The Emerging Discourse on Nature/ecology and the Social Contract

In light of the mounting ecological crisis, the past decade has seen growing calls for a new social contract as part of a transition to a more environmentally sustainable socio-economic order. Bodies including the UN and EU, as well as an array of global NGOs have embraced the language of the social contract as a rallying point for efforts to unite various interests and strands of discourse around a green transition. Such calls have invoked ideas of nature and ecology in various ways. The UN (2021), for example, has contrasted an “old social contract” of the twentieth century with a new imagined “contract with nature” or an “eco-social contract”. Others have similarly invoked the idea of a “socio-ecological contract” (ETUI 2021) as a way of underscoring the strong links between social issues and the ecological crisis, and the necessity that any transition address both at the same time. Though largely unacknowledged, this discourse is riven with the same set of conceptual tensions that have, for some time, been the object of sustained transdisciplinary academic debate around the relationship between nature and society. Authors since at least the 90s have attempted to reconceive this conceptual relationship in light of the ecological crisis. Prominent geographers, as well as the various new materialisms influenced by the work of Bruno Latour, have endorsed the view of inextricably interlinked “socio-natures” or “nature-cultures”. Others, including a number of eco-Marxist theorists, have defended a dualistic notion that maintains conceptual distance between nature and culture. At the same time, historians of political thought including the notable recent contribution of Pierre Charbonnier have begun to explore the ways in which political thought has historically embodied implicit assumptions about the relationship between societies and nature, and the way that the socioecological transformations of modernity have shifted these assumptions. Little has been said to date on the emergence of the social contract as a key feature of current global sustainability discourse. Whilst the invocation of the need for a new social contract is clearly intended to bring together disparate issues and interests, the language also leaves open important ambiguities and ambivalences regarding the direction and scope of this as a political project, and, as elsewhere in global sustainability discourse risks acting as a mask for technocratic and undemocratic new forms of governance. Furthermore, important questions remain unaddressed around what bringing nature/ecology into a new social contract would actually look like. Drawing both on debates in geography and environmental philosophy, and on the history of political thought, this paper seeks to map the contours of this emerging discourse, providing perspective on its invocation of the social contract as a concept, and exploring the stakes of emerging fault lines.