PLANNING FOR A SUSTAINABLE EUROPE? - TU Berlin

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environmental policy. Table 4.3 (below) provides an overview of the key differences
between so-called “brown” versus “green” agenda environmental policy. Central issues
such as the redistribution of both positive growth benefits and negative environmental
impacts are not addressed to the same extent in any other discursive framework. 35
Power
struggles over environmental resources, especially at the local level, are key themes in
the political economy framework.
Given the strongly local activist roots of most larger environmental organizations
fighting against further transport infrastructure expansion in Europe, it is not surprising
that most of them employ a mix of both “green” and “brown” arguments (sometimes
mixing them to a point where it obfuscates their overall argument). The same is true for
the EU, whose Commission continually produces policy statements applicable to both,
brown and green agendas, with an eco-modernist emphasis on the latter. Of late, the
Environment Directorate’s urban policies have emphasized land use and brownfields
issues, as well as more standard green environment themes (see Commission of the
European Communities 1998a; Commission of the European Communities and Expert
Group on the Urban Environment 2001g). Meanwhile, the EU’s general Urban Agenda
(Commission of the European Communities 1997a) also emphasizes “brown” issues such
as unemployment and social exclusion. More generally, the EU is of course also quite
conscious of the need to consider distributive aspects of environmental problems.
Typically, these aspects are (more or less implicitly) subsumed under mentions of “social
sustainability” or “social cohesion.”
35 Note that a process-oriented framework such as communicative rationality can in principle not be faulted
for failing to pre-specify negative substantive outcomes such as inequality or environmental destruction.