Institutional Dynamics in Environmental Corporatism: The Impact of Market and Technological Change on the Dutch Polder Model

This article describes how market and technological change can be conceived to affect corporatist politics in the area of waste management. The article adopts a political economy approach to institutional change, and seeks to trace the impact of market and technological change on established political and regulatory institutions. The article demonstrates that the main impact of marketization of waste services and the introduction of ISO 14001 environmental management systems was to expand the range of choices for companies and regulators to engage in regulatory interaction concerning environmental waste management practices. The main purpose of the article is to demonstrate exactly how the emergence of regulatory choices for both companies and regulators is likely to open up new avenues for regulation in the environmental field that, once pursued, systematically reduce incentives for corporate and regulatory actors to engage in associational politics.     

The Empty Heaven of Democracy

Going through a protracted period of transition since the end of the Cold War, the world order in the making is neither what was nor what it is yet to become. It is in “the middle of the future.” To get our bearings in this uncertain transition, we explore the two grand post‐Cold War narratives—“The End of History” as posited by Francis Fukuyama and “The Clash of Civilizations” posited by the late Samuel Huntington. Mikhail Gorbachev looks back at his policies that brought the old order to collapse. The British philosopher John Gray critiques the supposed “universality” of liberalism and, with Homi Bhabha, sees a world of hybrid identities and localized cultures. The Singaporean theorist Kishore Mahbubani peels away the “veneer” of Western dominance. Amartya Sen, the economist and Nobel laureate, assesses whether democratic India or autocratic China is better at building “human capacity” in their societies.