Environmental Politics: A Very Short Introduction by Andrew Dobson

Author:Andrew Dobson
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780199665570
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Published: 2015-11-25T05:00:00+00:00

Have Green parties made a difference?

This is a difficult question to answer, not least because it is hard to isolate the effect that Green parties as opposed to other influences have had on environment and sustainability policy. At one end of the spectrum of possibilities, any advances that have been made would have happened without Green parties. At the other end, these advances are due to Green parties and no-one else. Inevitably, the truth lies somewhere in the middle. What is incontrovertible is that Greens have influenced other political parties, and most of them now have a section on ‘the environment’ in their manifestos and party programmes. This is a direct result of electoral competition, and it applies mostly to left-of-centre parties where competition with Greens for political space is most acute—although centre-right parties, such as the UK’s Conservative Party, have also been known to paint green stripes in their blue flags as a sign of ‘modernization’. Some have argued that the German Green party’s roots in the anti-nuclear movement and its consistent anti-nuclear sentiment have been a key factor in Germany’s phasing out of nuclear power—though others will say that this was more due to contingent events such as the Fukushima nuclear power plant disaster in Japan in March 2011.

Overall it is probably fair to say that pressure from the environmental movement—including Green parties—has pushed mainstream politics into an acceptance of ecological modernization as we described it in Chapter 2. That is, an understanding that ‘the environment’ is the unavoidable context for politics and economics, and that we need to look after it more effectively and use it more efficiently. It is also true to say that in periods of stress, such as the economic crisis of 2008 to the present, these objectives come to be treated as a luxury extra. David Cameron, the UK Prime Minister, who made much of his green credentials in advance of the General Election of 2010, was heard to talk in 2013 of ‘all that green crap’ in reference to environmental obligations apparently driving up household energy bills.

How can we explain the generally increasing success of Green parties, and the way in which some parties seem to be consistently more successful than others? At the macro level we could refer back to Ronald Inglehart’s ‘silent revolution’—the idea of a shift from materialist to post-materialist values. The steady electoral gains made by Green parties are consistent with the idea that increasing numbers of people have their material needs met and so turn to parties with a more post-material message. One problem with this idea is that it is wrong to see environmental politics as post-materialist in the first place. But Inglehart’s thesis would also suggest a decline in Green party votes when people’s material wellbeing is threatened—during the recent widespread economic crisis for example. One report found that by the end of 2010, one in six households in Europe was struggling to find enough money to live on. Contrary to this expectation, though, twelve

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