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Researcher Name: Bronislaw Szerszynski and Larry Reynolds Project Start Date: 01.10.2007 Project End Date: 30.09.2012 Contact Details: bron@lancaster.ac.uk; l.reynolds@lancaster.ac.uk Funder: Background: In recent years there has been a stream of publications, both popular and academic, promoting the idea of a convergence between the imperatives of economic growth and environmental protection, and the possibility and desirability of a green capitalism. In some ways, this trend recapitulates the earlier discourse of ecological modernisation, but there are now new dimensions and emphases, such as the problem of restoring growth in a period of economic crisis, the economic opportunities presented by responding to climate change, and the role that markets can play in reducing global poverty and the overexploitation of natural resources. But of particular interest to this project is the emphasis on the idea of the emergence of a new suite of technologies, for example as proposed in the idea of the Knowledge-Based Bio-Economy as adopted by the OECD and the EU. Such a new technological revolution, it is claimed, would enable capitalism to shift its material base and thereby solve the intersecting problems posed by declining profits, global competition and the limits of nature. The idea of economic long waves has been enrolled in support of this idea, in the form of a putative ‘sixth wave’ of environmental technologies, and thereby seeming to grant the promise of a green capitalism an almost natural inevitability. This project is designed to develop a systematic, critical assessment of such claims for an emergent green, low-carbon, sustainable capitalism. Aims and Objectives: The aim of the project is to answer questions such as the following: How do we understand the emergence of the imaginary of a green capitalism? What is the role played by the discourse in shaping and stabilising the field of action for different economic and policy actors? How might the current discourse of a technological transition to a green capitalism be illuminated by situating it in longue-durée contexts such as long waves of techno-economic innovation, industrial revolutions, civilisational shifts and metabolic transitions? To what extent is a new material base for capitalism likely to be provided by ‘new’ technologies such as infotech, nanotech and biotech? What barriers to realising a promised new green economy are posed by capitalism’s innate crisis tendencies, and particularly the link between technological innovation and the tendency of the rate of profit to fall? What other more conjunctural factors stand as a barrier – such as the techno-economic lock in of dominant industries and forms of energy, production and markets? Research Methods: This is primarily a desk-based project, involving bringing together a number of literatures: existing research on economic performance; the history, philosophy and sociology of science and technology; political economy; social theory; and political ecology. Key Findings: Wider implications for policy: Project Update: A number of themes have already emerged and are being further explored, such as: the underperformance in productivity terms of new technologies such as infotech and biotech the continued reliance on the late-nineteenth century cluster of technologies that made possible the ‘long boom’ of the twentieth century, and its environmental consequences the contemporary ‘innovation crisis’, and the tendency for technologies to coexist alongside each other without succeeding to historicity the role of neoliberalism and a political economy of technological promise in delaying rather than solving the problems faced by Fordist capitalism in the 1970s the link between the systemic fall in profit rates and the proliferation of processes of financialisation, speculation, primitive accumulation and technological rents the ‘epochal’ nature of the contemporary economic crisis and the delirium tendencies of contemporary capitalism in its appropriation of nature Publications: Various journal articles and book chapters are in preparation. The main output will be a joint-authored book, provisionally titled Green Dreams: Why There Will Not Be a Sustainable Capitalism. External Links: Further information: Related conference presentations, all joint-authored: ‘Technoscientific innovation as an imagined solution to the economic and ecological crisis of capitalism’, paper presented to Historical Materialism: Crisis and Critique, 7th Annual Historical Materialism Conference, SOAS & ULU London, 11-14 November 2010. ‘Limits to biocapital’, paper presented to the EASST 2010 conference, Practicing Science and Technology, Performing The Social, Trento, Italy, 2-4 September 2010. ‘Coexistence or succession? Space, time and the onto-politics of GM agrofood’, paper presented at the workshop After Markets: Researching Hybrid Arrangements, Institute for Science, Innovation and Society, Said Business School, University of Oxford, 23 April 2010. ‘Theorising the bioeconomy: the life sciences and surplus value’, paper presented at 1st International Sociological Association Forum of Sociology, Sociological Research and Public Debate, Barcelona, Spain, 5-8 September 2008. ‘GMOs, publics and the contested construction of European space’, paper presented to the Innogen/PASOS workshop The Promises and Challenges of the Life Sciences Industry in Central and Eastern Europe, Prague, 18-19 October 2007. ‘GMOs and the contested construction of European space’, paper presented to the conference Regions and Regionalism in and beyond Europe, Institute for Advanced Studies, Lancaster University, 17-19 September 2007. ‘Discourses of the bioeconomy’, paper presented to the Stockholm Centre for Organisational Research (SCORE), Stockholm, 22 November 2006. For further information, please contact Larry Reynolds.
bron@lancaster.ac.uk; l.reynolds@lancaster.ac.uk
In recent years there has been a stream of publications, both popular and academic, promoting the idea of a convergence between the imperatives of economic growth and environmental protection, and the possibility and desirability of a green capitalism. In some ways, this trend recapitulates the earlier discourse of ecological modernisation, but there are now new dimensions and emphases, such as the problem of restoring growth in a period of economic crisis, the economic opportunities presented by responding to climate change, and the role that markets can play in reducing global poverty and the overexploitation of natural resources. But of particular interest to this project is the emphasis on the idea of the emergence of a new suite of technologies, for example as proposed in the idea of the Knowledge-Based Bio-Economy as adopted by the OECD and the EU. Such a new technological revolution, it is claimed, would enable capitalism to shift its material base and thereby solve the intersecting problems posed by declining profits, global competition and the limits of nature. The idea of economic long waves has been enrolled in support of this idea, in the form of a putative ‘sixth wave’ of environmental technologies, and thereby seeming to grant the promise of a green capitalism an almost natural inevitability. This project is designed to develop a systematic, critical assessment of such claims for an emergent green, low-carbon, sustainable capitalism.
The aim of the project is to answer questions such as the following:
This is primarily a desk-based project, involving bringing together a number of literatures: existing research on economic performance; the history, philosophy and sociology of science and technology; political economy; social theory; and political ecology.
A number of themes have already emerged and are being further explored, such as:
Related conference presentations, all joint-authored:
‘Technoscientific innovation as an imagined solution to the economic and ecological crisis of capitalism’, paper presented to Historical Materialism: Crisis and Critique, 7th Annual Historical Materialism Conference, SOAS & ULU London, 11-14 November 2010.
‘Limits to biocapital’, paper presented to the EASST 2010 conference, Practicing Science and Technology, Performing The Social, Trento, Italy, 2-4 September 2010.
‘Coexistence or succession? Space, time and the onto-politics of GM agrofood’, paper presented at the workshop After Markets: Researching Hybrid Arrangements, Institute for Science, Innovation and Society, Said Business School, University of Oxford, 23 April 2010.
‘Theorising the bioeconomy: the life sciences and surplus value’, paper presented at 1st International Sociological Association Forum of Sociology, Sociological Research and Public Debate, Barcelona, Spain, 5-8 September 2008.
‘GMOs, publics and the contested construction of European space’, paper presented to the Innogen/PASOS workshop The Promises and Challenges of the Life Sciences Industry in Central and Eastern Europe, Prague, 18-19 October 2007.
‘GMOs and the contested construction of European space’, paper presented to the conference Regions and Regionalism in and beyond Europe, Institute for Advanced Studies, Lancaster University, 17-19 September 2007.
‘Discourses of the bioeconomy’, paper presented to the Stockholm Centre for Organisational Research (SCORE), Stockholm, 22 November 2006.
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