continued
and sustained economic growth, the central driving force and
legitimating principle of contemporary industrial society. If sustained, such
a challenge would bring about a dramatic reshaping of the politics of the
advanced industrial countries, but it would pose far greater problems for
the ‘developing’ world which was, if anything, even more reliant on the
beneficial effects of general economic growth than the rich world.
In fact, these problems were put on hold for a few years. The downturn
in economic activity in the 1970s reduced demand for raw materials, and new
technological advances such as the microchip
revolution were less depen-
dent on material input than the old technologies. The ‘limits to growth’
predictions were, in any event, probably excessively pessimistic, and, more-
over and quite fortunately, self-defeating, since they concentrated minds to
a far greater extent on energy conservation, recycling, and the development
of new resources. In the sense in which the term was used then, we are,
clearly, still a long way away from reaching the limits of growth. Nonetheless,
the debates of the 1970s were a useful rehearsal for the actual problems that
have emerged in the 1980s and 1990s. Climatic changes such as the deple-
tion of the
ozone layer and global warming, rising water levels, deforesta-
tion, loss of biodiversity and the desertification of large parts of Africa pose
similar sorts of challenges to the civilization of productivity to those posed
by the idea of limits to growth – with the significant difference that these
challenges are rather better supported by scientific opinion, and rather less
amenable to piecemeal responses. This time it really does seem possible that
‘we’, all of us, may have to change the way we live – if we, or ‘our’ states,
can summon the willpower so to do.
The case of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) which attack the ozone layer is
instructive. The Vienna Convention for the Protection of the Ozone Layer
in 1985, protocols on the same subject of Montreal 1987
and London
1990, and discussion at the United Nations Conference on Environment
and Development (UNCED) in Rio in 1992 and in a number of subsequent
forums – especially Kyoto 1998 – bear witness to the perceived importance
of ozone depletion and the need to cut the emission of CFCs. An interesting
question is: how did this perception arise? It is clear that there are quite
good, albeit short-sighted, reasons why states might not want to take up
this issue. CFCs are created by the employment of technologies which,
although polluting, are undoubtedly cheaper than the alternatives. Developing
states which wish to foster the increased use of refrigeration want to employ
the
cheapest technology available, which creates CFCs; developed countries
are equally disinclined to cease using technologies on which they have come
to depend. Everyone has a long-term interest in avoiding the stripping away
of the earth’s protective shield, but everyone has a short-term interest in not
leading the way in this matter. This is a classic problem of collective action,
notoriously difficult to address; however, while few would describe the
174
Understanding International Relations
response of the international community as wholly adequate,
the issue is, at
least, on the agenda. Why? How did it get there?
The answer seems to be that it got there because of the emergence of
a consensus amongst scientists that it was a problem that could no longer be
avoided; on the basis of this consensus, governments were lobbied and, often
reluctantly, convinced that they had to act. This is an example of an interesting
new phenomenon in international relations – the emergence of international
‘pressure’ groups, the source of whose influence is the possession of highly
specialized technical knowledge rather than more conventional political
resources. Peter Haas has introduced the term
epistemic communities into
the literature to describe such groups (1989). It is clear that,
in the right cir-
cumstances, they can be very effective; governments can be made to feel that
they have no alternative other than to act in the way that the scientific con-
sensus indicates. There may often be a scarcely concealed political threat
here – act or we will reveal to the public your willingness to expose them to
life-threatening risk – but the basic influence exerted by epistemic communi-
ties arises simply from their ability, or at least the public’s belief in their
ability, to provide a dominant interpretation of the nature of the problem.
Yet the significance of epistemic communities should not be overestimated.
They require the right conditions to be effective; such conditions include
a near-consensus amongst the relevant knowledge holders,
and an issue that
does not touch the core interests of states. One interesting feature of epistemic
communities is their lack of democratic legitimacy. Greenpeace International
is an salient case here, because it is often seen as the paradigm of a pressure
group which employs scientific expertise to make its case in global civil
society. Greenpeace scientists are highly regarded and their opinions are
taken very seriously by large parts of Western public opinion. They have
been capable of scoring quite important political successes – the Brent Spar
affair of 1995 is a case in point, when a Greenpeace campaign involving
a public relations blitz and consumer boycotts succeeded in reversing a deci-
sion by Shell and the British Government to scuttle
the Brent Spar oil plat-
form in the open sea. As it turns out, there were mistakes in Greenpeace’s
calculations, and it is still a matter of dispute whether disposal at sea might
not have been the most environmentally sound strategy, but what is inter-
esting, and might in some circumstances be rather sinister, is that the
unelected, unaccountable Greenpeace scientists were able to manipulate
public opinion and override the will of a democratically elected government
and its scientific advisers. There is an added irony here – many of Greenpeace’s
supporters have a very sceptical view of the authority of science in general,
and yet it is precisely the public’s lack of scepticism on this issue that gives
the organization its clout.
Moving away from epistemic communities,
environmental politics have
had a major impact on the normative issue of global justice, most importantly
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