The argument is presented that the increasing awareness of the tension between international trade/globalization & environmental protection will only improve with the co-evolution of ecological knowledge & reform of national & international institutions. The author supports the argument by analysis of three topics that include epistemological tensions between key trade & environment norms, the relationship between trade, ecology & intellectual property rights in relation to the TRIPS agreement & geographical indications, & the importance of shared national experience & ecological knowledge for institutional innovation & integrative responsibility at the international level. The author advocates continued experiments between institutions in spite of the current lack of intellectual & political leadership needed to guide dialogue between the national & international communities. References. J. Harwell
The author contrasts the dangerous linear world view of dialectics with the totemic view of knowledge & "sacred balance" of spatial patterns & timing in the ecosystem that is shared by many indigenous peoples. The relationship between animal & human energies is related in a Kayapo myth & the anthropogenic landscapes of indigenous peoples. The author asserts that the tension between the reductionist commodification of nature that are institutionalized in international conventions verses indigenous intellectual property rights is a reflection of the actual motivations of science. The author concludes that the environmental crisis cannot be solved by technological tampering or superficial political measures, but rather civilization needs to relearn ecological knowledge & sustainable principles from indigenous & traditional peoples. References. J. Harwell
"Following its December 2013 discussion on defence, the European Council commissioned a review of 'changes in the global environment' and the resultant 'challenges and opportunities for the Union'. This is overdue. The 2003 European Security Strategy is the product of a bygone era, and reluctance to revisit it has hampered Europe's foreign policy and contributed to the failures of the CSDP. Common external and defence policies require a shared understanding of global developments, of how Europe should respond, and of where armed forces can contribute. But no such shared understanding now exists - as recent surveys of national security strategies and strategic cultures across the EU attest. The consequences include reluctance to cooperate and misapplied defence resources. So the new review will represent an important opportunity for the member states to converge on a shared strategic narrative, and revitalise their common foreign and defence policies. The reverses Europe has suffered in the last few years should concentrate minds." (author's abstract)
Argues that analytical advances can be made by employing a historical-comparative perspective to changes in the political architecture & governance structure of European countries. The Holy Roman Empire, with its dual features of overlapping authority & divided loyalty, is used to analyze the implications of European integration, noting that the imperium of the Middle Ages retained both territorial & nonterritorial connotations. The complex governance structure of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation in 1648-1806 is described to shed light on the institutionalization of shared sovereignty & the relation between centralization, federalism, & devolved government. It is contended that the polity that was seen as outmoded by the sovereign territorial state offers insights into the contemporary reconfiguration of political forces in Europe which involves both a restructuring of political authority within the EU & an attempt to rearticulate the EU's relations with the European environment. The Holy Roman Empire serves as an analytical, but not as a political, model for understanding the reconfiguration of the European political space. J. Lindroth
Argues that analytical advances can be made by employing a historical-comparative perspective to changes in the political architecture & governance structure of European countries. The Holy Roman Empire, with its dual features of overlapping authority & divided loyalty, is used to analyze the implications of European integration, noting that the imperium of the Middle Ages retained both territorial & nonterritorial connotations. The complex governance structure of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation in 1648-1806 is described to shed light on the institutionalization of shared sovereignty & the relation between centralization, federalism, & devolved government. It is contended that the polity that was seen as outmoded by the sovereign territorial state offers insights into the contemporary reconfiguration of political forces in Europe which involves both a restructuring of political authority within the EU & an attempt to rearticulate the EU's relations with the European environment. The Holy Roman Empire serves as an analytical, but not as a political, model for understanding the reconfiguration of the European political space. J. Lindroth
The thesis that culture is rightfully an integral part of politics is described as a major theoretical insight of nationalism that is embodied in the concept of the nation-state. The focus is on the implications of this thesis for dealing with the claims of aboriginal peoples in multinational states. Consideration is given to ways to conceptualize the loss experienced by indigenous peoples of Canada, the US, Australia, & other "post-colonial" states. It is contended that justice requires non-indigenous people to acknowledge past wrongs; gain understanding of indigenous cultures; & provide legal, political, & social space for indigenous people to reproduce their culture. Indigenous people must be willing to adapt their lives to the new environment & work with non-indigenous people to construct an understanding of their shared land & history that does justice to the presence of each. It is noted that the commitment required demands a strong sense of national identity even though the "very problem that needs to be addressed is one that erodes the legitimacy of that identity.". 33 References. J. Lindroth
Business enterprises are increasingly regarded as key actors of sustainable development. The development towards sustainable business is even more fostered by the spreading of business rankings based on corporate sustainability indexes, which assess the overall sustainable performance. But despite these trends the awareness of the necessary sustainability shift within business enterprises is rather moderate. At least to some extent this can be explained by the lack of instruments to teach sustainable development in business schools and in advanced business training. This holds especially true for the ethical questions of sustainability. This is amazing since the concept of sustainable development is strongly bound to moral principles (e.g. social justice, dignity of man, human rights, ethical concepts of a good life and of solidarity). Relying on these implicit principles sustainability indexes demand for sustainable products and services, for ecological management, for social reporting, for codes of conduct for suppliers, for equal rights and non-discrimination etc. Consequently some business enterprises have started to establish corporate value management to cope with theses challenges. Taking the ethical demands for sustainable corporate performance serious practising and teaching sustainability has to comprise ethical reflections on the relevant moral ideas for sustainable development, too. Thus this paper wants to put forward neo-Socratic dialogue (NSD) as a didactic method to teach fundamental ethical questions of sustainable development for business enterprises. A NSD is an inquiry into ideas, originally meant to find consensus on some topic through a joint deliberation and weighing-up of arguments. The dialogue aims at visioning, explaining values and clarifying fundamental concepts. It implies a systematic investigation of our assumptions, reasons and viewpoints, and a cooperative testing of their validity. In the dialogue participants attempt to formulate legitimate principles and develop a shared and inspiring perspective. A second aim of the NSD is to learn to have a dialogue instead of a discussion. This requires adequate command of a number of dialogical roles, skills and attitudes, especially suspending judgements and keeping a balance between taking position and resigning. Both aims are intimately connected to the development of strategy, organisational learning and knowledge management. The NSD has been successfully applied so far in medical ethics, university teaching, organisational learning, business ethics, as well as in primary education. A NSD is focussed on a single fundamental ethical question. A NSD is applied to a concrete experience of one of the participants that is accessible to all other participants. Systematic reflection upon this experience is accompanied by a search for shared judgments and underlying reasons for these. In the case of sustainable development examples for such fundamental questions are the following: What does it mean to conduct a good life? Is luxury unnecessary? What does participation in the context of business enterprises mean? How can business enterprises realize solidarity? What is basically Socratic in the NSD is the method of rigorous inquiry into the thoughts, concepts and values we hold as true. The NSD is a joint investigation into the assumptions we make when we formulate our thoughts. The proposed paper will give an overview on this method and its application for teaching ethical questions of sustainable development. The article will elaborate especially the business applications of NSD to teach sustainability. Besides describing the more theoretical background of NSD, the paper will present a case study of a NSD held with an interdisciplinary group of students studying sustainable development at the University of Vienna.
Does the result of the discussion that there is more than one rationality at stake in environmental policy-making imply a relativistic methodological conclusion? There are three reasons that could pull us toward a relativistic notion of rationality: (1) The existence of competing cultural models of nature forces us to abandon the idea of nature as something outside society. Nature exists for us only through culture. To the extent that we have to accept that nature is a cultural construction, the notion of 'hard facts' vanishes. Nature is - like all social facts - a soft fact. This will open our way of 'regulating nature' through environmental politics and policies to moral claims and moral discourse. (2) Environmental policy cannot be based on the authoritative nature of 'hard facts'. Nature as a collective good is a soft fact that will increase communication and argumentation about what should be done because of the possibility of competing claims of these facts. A political culture of communicating 'as-if-facts' develops. Groups begin to argue as if there were 'hard facts'. To free political communication from 'hard facts' will accelerate communication - and the remaining problem is to guarantee communicability and solve the problem of emerging communicative power. (3) Cultural analysis leads us to question the very basis of modern rationality: the idea of bare facts. Policy analysis as the most advanced form of rationalizing the reproduction of modern societies has given us the possibility to explore the cultural basis of this advanced form of formal rationality. When environmental policy analysis can no longer be based upon this type of rationality we are forced to base the rationality of policy decisions on soft facts. Thus policy-making will be drawn into the communication of 'as-if-facts' (which are soft facts) using institutional power to validate them. That there are no hard facts, that we can talk about everything, that everything is a social construction: all these claims come close to a relativistic position. We do not, however, have to draw such a relativistic conclusion from these arguments. There are again at least three reasons that limit this potential relativism: (1) As long as there is a struggle over 'as-if-facts', rationality lies in the process of communicating such soft facts. The institutionalization of procedures of negotiating and communicating interpretations of facts contains the possibility of procedural rationality. This does not imply a return to absolutism, but rather an 'anti-antirelativism' (Geertz 1984). The purity model is not only a second type of rationality developed within the European tradition that competes with others but also creates the conditions of arguing about the relative weight of each. (2) The observation of two traditions in one culture is an argument against the hegemonic role of one culture and also an argument against relativism. Therefore the purity model becomes the key to an understanding of new and so far suppressed elements of rationality in environmental policy-making. Since this model is the dominated one its thematization not only lays bare the suppressed model but also lays the bare fact of suppression as such which has repercussions on the legitimacy of the dominant model. (3) To conceive nature - in line with what we have called the Jewish model - as an indivisible, holistic entity justifies the construction of nature as a collective good to be shared equally by all. Thus a new ground for fairness and justice can be laid in the modern discourse of a just and fair society. The reconstruction of cultural traditions regulating the relationship of man to nature allows us to identify the forms of symbolically mediated relationships between the two. We do not only use nature for instrumental purposes, we also use it to 'think' the world (to use an expression of Tambiah (1969)). We use natural differences to make sense of social differences, which in turn gives meaning to natural differences (Douglas 1975). Nature, in a sense, gives lessons on how to conceive differences. Moving our focus from justice to purity gives us a better understanding of the differences underlying the emerging modern European culture of environmentalism. The analysis of cultural movements carrying counter cultural traditions thus forces us not only to broaden our theoretical notion of the cultural 'code' underlying European culture, it also forces us to see the carriers of counter cultural traditions as more than movements of protest against modernity and modernization. I claim that the two competing models relating man to nature have become the field of a new emerging type of social struggle over two types of modernity in advanced modern societies. It is my contention that the culture of environmentalism contains the elements for an alternative way of organizing social relations in modern society.
