The Quest for Ecological Modernization 445- What opportunities will arise for the restructuring of industries around new
business models and types of production systems and technologies? - How will business-to-business and business-to-consumer relationships change
if a service-based economy (i.e. through leasing, take-back and service arrange-
ments) begins to replace the traditional exchange of physical goods?
To begin to answer some of these questions will require the development of new
social and regulatory ‘designs’ around which we can begin to explore the richness
and complexity of business/environment relationships. Such an endeavour will
need to take us far beyond the much more established and somewhat retrospective
‘tracking’ of multinational commodity flows. Moreover, we should put aside the
rather binary question of whether firms will or will not ecologically modernize.
Rather, we should explore both what is and what might be.
Regulation and bureaucratic professionalization
It is important to recognize that the story of environmentalization in the rural field
over the past two decades has been one in which a particular form of Weberian
bureaucracy has been increasingly prevalent. We need to recognize both why this
has been the case and, conversely, why it is not necessarily the only model in town
(see Marsden et al, 2001). I have, in the context of the agricultural and food sector
in Europe (post-BSE) termed this more specifically the hygienic mode of regulation.
As the industrial mode of food supply has become even more crisis-ridden, the
state has attempted to largely ‘correct’ this by setting up highly professionalized
and bureaucratized forms of environmental safeguards and instruments. This has
also been conducted in ‘the interests of the consumer’, as a way of governments
seeking to protect their interests at the same time as allowing corporate industry
the ability to exploit new markets. The growth of a profound regulatory burden,
as a response to the crisis in the industrial mode of agro-food, tends therefore only
to strengthen the economic and political power of established agroindustrial inter-
ests (including the large retailers and manufacturers). Both private and public
forms of regulation are used to ‘clean-up’ the industrial system in the ostensible
‘public interest’. Such schematization holds the added consequence of further con-
straining the real potential of integrated agricultural development as well as pro-
viding new regulatory barriers to market entry for many smaller producers and
processors. For consumers, it allows the disconnections and distanciations between
production and consumption to conveniently continue: with an encouragement
that ‘safety’ comes before sustainability. A growth industry for many environmen-
tal scholars has been found in the evaluation of such hygienic schemata.
These processes have tended to break, or at least ‘fracture’ the environmental
and rural development question into specific boxes, projects and schemes; making
it more difficult to make holistic connections (as associated with agroecology for
example, see Sevilla Guzmán and Woodgate, 1998). As a result it has been difficult
for many actors to construct viable and integrated alternatives, or to harness the