Environmental management as political sustainability

Abstract

Grounded in critical theory and the Gramscian concept of hegemony, this article argues that environmental management (EM) can be understood as an accommodation to growing public awareness of environmental problems that potentially threatens dominant hegemonic coalitions. On the material level, EM is a set of practices that ameliorates the more egregious environmental consequences of industrial production; on the ideological and symbolic level, EM constructs products and companies as "green" and legitimizes the primacy of corporate management's role in addressing environmental problems. EM is thus seen to be more about political than environmental sustainability.