Social-ecological transformation

Social-Ecological

Transformation

Reconnecting Society

and Nature

Karl Bruckmeier

Social-Ecological Transformation

Karl   Bruckmeier

Social-Ecological

Transformation

Reconnecting Society and Nature

ISBN 978-1-137-43827-0 ISBN 978-1-137-43828-7 (eBook)

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-43828-7

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016942407

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Karl   Bruckmeier

National Research University

Higher School of Economics

Moscow , Russia

To the memory of Marina

vii

Th e theme of this book is the social-ecological transformation of modern

society to a sustainable future society. Diffi culties in this process are two￾fold: complex environmental problems for which technological and engi￾neering solutions are insuffi cient, and complex processes to be organised

in the governance of global change or earth system governance. In sustain￾able development, as the transformation process is usually and inexactly

called, a new democratic world order needs to be built to achieve the

transformation to sustainability. Ends and means of global transformation

interplay in complicated ways. Th e lack of success and the distortions of

the prior sustainability process can be seen as a consequence of the pre￾vailing policy: the neoliberal “green economy” strategy, aiming more at an

ecological modernisation of the global economy than at a transformation

into a sustainable economic system. In the 2015 summit of the United

Nations a new agenda, “Transforming our World: the 2030 Agenda for

Sustainable Development”, was adopted. Th is soft policy document shows

still the predominant and incoherent sustainability thinking of the past,

in normative terms, without adequate knowledge and governance prac￾tices—although the terminology of transformation is now in use.

When the global discourse of sustainable development began, about

thirty years ago, the nature of the changes on the way to sustainability was

not clear. A series of social, political, economic, and environmental changes

paves the way to sustainability. Knowledge practices in the scientifi c and

Pref ace

viii Preface

political discourses of sustainable development and global governance

need to be reviewed critically to initiate a transformation: specialised envi￾ronmental research and governmental policies do not create the knowl￾edge, action capacity, empowerment of actors, and transformative agency

necessary to achieve sustainability. To build more coherent strategies and

provide more realistic information, social-scientifi c and ecological knowl￾edge of the changes of modern society and modern ecological systems

needs to be synthesised. Meanwhile, sustainable development has been

reformulated as another “great transformation”, using the term created by

Karl Polanyi in his historical analysis of the rise of modern capitalism and

its market economy in England. Today the term is used for a new, global

transformation of modern society: a rupture of path-dependent develop￾ment of the modern economic world system that is programmed for self￾destructive economic growth and growth of resource use.

Th e social-ecological transformation is not another phase of modernisa￾tion, as discussed in theories of refl exive or ecological modernisation. Th e

development of a collective political subject for global governance that can

drive the transformation is a complex social process; it is not achieved with

the organisation of cooperation of political actors with diff erent interests

in the routines of environmental policies at regional, national, and inter￾national levels. Transformative governance, rethought as social-ecological

transformation, is higher-order governance for regulating long-term social

and ecological change. Such regulation deals less with policy planning or

the management and restoration of ecosystems and more with attempts

to infl uence indirectly the autonomous processes of social and ecologi￾cal development and change that cannot be managed, triggering further

changes that result, fi nally, in the transformation of modern society and

its relations with nature. On the way to global sustainability, a process of

many decades or even some hundred years, a new mode of production is

built, in the terminology of social ecology called a new societal metabolism.

Preface ix

Th is social-ecological process that touches all spheres of society and nature

cannot be foreseen in its course. In the process of transforming society, only

the near future is visible. Th e distant future, approached in subsequent

phases of transformation, clarifi es gradually with the advancing process.

Karl   Bruckmeier

Moscow, Russia

December 2015

xi

For this book, a result of the reworking of information from many

sources, it is diffi cult to describe the immediate infl uences from the com￾munication and collaboration with colleagues, friends, and students. Th e

important personal communication to be mentioned here is that in sev￾eral conferences and workshops, including human ecological conferences

in diff erent European countries, and in my teaching and research at the

National Research University—Higher School of Economics at Moscow.

From the courses and the discussions with students, I benefi ted for the

work with this book, especially by learning to avoid oversimplifi cation of

complex themes. Th e people to be named more concretely include the

ones who worked with the manuscript, reading, reviewing, or editing

it. Earlier versions of the chapters were read critically by Inna Deviatko,

Iva Miranda Pires, Ana Velasco Arranz, Parto Teherani-Krönner, Imre

Kovach, and Pekka Salmi. I am very grateful for their comments that

helped to clarify the arguments. I want to thank the editorial team and

an anonymous reviewer at Palgrave Macmillan for their editing work and

the comments that helped to structure the chapters more clearly. For the

book project no fi nancial support was provided, but it would not have

been possible without interdisciplinary research projects on the environ￾ment and natural resource management in which I participated during

the past decade, several of them funded by the European Union. At least

three of these projects infl uenced the ideas of the social-ecological theory

Acknowledgements

xii Acknowledgements

drafted in the following chapters: the projects FRAP (Development of

a Procedural Framework for Action Plans to reconcile confl icts between

large vertebrate conservation and the use of biological resources),

CORASON (Rural Sustainable Development in the Knowledge Society),

and SECOA (Solution to Contrasts in Coastal Areas). Th ese projects

helped to rethink the sustainability process as a confl ict-based process, as

a knowledge process, and as a transformation process.

xiii

Contents

1 Introduction: Developing Social- Ecological

Concepts and Th eories 1

2 Interaction of Society and Nature in Sociology 15

3 Interaction of Nature and Society in Ecology 69

4 Sustainability in Social-Ecological Perspective 125

5 Social-Ecological Systems and Ecosystem Services 183

6 Knowledge Transfer Th rough Adaptive Management

and Environmental Governance 235

7 Climate Change and Development of 

Coastal Areas in Social-Ecological Perspective 285

8 Transformation of Industrial Energy Systems 337

xiv Contents

9 Conclusion: Th e Coming Crisis of Global

Environmental Governance 385

Index 399