Think Global, Reconfigure the Local: How Intermediaries Articulate Pro-Environmental Values and Practices

Abstract

Contemporary debates about the conservation of natural ecosystems and resources owe most of their influence to the rise of sustainable development, or, sustainability. Since its inception, ‘sustainability’ has become the dominant paradigm for addressing global ecological problems, as well as a strong motivator for changing patterns of behaviour at the level of individual people. The World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED) introduced this framework into global proenvironmental discourse in 1987, and it has since been the source of many debates and discussions within and between academic disciplines. One of the central issues has been the opposition between agency and structure. This is the problem of whether to appeal to agency (theories of individual behaviour change) or structure (theories of social practice) when addressing global environmental problems, as these fields are generally characterised as necessarily opposed to one another. However, each of them at least conceives of a particular kind of agency, meaning that both make an appeal to ‘the individual’ in one way or another. The ultimate aim of this thesis, then, is to reconfigure the way in which individual people are framed by and thus implicated in contemporary discussions about sustainability. In order to do this, I will be drawing heavily on Pierre Bourdieu’s (1984) concept of the ‘cultural intermediary,’ as well as Stuart Hall’s (cf. Grossberg, 1986) theory of ‘articulation.’ I propose a framework that characterises proenvironmental groups as ‘intermediaries,’ as each of these groups acts as a ‘mediator’ or ‘point of articulation’ between the structural dimensions of sustainability and the individual people that they address. I will analyse this framework by appealing to two close studies of two different intermediaries: Greenpeace, and its ‘Save the Reef’ campaign, and Sydney’s Inner West Council, and its ‘Home Eco Challenge.’