At some point in the mid-1980s, the environmental movement ceased to exist as a living source of collective identity for a relatively small number of people and became instead a source of collective inspiration for society as a whole. What had previously been a wide ranging critique of industrial society and its waste and artificiality became a much more delimited and disembodied set of symbols, ideas, slogans and practices that have since been working their way into the the world of science and technology policy. What had earlier been seen by the power elite primarily as a subversive threat to the further expansion of the industrial state has come instead to be seen, by many influential actors in both business and government, as an important contributor to economic recovery and rejuvenation.

From the paradigmatic notions of sustainable development and risk society to the pragmatic techniques of cleaner production and pollution prevention to the new marketing strategies of green consumption and environmental labelling, the political discourse of environmentalism has been reinvented over the past ten years as a policy discourse. What represented in the 1970s an alternative approach to modern science and technology has come to be reconstituted, from the mid 1980s onward, as a partner in a constructive program of science, technology and economic policy. And what were in the 1960s and 1970s protest movements of radical opposition have largely been emptied of their political content, while simultaneously giving rise to new branches of, and approaches to, science and technology. While the more radical, or oppositional, voices have lost much of their influence, the more pragmatic and scientific voices have been given a range of new opportunities. Of course, this is not to say that there is no longer a radical environmental opposition, but I would contend that radicals and reformists have increasingly drifted apart from one another, and in most countries now work in different organizations, with little sense of a common, oppositional movement identity.

There has been, in other words, a fragmentation of what was, for a relatively short time, a social movement into a number of disparate bits and pieces. In the 1970s, environmentalism, throughout the industrialized world, stood for an alternative set of “knowledge interests,” involving both a fundamental political critique of modern technoscience’s attitude to nature, as well as an alternative organizational ideal - a democratic, or participatory ideal - for the development of knowledge. There was also a distinct form of collective learning that took place in the study circles and information activities of environmental movements, and a kind of grass-roots, or, what Ivan Illich termed a “convivial” form of engineering that went under the name of appropriate, or radical technology. The point is that, as a social movement, environmentalism managed to combine different kinds of interests into a central core identity, what Ron Eyerman and I have termed cognitive praxis, with both cosmological, technological and organizational dimensions.

The cosmology was, to a large extent, the translation of a scientific paradigm into a socio-economic world-view. The holistic concepts of systems ecology were transformed into political philosophies of social ecology; in the writings of the American anarchist Murray Bookchin, for example, ecology was linked to a utopian political tradition, represented by Charles Fourier, Henry David Thoreau, and William Morris to inspire a new kind of liberatory “ecology of freedom”. For Bookchin, and for Arne Naess in Norway, and for many other movement intellectuals, ecology was not to be reduced to an instrumental rationality, to a control apparatus. An emancipatory, or deep ecology would rather be one in which scientific knowledge production would be selectively restructured according to an organismic ethic, rather than a mechanical logic.

Technology was to be developed under the general perspective that “small is beautiful”, and that large scale, environmentally destructive projects were to be opposed and stopped. At the same time, new contexts for education and experimentation and the diffusion of research were created in the form of movement workshops and, in Holland, for example, in the form of science shops, allowing activist groups to gain access to the scientific expertise at the universities.

I have earlier suggested that one of the key processes at work in the 1980s, which served to decompose, or break apart this integrative movement cognitive praxis into a disparate cluster of organizations and individuals, was a process of professionalization. The knowledge interests of the environmental movement were transformed into various kinds of professional expertise, which made it possible to incorporate parts of the movement into the established political culture, and shift at least some of the members of the movement from outsider to insider status. Some of the alternative technical projects proved commercially viable - biological agriculture, wind energy plants, waste recycling.

Some of the alternative visions were taken up by professional philosophers and politicians (and even Murray Bookchin got a university post), while the alternative contexts for knowledge production and dissemination either cleaned up their act and developed more sophisticated communication and information strategies or they eventually ran out of steam. There were both internal and external reasons for this professionalization process. In the course of the energy debates of the 1970s, the environmental movement had generated within its own ranks a new range of expert competences in energy planning, energy policy, alternative energy production, and so forth. As the intensity of the public debate over energy futures waned in most of the industrialized countries during the early 1980s, either through over-exposure or some kind of definitive parliamentary decision, these counter-experts thus found themselves in need of new sponsors to support their work. Some became professional consultants, working either in private consulting firms or in relation to the government, and some found jobs at non-governmental organizations, like Greenpeace, or the older, more established conservation societies. Others carved out niches in the media and the universities, creating new professional identities as environmental journalists, environmental and energy researchers. Still others moved into governmental and intergovernmental agencies, like the World Bank and the European Commission, to develop programs in energy efficiency and sustainable technology development.

What began to be noticeable in the mid-1980s, to a significant degree as a result of these professional outgrowths, or spin-offs, from the environmental movement, was a new kind of environmental policy agenda, the so-called global environmental agenda that focused on problems of biodiversity, climate change, and transborder pollution. These problems were, of course, identified by scientists and engineers as serious and urgent, particularly after the hole in the ozone layer was disclosed over Antarctica. It is, however, worth noting that most of these international environmental problems had been discussed at least since the 1940s by concerned scientists and nature-lovers, and, at the 1972 UN Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm, the global nature of environmental problems had been stressed by many scientific participants.

What had changed in the meantime was the character of the international political economy. By the mid 1980s, production, in many branches, had become increasingly globalized, with research carried out in one part of the world, development in another, and manufacture in still another. Individual firms were increasingly nodes in transnational corporate networks. Economic life had more and more come to be governed by international patterns of production and diffusion, and this globalization trend was further accentuated by developments in telecommunications and information technology. It became possible, and, in a few short years, common practice, to plan industrial operations on a global basis, and to shift operations from country to country depending on changes in market and financial conditions. There are, of course, many elements to this globalization that are open to dispute, and there is, to say the least, a lively discussion of what all this means. For environmentalism, and environmental science and technology policy, globalization has meant a shift in substantive focus - from the local and national to the global, when it comes to the issues to be dealt with - as well as a shift in location - from national policy-making bodies to intergovernmental and international organs, when it comes to agenda-setting, and, increasingly implementation of research programs, as well. In actual research practice, the new information technologies have meant a great deal, in terms of the kinds of observations that can be simulated, the kinds of models that can be constructed, and the kinds of calculations that can be made. The social construction of scientific facts has been shifted from a more or less direct interaction with the environment and its component parts, to an ever more abstract and aggregate meta-environment of atmospheric, hydrological and geological processes that cannot be directly observed or, for that matter, studied.

It can be suggested that what has made these new issues particularly interesting for the new cadres of environmental professionals that had grown out of the environmental movement, is that their solution requires something more than old fashioned science and technology. They require rather a new kind, or mode of knowledge production that combines various disciplinary perspectives. Most importantly, these new global environmental problems require a new kind of social or political expertise to complement the traditional kinds of scientific-technical expertise that had previously dominated environmental science and technology policy. In particular, there is need for an intermediary expertise between the global and the national, an expertise in the social, or, as it is often called, the human dimensions of global change. What this expertise often involves is a knowledge of particular methods of accounting, assessment, scenario building, forecasting, foresighting, prediction, and the like that seem to be called for in dealing with these extremely abstract and uncertain global problems. But it is also, at various levels and in various ways, an expertise in societal adjustment, environmental management, “life-cycle” analysis, risk assessment. It is what Ulrich Beck calls reflexive knowledge, a kind of knowledge that Beck sees as characteristic for the emerging risk society that, one might contend, the environmental movement first identified. Instead of calling it risk society, which, in essence, implies an acceptance of continuous and ever more serious risks in our complex societies, the environmental movement saw the construction of risks as the problem to be overcome, and those technologies - nuclear energy, automobiles, chemical fertilizers - that were too risky simply had to go. It was science-driven development itself that was the problem, because, as Barry Commoner showed already in 1971, that development favored artificial, synthetic techniques; an ecological society would be one that lived within nature’s limits, however difficult it was to define those limits in practicable - and economically profitable - terms. The ecological society - Ernest Callenbach’s “ecotopia” - proved to be a vision that could not be made amenable to a capitalist, market-based logic, at least not on a general, global scale. Risk society, on the other hand, can be lived with, and it can be incorporated into a capitalist economic system, but it requires new kinds of expertise in order to become sustainable.

How can we as social scientists continue our analysis of these transformations? Let me briefly present the project that I have just initiated within the program on targeted socio-economic research (TSER) of the European Commission. It might serve to inspire others among us who are culturally and critically minded to respond to the upcoming second call for proposals (deadline in January 1997). We call the project PESTO, since we are green and saucy; it stands for Public Participation and Environmental Science and Technology Policy Options.

What we want to investigate is how the transformation of the environmental movement that I have described above has affected environmental science and technology, both in terms of policy agendas, as well as in terms of project implementation and institutional restructuring. We conceptualize science policy as a cultural process, by which representatives of the concerned policy domains, or cultures, negotiate decisions, or non-decisions, of various kinds. In this perspective, the environmental movement can be said to represent a civic “policy culture”, and its influence can be evaluated by seeing how much its conceptions of policy measures, doctrines, and programs are taken into consideration in policy deliberations with the other policy cultures - economic, bureaucratic and academic. Science policy making can be thought as a field of cultural tensions, where the different actors try to impose their prirorities and policy principles onto the system as a whole.

It is interesting that, by becoming respectable, the environmental movement - renamed “non-governmental organizations” - has been allowed to take a more active part in policy-making. But that participation differs substantially from country to country. In Denmark and the Netherlands, for instance, technology assesssment is an officially established activity, and the general public is involved in a variety of ways in the new programs of sustainable science and technology. In Sweden, on the other hand, science policy remains largely in the hands of the experts, and public participation is much more limited and circumscribed. I would contend that policy makers, activists, and social scientists have a lot to learn from cross-national comparative research.

PESTO is divided into three main phases, or “work packages,” as they say in Brussels:

• In the first work package, the project investigates the interface between the public and policy-makers, focusing on issues of representation and legitimation, and on the communication strategies of environmental organizations and relevant authorities.

• The second work package will analyze the evolution of new innovative networks in environmental science and technology in the different countries. We will study the connections, or linkages, that are being established between universities and private companies, and the role that the public is allowed to play, or not play, in these emerging networks.

• In the third work package, we will explore the transnational exchanges that are taking place in environmental science and technology policy. Here, we will examine how the new policy activities and programmes transcend national borders, especially in Europe.

PESTO thus focuses on how the “public”, in different countries and in different ways, participates in the new approaches in environmental science and technology policy. The aim of PESTO is to compare the reconstitution of environmental science and technology policy in eight European countries: Britain, Denmark, Iceland, Italy, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Norway, and Sweden. It is our contention that the involvement of the general public is crucial for the successful implementation of environmental science and technology policies, and that, in this regard, the countries of Europe have a great deal to learn from each other’s experiences. By systematically comparing what we term the cultural tensions in environmental science and technology policy making in a wide range of different countries, we hope to develop a better understanding of these important policy transformations.

What we hope to achieve in PESTO is an interactive process of social learning, both among the participants, but also with various participants in the networks that we study. We want to provide an opportunity for reflection and for the sharing of experiences across the European countries. We would also like to carve out a new kind of role for social science in the new discourse of sustainability, a more partisan role, in that we believe that the issue of participation is central to the value of the new environmental science and technology policies. And finally, we want to strengthen the comparative understanding of ecological modernization, by identifying, in a systematic manner, the national differences in policy making, network building and public participation.

Note: This paper was presented, in slightly different form, at a conference on Environment and Power, organized by the Center for Technology and Society at the University of Trondheim, October 30-31, 1996. For a more developed version of the argument, see my article in Risk, Environment, Modernity, edited by Scott Lash, Bron Szerzynski and Brian Wynne (Sage 1996).