Ecological Regimes

Regulating Society: Environment Relations

Since physical interventions in the world are often constitutive elements of actions, the coordination of actions or interactions incorporates physical aspects into social order at any scale. The regulation intends to establish or maintain specific environmental conditions. Ecological regimes thus constitute a realm of objects and related targets.

Typical examples of ecological regimes are the regulation of forestry, agriculture or other forms of land use; taking precautions against epidemics, floods, avalanches, and other natural hazards; energy policies; or the waste systems. Since literally everything may become involved in actions or interactions, there is no a priori limitation to the object realm of ecological regimes. However, the regulative targets determine what belongs to a regime or not. Insofar as ecological regimes are constituted by a normative coordination of actions, they resemble institutions. They may encompass institutions as well as individual actions, though.

Toward an Integration of Social and Physical Structures

That people do not make their history under self-chosen conditions is obvious. What is controversial, however, is what ways and to what extent material nature and artifacts contribute to the constitution of society. In general, the social sciences, including human geography, obey the rule of explaining social facts by referring to other social facts and processes exclusively. The purpose of this methodological imperative is to ensure that research avoids any kind of physical determinism, such as environmental determinism, normative naturalism, or racism. However, approaches such as ecological economics, science and technology studies, environmental philosophy, actor-network theory, ecofeminism, or political ecology strive to integrate material elements into their conceptions of the social. In this context, the concept of ecological regimes offers an approach to study the interrelations between social and physical structures that avoids physical determinisms and does not make the social an absolute.

By producing and referring to physical facts, actions and interactions may link social conditions to physical conditions. Consequently, the latter may even steer social processes to some degree. If, for instance, an annual budget for road repairs depends on weather conditions, then physical conditions are allowed to determine that money is spent for certain purposes instead of others.

The concept of ecological regimes might play a key role in developing perspectives in social theory that stress the coevolution of “nature” and “culture.” In contrast to notions of hybridity, which tend to sweep the specific differences between human actors, animals, plants, and physical conditions generously away, analyses setting out from ecological regimes trace the integration of physical and social facts down to individual actions or interactions and their regulation.

There are related notions in use. Like Christoph Görg, several authors address the regulation of society-nature relations, and when referring to [Page 839]the shift from wood to coal or oil as the primary energy resource, Marina Fischer-Kowalski and Rolf Peter Sieferle speak of different socioecological regimes. For geography, this concept offers not only possibilities to relate physical and human geography in novel ways but also an alternative to the often problematic use of “space” or “landscape” as concepts, which somehow should integrate material and social facts.

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