Environmental policy is failed – unless we tell better stories

Future future: rethinking environmental policy drama Martin a. Immigrant and Jiroin Omin Oxford University. Press (2025)

From time to time, she looks forward to a book. Follow before publishing conversations, promise, drama. The political scientist Martin Hajar has known for three decades as an academic, policy maker and activist. If any person has the skills and technical knowledge of understanding the logic of environmental policy deeply, then this is.

This book exceeded my expectations. Written with the social world of the rising star Jeroen Oomen, I seized futures contracts Strong, in time and contact. It can be said that it is the most important book on environmental policy in the past decade. The concept of “the future captured” brilliantly explains how environmental policy has become besieged in ways that multiply all of its failure and restrict people’s ability to imagine alternatives.

The big problem of science is the loss of influence, not the loss of confidence

The book begins by organizing evidence that environmental policy exceeds global environmental health. It is a familiar menu, including unparalleled targets to cut greenhouse gas emissions, constant losses of biological diversity, fertile soil and fresh water.

After that, the authors present a radical idea: that environmental policy, where it is formed and practiced currently, must fail. This is not because of the lack of political will, organizational obstacles or state, but because of the conceptual framework – the “dramatic system” – through which the enactment of environmental policy rules and its agreements are enact.

Failed

At the heart of this system, there is an environmental update: a set of condemnations that laughed for three decades. This includes that technological and market -based solutions can address environmental crises; This natural science, with the “facts” of the neutral value, can provide the knowledge necessary to create these solutions; These are politicians, in their “experimental” role, defining global options, goals and goals.

In this system, if the goals are not met despite the provision of scientific evidence, the only response available to those in the clique of the political leadership is an escalation of their urgency. The images of the imminent catastrophe that increase the feelings of citizens increase the political agency and the senses of many people already exacerbate despair, despair and recovery. As the final technocratic solution, climatic geological engineering represents the last environmental modernization position.

The common narration of “Win-Win Solutions” and “Games-Sum Evondal” ended. Authors describe how the increasing effects of environmental policy on daily life – through movement, energy and housing – generate political responses. This is as a “violent reaction age”, they write, pointing to Yellow jacket (Yellow jackets) the movement in France and street protests for farmers throughout Europe.

Worse, the dramatic system unintentionally contributes to political polarization. Many people, including populists and others on the right, view the climate change community, and universities on a broader scale, as part of a global and elite system incitement against ordinary people. This dynamic has increased this year, especially in the United States, where the Trump administration attacked elite universities including Harvard, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and funding for federal environmental and health agencies.

Tide

The environmental policy needs to tell a more ambitious story. We need to move from stories that raise fear and despair towards those that give hope and renewal. We need to raise awareness of the potential future contracts that are desirable, such as dreams based on the consumer that we are associated with. Let’s transfer the task forward, the authors analyze how fossil fuels and lifestyles they allow are guaranteed deeply and attractive in the senses of most people for personal freedom, lifestyle and identity. The American dream is alive, and it is universal.

To learn about what might succeed, Hajer and Oomen analyze two historical example of intellectual speeches that have transformed societal mood. The economist in the UK and the social reformer William Beveridge developed the principles of the modern luxury state in the 1942 report, with radical ideas on how to eliminate poverty that was strong enough for people to fight for it. The efforts made by Think Tanks and other conservative thought in the 1960s and 1970s turned new liberal concepts such as property ownership, abolition of restrictions, privatization, and free markets.

Today, three environmental political speeches exceed: “beyond growth” question the necessity of economic growth; Criticists criticize the models for the development of development that enhance the dominance of the previous colonial powers; Environmental archives focus on the individual’s duty as a host to protect the natural world. But these discussions, although they are valuable, remain mainly intellectually and echoes only marginally with the audience.

Where may someone else look? One of the methods that Hajar and Oomen does not discuss the study of transformations in daily experiences, and the social, cultural and political trends that support it. Think of four brilliant sociologists: Ulrich Beck, John Orri, Anthony Gidins and Manuel Castels. Instead of glorifying the visions of the vanguard that can be presented in political projects, each of them sought to see the world around them with sharp sensitivity and then develop concepts and theories harmoniously what they saw.

Why may the green technology race not save the planet

The “Risk Society” in Beck reflected a globalized world saturated with invisible, non -applicable and non -backward risks. The “irregular capitalism” of the Orri describes the shift away from the structural shape and the relatively stable sequence of “organized capitalism”. It explains the “reflexive update” of the dual -edge nature of modernity with regard to science, individualism, capitalism and industry. Castells “Network Society” describes the growth of forms of social organization on the basis of networks instead of traditional hierarchical serials.

Such thinking can be applied to Earth, for example, on the wave of the province that appears in global politics, from the United States to Argentina, Finland and Italy. On the night of the election of US President Donald Trump, when it became clear that he was not only won the elections, but the majority of it increased through the main population composition (including black and Latin voters, rural voters, religious voters, men under the age of 50, and even homogeneous citizens), I asked myself, why? Since then, it has sought to understand the structure of feeling that supports this new form of the province.

Ask people

Sociologist Arly Russell Hoschild Strangers in their land (2016) offers some ideas. She explores her ethnographic view of the emotional life of the arc conservatives in Bayu Contestre, Louisiana, based on the field work that was conducted between 2012 and 2016, why are people who are increasingly disorganized to move to the political right, not the left.