Institutionelle Reformen für eine Politik der Nachhaltigkeit [Institutional Reform for a Policy of Sustainability]

Citation

Simonis, U.E. (2000), "Institutionelle Reformen für eine Politik der Nachhaltigkeit [Institutional Reform for a Policy of Sustainability]", International Journal of Social Economics, Vol. 27 No. 12, pp. 1270-1282. https://doi.org/10.1108/ijse.2000.27.12.1270.3

Following years of laborious discussion on what long‐term environmentally sound or (better!) sustainable development really is, five authors, with five assistants, have addressed the question of the means, the “how” of its achievement. This they have done on behalf of the Enquete Commission of the 13th German Bundestag on the “Protection of Man and the Environment” – and done it in a way that must be termed impressive and futile at the same time.

The authors start out by pleading for an enlargement of the debate on a policy of sustainability: “The ‘what’ involved in concretizing the goals bound up with the different poles of ‘sustainable development’ must not … lose sight of the ‘how’ of social organization” (p. viii). After all, the authors argue, far from being a simple management problem, sustainability is a future‐oriented process of learning, searching, and formative action, one characterized by widespread ignorance and uncertainties, and entailing a broad spectrum of conflicts. By addressing the issue of institutional reform (the title of the study), the task is to determine what shape politics and society should be given if we are to come closer to sustainability – understood as a regulative idea.

So we are not to rely solely on the market as an omnipotent search and learning process; there is need for some policy making. So far so good. However, the answer that the authors then give reveals them as what they in fact are – theorizing academics, far removed from practice and everyday life.

Building on a comprehensive (better: overly extensive) analysis rooted in social theory and political economy, the authors present four so‐called basic strategies, the implementation of which represent, it is claimed, the “pillars of a policy of sustainability”: reflexivity, participation/self‐organization, redress and conflict resolution, and innovation. For each of these four basic strategies the authors formulate substrategies, 60 of which the present reviewer was able to detect in the second part of the study (pp. 139‐379), called the Institutional Atlas. So things seem to be made complicated before they can be made concrete. This is what one may expect of theoreticians, but do we really have to go along with it?

What, for instance, are reflexivity strategies? Here the authors specify five partial strategies with a total of 15 substrategies: “Discursive elaboration of a national sustainability strategy”, one of them is called; “Discursive further development of the institution of an Enquete Commission”, another. Many a reader may founder at this point, many a politician will give up. Furthermore, with the other three basic strategies parceled out in just about the same way (a total of 12 partial strategies and 45 substrategies), the picture of the future takes on a somewhat nebulous hue. Here, at the latest, it would have been time to back‐couple with practice, to pull the methodology brake. And the authors know it, too: “While earlier less differentiated societies, in a more or less unfree fashion, took relatively inefficient, albeit integrated decisions, the decisions taken under formally free conditions, in our systemically differentiated society are relatively efficient but disintegrated” (p. 62). This disintegration, the authors claim, poses – in the guise of social, ecological, and economic problems and practical constraints – a threat to society as a whole, and may, in the future, even encroach on individual freedom.

In view of this measure of insight, we are, of course, forced to raise the question of whether the 60 proposals on institutional reform developed in this commissioned study are in fact suited to achieve the integration demanded of a strategy of sustainability. So what will be the fate of this imaginative and resourceful book?

Many a reader, disconcerted, will put it aside because of its flawed workmanship – the occasional typesetting errors, duplication, confusion. That, however, would be regrettable, particularly in view of the fact that the authors had little, too little, time to prepare their text for publication. Other readers may criticize the book’s methodology, which, in its high level of differentiation, leads straight into the dilemma of disintegrated politics that the authors wanted to guide us out of. We, the readers of this study (and of the present review), will thus have to take pains to prevent the subject from being forgotten, for, as the authors rightly note: In dealing with the topic of sustainability, the concern is not only the “what” but also, and in particular, the “how” of politics. This book is in urgent need of public discussion.