecessors because it does not involve incorporation of a social class. But none of our analysis turns on the class character of these earlier inclusions. All three transformations entail both an interest included in the state and a discourse shift concerning the states role. 4. For details, see the special issue of Environmental Politics, 9 (1), Spring 2000.

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