The Politics of Environmental Narratives

What makes environmental conflicts complex and difficult to solve? This question is increasingly important because, more and more, environmental problems are going to shape local, national, regional, and international politics. Not surprisingly, this question has generated a lot of scholarship. Most of the time, however, it has been approached through the lens of a global, macro normative theory. By normative, I intend a theory that explains how certain conflicts should be solved or certain social relations should be governed; by macro, I intend a theory that departs from certain normative principles and from there illuminates a number of practical consequences; finally, by global, I intend a theory that looks at environmental problems through the lens of what people and state across to the globe owe to each other. In this thesis, I argue that such standard approach is useful only in limited cases and seldom can explain environmental conflicts which are characterised by different understandings of what an environmental problem ultimately is, by competing views on market-based mechanisms to solve environmental problems, and where different actors hold opposing positions of what should be done to solve the problem (...)