In recent years environmental governance has emerged in industrialised democracies as the key strategy to coordinate political agency between and across societal spheres and sectors to achieve the common goal of a ‘sustainability transition’. The governance paradigm assumes that the ‘problems’ constituting the environmental crisis are too complex to be solved by government alone and too fundamental to be decided by any one sector of society. Hence, governance is about including policy-makers, bureaucracies, businesses and civil society actors in horizontal and inclusive processes of ‘problem-solving’ and political steering. What is commonly framed as a form of democratic participation and burden-sharing, however, has also been criticised as a strategy to delegate and disperse political responsibility and to water down processes of substantive decision-making.
This paper analyses the paradigm of environmental governance as an instance of political lock-in that results from conflicting state imperatives, societal goals and socio-economic priorities. In analysing the mechanisms of lock-in, we will draw on two novel concepts: one is that of ‘epistemic legitimacy’, which explains the need of liberal democratic regimes to delegate the burden of change into opaque realms like the market and hence the reluctance of democratic governance to take decisive transformative action. The other concept is that of ‘agentic operators’, which allows a distinction between different modes of intervening into reality that can be used to analyse how these different modes are employed in processes of governance. These concepts will help us assess how transformative agency is channelled, delegated, and ultimately blocked within systems of environmental governance. The resulting explanatory account of transformative ‘system failure’ will provide further insights into contemporary politics of unsustainability.
