PLANNING FOR A SUSTAINABLE EUROPE? - TU Berlin

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4.5 Political Economy
Only through critical re-engagement with political-economy … can we hope to reestablish
a conception of social justice as something to be fought for as a key value
within an ethics of political solidarity built across different places.
David Harvey (1996:360)
4.5.1 Introducing the Framework
In the discursive framework of political economy, the overarching theme or goal
is not the “sustainable” growth of the economy or the preservation of the Earth’s
ecological balance but simply and plainly “equity.” Equity is interpreted most commonly
in terms of social (and, slightly more problematically, environmental) justice. The key
unit of analysis is thus society. In the following sections, I also recognize several
political economy approaches that are more concerned with spatial distributional aspects
than with social ones, since the respective spaces are ultimately connected to different
populations. The key relevance for policy lies in political economy’s focus on
redistributive action.
Like renunciation approaches (and, to a lesser extent,
communicative rationality), political economy approaches are to be understood as
alternatives, not complements, of the dominant approach of ecological modernization,
and most political economy approaches are explicitly anti-capitalist.
David Harvey’s (1996) much debated Justice, Nature and the Geography of
Difference provides a useful example for an academic study written within the discursive
framework of political economy. In the book, Harvey in fact provides an explicit critique
of the ecological modernization framework (pp.382-3):
As a discourse, ecological modernization internalizes conflict. …. It can be
appropriated by multinational corporations to legitimize a global grab to manage all of
the world’s resources. Indeed, it is not impossible to imagine a world in which big