Although the Ecological Modernization approach offers some great possibilities for a greener world, it’s often used as a semantic cover or ideological guise to displace environmental politics as well as to obscure exploitative relations of production and poor environmental performance. Taking certification in the global aquaculture, I have dug into the central dynamics of capitalism and proposed a theoretical renewal which I call the “Modernization of Ecology.” I’m happy and humbled to eventually make this small yet new contribution to environmental sociology. It can also be used for international development and global agro-food studies.
Here is the article:
Islam, Md Saidul. 2022. “Certification regimes in the global agro-food system and the transformation of nature-society relationship: Ecological modernization or modernization of ecology?” Nature and Culture 17(1): 87-110. DOI: https://doi.org/10.3167/nc.2022.170104
Abstract:
Recent years have witnessed a proliferation of environmental certification regimes in the global agro-food system—a trend characterized as an example of the ecological modernization approach—emerged largely because of the rise of consumer sovereignty and neoliberal push for environmental and social ‘quality’ in food production and processing. Based on a robust analysis of the global aquaculture, the paper argues that the environmental certification regimes privilege some actors, species, and cultures while marginalizing others. While the fundamental tenet of the ecological modernization approach is to shape capitalism by ecological principles, I argue instead that through environmental certification, ecology or nature itself is largely shaped, transformed, and restructured to fit into and thereby serve neoliberal global governance and accumulation in a normalized manner. The example of certification regimes is therefore more like a ‘modernization of ecology’ rather than ecological modernization.