Abstract
The growth preference and the growth imperative provide only a partial explanation for the commitment of governments to economic growth. This is because by adopting modes of analysis based primarily upon agency or structure, neither approach is able to capture the inevitable interplay between these respective explanatory logics. Overcoming this problem requires a critical constructivist approach that works at an ideational level of analysis. Rather than focussing on some abstract and deterministic logic of social interaction, constructivism is concerned with how ideas, ideology and discourse shape agency, structure, interests and ultimately political practices, thus providing a more holistic account of world affairs (Adler and Pouliot in Int Theory 3(1):1–36, 2011; Buttel Organ Environ 11(3):261-286, 1998).
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Notes
- 1.
Epistemic communities comprise experts and professionals who share a commitment to a common set of political values and understandings about social and scientific phenomena (Haas 1990).
- 2.
Named after Prometheus, who in Greek methodology stole fire from Zeus, thereby greatly increasing the capacity of humans to manipulate the world for their own ends (Dryzek 1997).
- 3.
In linguistics, the term collocation denotes words that specifically or habitually appear together in speech (Matthews 2007).
- 4.
The UNFCCC even explicitly promotes ‘the need to maintain strong and sustainable economic growth’. (United Nations 1992: Article 4(2)(a).)
- 5.
In the 3 years after Brundtland (1987) introduced the term, one observer counted at least 40 working definitions of sustainable development (Brooks 1992).
- 6.
For a critical examination of the contested terrain of development discourse see the contributors to Sachs (1992a).
- 7.
Other significant reasons for the environmental movement’s shift in priorities at this time include the economic crises of the 1970s that overshadowed concern for the environment; the professionalisation of the movement; and the emergence of new, less immediately perceptible issues that were more difficult to campaign on, such as stratospheric ozone depletion and climate change (Hajer 1995).
- 8.
In this sense Foucault does not develop a theory of the state, but rather a genealogy of the way power is manifest in the state-society complex (Jessop 2007; Ekers and Loftus 2008).
- 9.
Entitled The Global Competitiveness Report and The World Competitiveness Yearbook respectively.
- 10.
For this reading of Smith ’s work see Andrew Skinner’s introduction to Smith (1967).
- 11.
Some branches of neoclassical economic theory such as behavioural economics, which modifies the basic utility-maximising model of human behaviour to account for psychological and cognitive factors, do recognise the social construction of economic phenomena. However, these approaches remain at the margins of the economic mainstream.
- 12.
The scientific pretentions of contemporary mainstream economics has led some critics, including Mirowski (1989) and Castoriadis (1985) to accuse economists of suffering from ‘physics envy’; that is, the belief that economic reasoning has achieved a similar degree of explanatory accuracy as the mathematical and physical sciences.
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Ferguson, P. (2018). The Growth Hegemony. In: Post-growth Politics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-78799-2_6
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