Published in:

Spash, Clive (ed., 2017): Routledge Handbook of Ecological Economics: Nature and
Society. London: Routledge, 152-161.

The Imperial Mode of Living

Ulrich Brand / Markus Wissen

ABSTRACT

This chapter introduces the concept of the “imperial mode of living” in order to understand
better a key factor of the ecological crisis and the limits to effectively deal with it. The term
indicates that everyday practices of people in the Global North rely heavily on the principally
unlimited appropriation of resources, on a disproportionate claim to global and local
ecosystems and sinks and on cheap labour from elsewhere. It also highlights that despite the
strong awareness of the ecological crisis the imperial mode of living dynamically extends
towards the middle-classes of the Global South. This deepens the ecological crisis and brings
increasing rivalries for global resources, the use of ecosystems and sinks. The second part
highlights some important theoretical references as political ecology, regulation theory,
Gramsci´s concept of hegemony, practice theory, feminist social sciences and the concept of
ecological imperialism. Then, a short historical sketch shows how the concept of imperial
mode of living can be applied. The fourth section formulates some open questions and
promising fields of research by linking the term to dynamics as the financialisation of nature
and green grabbing, the role of politics and the (internationalised) state, debates about Green
Economy and Green Capitalism and, finally, the conceptual and practical search for
alternatives.

KEYWORDS

fossilist production and consumption patterns, (global) environmental politics, crisis politics,
political ecology, regulation theory, hegemony, alternatives

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1. Introduction

Despite increasing geo-political and geo-economic rivalry, a strong global compromise seems
to exist which, on the one hand, nurtures those rivalries and deepens the ecological crisis and,
on the other, constitutes a stabilising moment in the crisis of capitalism. We refer to the broad
consensus that the further exploitation of natural resources and the overuse of global sinks are
considered as the basis of global capitalist development and the overcoming of its crisis.
Behind this stands a global consensus about the attractiveness of modern capitalist everyday
practices what we call the “imperial mode of living”.

2. What does “imperial mode of living” mean?

The concept of the „imperial mode of living” (impLiv) draws our attention to the fact that
capitalism does not only imply uneven development in time and space as well as a constant
and accelerating universalization of a Western production model. The logic of liberal markets
since the 19th century and especially since World War II is inscribed into everyday practices
that are normalised and usually unconsciously reproduced. They are a main driver of the
ecological crisis.

The concept of the impLiv implies that the everyday practices of people, including individual
and societal orientations as well as identities, rely heavily on the principally unlimited
appropriation of resources, on a disproportionate claim to global and local ecosystems and
sinks and on cheap labour from elsewhere. This availability of commodities is organised
through the world market, backed by military force and/or the asymmetric relations of forces
as they have been inscribed in international institutions. The concrete production conditions of
the consumed commodities which are essential to particular modes of living are usually not
visible. For example, as far as agricultural products are concerned, McMichael (2010: 612)
speaks of “food from nowhere”.

In recent years, the globally attractive imperial mode of living has been unevenly globalised.
A large group of “new consumers” (Myers/Kent 2004, UNEP 2010) has emerged in countries
like China, India, and Brazil, i.e. consumers who integrate the consumption of meat,
automobility, and electronic apparatuses into their everyday lives.

The impLiv contributes to safeguarding social stability in the global North and provides a
hegemonic orientation in many societies of the global South. The social relations underlying

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the impLiv and possible ways to transform them are hardly politically disputed and
insufficiently reflected in current political debates, official reports and research.

The impLiv is not socially neutral. People with high levels of education, relatively high
incomes, and high environmental consciousness have the highest per capita resource use,
while classes with lower environmental consciousness, but also lower income, use fewer
resources. Moreover, the concept does not refer only to lifestyles of different social milieus. It
aims to recognise the dominant patterns of production, distribution and consumption as well
as discourses and related orientations of “a good life” in the Global North and, increasingly, in
the countries of the Global South.

The concept helps us to understand that,

- first, despite the crisis of neoliberal-imperial globalisation resource- and energy-

intensive everyday practices persist and remain to have severe social-ecological
consequences;
- secondly, the hegemonic, i.e. largely accepted forms of living are closely linked to the
dominant mode of production and capital´s valorisation strategies, to politics and the
very structures of the state and to prevailing orientations and dispositives of action;
- thirdly, global environmental politics is largely ineffective and we experience a severe
“crisis of crisis management” because it does not focus the core of the crisis, i.e. the
imperial mode of production and living. The very structure of national and
international politics is deeply linked to the dominant mode of production and living;
- fourthly, despite all rhetoric we experience a fostering of (neo-)imperialist strategies
with respect to natural resources and sinks in order to maintain existing power
relations and interests but also the impLiv;
- fifthly, in the current economic crisis the development and strengthening of resistance
and alternatives to dominant crisis politics and the promotion of a social-ecological
transformation are difficult;
- and finally, that the hegemonic imperial mode of living - which changes over time – is
one starting point for counter-hegemonic struggles; beside the blocking of
unsustainable capital and state strategies, the forms of living must be transformed.
Another entry point for alternatives is the irreducible existence of more solidary and
social-ecological modes of production and living that might become universalised.

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3. Theoretical background and references of the concept

The concept is quite new and was introduced a few years ago by the authors of this entry.
However, it is an interdisciplinary term that can be used in various fields of research and from
approaches. On the other hand, the concept benefits from various theoretical traditions.

Brand and Wissen (2013, 2015) especially refer to political ecology, regulation theory and
Antonio Gramsci´s concept of hegemony. They are all linked to eco-Marxism (Douai in this
handbook). The starting point is that the capitalist mode of production is expansive and geared
towards increasing surplus value, production, and consumption. This goes hand in hand with
an extension of the capitalist (world) market and a capitalist valorization of ever more areas of
life.

One central category of regulation theory is that of the “mode of development”. It refers to
the temporary coherence between the historical development of a mode of production and
distribution, on the one hand, and a mode of consumption on the other (the regime of
accumulation), which is safeguarded by a range of institutional forms that together constitute
a mode of regulation. Capitalist dynamics are especially – albeit not exclusively – present if a
“stable” regime of accumulation emerges in the sense of more or less calculable and
incremental changes. From the point of view of regulation theory, the various segments of the
production process – the production goods industry and the consumer goods industry – and
the prevailing standards in these processes must be more or less compatible with the
conditions of final consumption. Michel Aglietta argues in his seminal study that the
emergence of a working-class mode of consumption centred around standardized housing and
automobile transport became after World War II “an essential condition of capitalist
accumulation” (Aglietta, 1979, 154) and an important factor for the generalization of wage-
labour in Fordism (Huber 2013 on the link of fossilist capitalism and the wage relation). The
concept impLiv adds to regulation theory by assigning greater weight to the micro-level of
everyday practice and everyday knowledge.

Hegemony theory in the tradition of Antonio Gramsci and Political Ecology broadens this
perspective even further (Peet et al., 2011, Görg 2011 on the theoretical foundation of the
concept societal nature relations; drawing on Gramsci: Mann, 2009). It is argued that in
certain historical phases, and building on a coherence between norms of production and of
consumption, a hegemonic, i.e. broadly accepted and institutionally secured mode of living
can emerge that is deeply rooted in the everyday practices of people and safeguarded by the
state. This highlights the aspects of domination – along class, gender, race, international and
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post-colonial lines - which are more or less consented by the dominated. Hegemony does not
mean that differing modes of living do not exists. However, usually they remain at the
margins (albeit they are crucial in order to develop alternatives).

Modes of production and consumption that become hegemonic in certain regions or countries
can be generalised globally through a “capillary” process, meaning in a broken manner and
with considerable gaps in time and space. That process is associated with concrete corporate
strategies and interests in capital valorisation, trade, investment, and geo-politics; with
purchasing power; and with dispositives of an attractive mode of living that predominate in
the societies into which these modes diffuse by way of the world market. “Generalisation”
does not mean that all people live alike, but rather that certain, deeply-rooted concepts of the
“good life” and of societal development are generated and are reflected in the everyday life of
a growing number of people, not only symbolically but also materially.

Feminist economics and other feminist social sciences make important contributions to a broader
understanding of economies and societies. Beyond the formal economy, capital investment,
financial markets and wage labour there are other structures and processes which are the
precondition for the functioning of the formal and money-mediated economy. Workers are raised
and the elderly are cared not only – and in many cases even not predominantly - through the
formal market economy. Biesecker and Hofmeister (2010; see already Luxemburg 1913, Salleh in
this handbook) argue that the capitalist economy is structured as one of “separation” and
“externalization”, i.e. is works because it hides and uses other forms of activities and the sector of
unpaid reproduction (which is also true for many environmental dimension). Such a perspective is
highly relevant for the concept of the impLiv because the mode of living and formal production is
highly linked to the reproductivity of a society and to manifold forms of gendered domination.

The notion of the impLiv is very close to what Foster and Clark have termed ecological
imperialism, i.e. “the pillage of the resources of some countries by others and the
transformation of whole ecosystems upon which states and nations depend; massive
movements of population and labour that are interconnected with the extraction and transfer
of resources; the exploitation of ecological vulnerabilities of societies to promote imperialist
control; the dumping of ecological wastes in ways that widen the chasm between centre and
periphery; and overall, the creation of a global ‘metabolic rift’ that characterizes the relation
of capitalism to the environment, and at the same time limits capitalist development”
(Foster/Clark, 2003, 187). We add to this perspective the theoretically-hegemonic one by

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asking how ecological imperialism is rooted in everyday practices and supported by state
institutions and thus normalized in a way in which its imperial character remains hidden.

Practice theories are a cornerstone for the concept of impLiv. They argue that social practices
are shared behavioural routines that are constituted by sets of interconnected elements (see
Røpke 2009 for an overview). The social and political institutions which facilitate them, the
socio-technical configurations, such as the physical infrastructures, which enable them, the
available knowledge and prevailing symbolic orientations which, consciously or not, guide
them, and the forms of power which are inscribed in all these elements (Spaargaren 2011).
Because of its habitualised character, an environmentally detrimental social practice such as
driving a car is only to a very limited extent accessible to intentional steering and
management, or to consciousness-raising campaigns.

Research in the tradition of Michel Foucault contribute linking link the impLiv with historical
forms of disciplining and their repressive as productive character, the bio-power as a form of
self-control which complements the power of state and capital. And such a perspective could
highlight the deeply inscribed and historically varying forms of eco-gouvernmentality (Luke,
1999; Goldman, 2004).

Social Ecology helps us to understand the longue durée of society´s “colonization” of nature
and the specificity of the “industrial socio-metabolic regime” and its particular energy sources
(Haberl et al. 2011, Krausmann in this handbook). By replacing continually reproducing
biomass as the main source of energy with fossil biomass the prevailing patterns of
production and consumption in the Global North were enabled. The approach insists that still
two thirds of the world’s population are in transition from the agrarian to the industrial regime.
Research on the impLiv can fruitfully refer to this body of research.

4. The imperial mode of living in historical perspective

The concept enables a different understanding of history and current developments.

In principle, the impLiv started with the colonisation of the world. Minerals like copper and
agricultural commodities like coffee, tea or bananas were extracted and grown by slave or cheap
labour and brought to Europe. For centuries, these products were luxury goods for the upper-
classes, inputs for production processes or – in the case of gold and silver – means of exchange or
to store values. Liberal capitalism in the 19th century extended the impLiv towards the evolving
middle-classes in Europe and the upper classed in regions like Latin America where the colonies

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became independent and national bourgeoisies emerged. Historical imperialism between 1875 and
1914 can be also read as an attempt to bring the respective national economy in a good position for
the extension and deepening of an impLiv. Without referring explicitly to the concept,
Kloppenburg (1988) showed in his seminal study how plant genetic resources played a major role
in the making of an imperial world order at the level of every day practices.

Mitchell (2011) reminds us that the struggle for and enactment of political and social rights in
modern societies are closely linked to fossil fuels. He argues that since the 19th century workers
achieved political and social inclusion especially through their power in the extraction, distribution
and use of coal. He calls this “carbon democracy”. The labor intense processes allowed workers to
interrupt processes via strikes or at least to menace the use of coal. However, the modes of living
were not deeply affected, many workers remained at least in parts living within a subsistence
economy. „A century ago, the widespread use of coal gave workers a new power. The movement
of unprecedented quantities of fuel along the fixed, narrow channels that led from the coal mine,
along railway tracks and canals, to factories and power stations created vulnerable points of
passage where a labour strike could paralyse an entire energy system. Weakened by this novel
power, governments in the West conceded demands to give votes to all citizens, impose new taxes
on the rich, and provide healthcare, insurance against industrial injury and unemployment,
retirement pensions, and other basic improvements to human welfare. Democratic claims for a
more egalitarian collective life were advanced through the flow and interruption of supplies of
coal.” (Mitchell 2011: 236)

The Fordist mode of development after World War II brought an enormous extension of the
impLiv. This is mirrored, for instance, in a model of well-being that includes in the Global North
the masses, unknown forms of political participation, high annual growth and profit rates and the
use of resources and sinks. Fordism implied a predominantly intensive regime of accumulation, i.e.
the reproduction of the wage earners itself became a sphere of capital valorisation and they
participated to greater or lesser extents in productivity increases. In the semi-periphery, parts of
the urban middle classes joint this obviously attractive mode of living. This resource-intensive
model is the main reason for many dimensions of the ecological crisis (Altvater 1993).

This model largely rested on opening up internal markets, wages were seen not only as a cost but
also as an important demand factor, and trade unions managed to link wage increases to rises in
productivity. Attractive forms of living centred around the male bread-winner model, auto-
mobility, processed and cheap food, the consumption of meat as an indicator of wealth, and the
use of electronic equipment. The capitalistically produced commodities and social relations need

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to be accepted and practically lived by the people who reproduce themselves materially and
symbolically through these commodities. The imperial mode of living of the Global North, i.e.
(fossilist) production and consumption patterns which rely on a disproportionately high
appropriation of labour force, resources and sinks on a global scale, has its root causes here. The
Fordist mode of development generated a high level of social consensus and shaped also
subjectivities and gender relations, i.e. a consolidation of patriarchal gender relations along the
“bread-winner model” occurred. The state has played a major role in constituting and stabilising
the imperial mode of living by not only externally securing access to strategic resources but also
internally guaranteeing a certain living standard of the masses through social insurance systems
and labour market regulations. This provides the material basis of the imperial mode of living and
it turns the state into an “educator” that aims to “make certain habits and practices disappear,
while seeking to spread others” (Gramsci, 1996 [1932-1934], p. 1548, our translation).

Unlike the 19th century, Mitchell (2011) argues, workers were less powerful in the postwar period
given the more decentralized (pipelines) and internationalized production of oil (especially
through the role of authoritarian governments in the Arab world). On the other hand, industrialism
based on oil (and gas) shaped the modes of living of workers and ordinary people in a profound
way: clothes, plastics, food, mobility became more and more oil and fossil fuel based (on the
central role of oil cf. also Huber 2013).

Moreover, national economies were cushioned through an “embedded liberalism” (Ruggie 1982),
that is, open markets with certain regulations. The financial sector, in particular, was strongly
regulated, not at the least due to the experiences of the crisis of 1929, and subordinated to the
circuit of industrial capital.

Fordist accumulation strategies came into crisis in the 1970s when profit rates declined and class
conflicts intensified in many parts of the world. The ecological destructiveness of the Fordist
mode of development was politicised by scientists, environmental movements and, in some cases,
by concerned bureaucrats. In the capitalist centres, the Fordist class compromise was dismissed
from above, while in many peripheral countries (particularly in Latin America) military
dictatorships took over state power. The orientation towards the world market was one strategy to
overcome the crisis, albeit with limited success. Despite new technologies, gains in productivity,
rationalisation, a reshaping of societal power relations, and a transnationalisation of the capitalist
mode of production and living, the contradictions of globalised capitalism impeded the emergence
of a more or less coherent new “post-Fordist” mode of development.

Although a certain politicisation of the ecological crisis, the Fordist appropriation of nature was
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intensified.

In the capitalist centres profit rates did indeed rise again. However, since the 1990s a partial shift
towards patterns of financialisation has played an increasing role in the reproduction of the
imperial mode of living. This goes hand in hand with the financialisation of nature and
mechanisms like carbon trading (Spash 2010).

In the current crisis the impLiv constitutes an important element of societal consensus. This is due
to the fact that in the capitalist centres the costs of the reproduction of wage-earners, which are
under neoliberal pressure, are reduced through enhanced access to globally-produced commodities
traded in liberalised markets (which is a means of increasing relative surplus value). This process
occurs along structuring lines of class, gender, and ethnicity but it is broadly accepted and its
deepening is a crucial strategy of dealing with the current crisis.

Furthermore, the impLiv is asymmetrically universalised in many countries of the Global South,
where development - in the sense of capitalist modernisation and a more or less selective world
market integration - is broadly accepted by elites and urban middle-classes. Some regions of the
Global South experienced rapid economic growth due to industrialisation and proletarisation, as in
China, and the development of a globally-oriented service economy, as in India.

Ecological crisis phenomena, like the erosion of biodiversity and climate change, have been
caused by the spread of production and consumption patterns. It creates resource and land-use
conflicts, geopolitical tensions and intense capitalist competition. Exclusive access to resources,
guaranteed by contracts or through open violence, and the externalization of the socio-ecological
costs that using these resources entails, are the conditio sine qua non of the global North’s mode
of production and living, which therefore can be called “imperial”.

5. Future Directions (e.g. potential, research needs, next steps, barriers)

The concept of the “imperial mode of living” enables us to understand better historical and
current developments. A critical discussion and further elaboration is going to make it more
robust; its use in concrete research and within different conceptual frameworks will show its
analytical usefulness. The potential of the term was indicated above: It sheds light on the
persistence of the unsustainable mode of production and living and related strategies of
various actors despite the highly politicised ecological crisis, to have a broad perspective of
the economic, political and cultural rootedness of the crisis and its links to other dimensions
like the economic crisis. The term contributes to a better understanding of the limitations of

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existing global environmental politics as well as politics at national and local scales, the
highly conflictive character of international economic and resource politics also happen
against the background of the maintenance of the impLiv.

In the following, we outline some promising fields and needs of research (which are not at all
comprehensive).

Green Grabbing, financialisation of nature and further `Landnahme´: The universalisation of the
imperial mode of living turns mineral and agricultural resources as well as sinks into increasingly
scarce goods and fosters varying forms of Green Grabbing (Fairhead/Leach/Scoones 2012).
Valorising them, i.e. enhancing mining activities under capitalist conditions and turning commons
or supposedly uncultivated land into capitalist commodities, becomes a more and more attractive
business. In the tradition of Rosa Luxemburg this can be called a further land-taking
(`Landnahme´; cf. Dörre 2015). It applies not only for mining and agricultural capital but also for
financial capital in search of new investment opportunities in a crisis of over-accumulation.
Investments in nature may not provide for the highest, but possibly for quite durable and secure
rates of return to capital. The strategies of capital are an important issue here. In Latin America,
the link between the further valorization of nature and the impLiv can be discussed in the
framework of the neo-extractivist mode of development (Lang/Mokrani 2013).

Theoretical and empirical research is required with respect to the state and the international
political system. Overall, they promote and secure the outlined and not at all sustainable
developments. At the same time, attempts to deal with the ecological crisis do exist. A critical
theorizing of the state that does not reduce it to an institution but understands it also as a social
relation is important. The state is a terrain of contest that is asymmetrically structured and has
biases towards certain interests like those of powerful groups and dynamics like the growth
imperative. Jessop (2007) calls this “strategic selectivities”. In that sense, the state cannot be
understood without considering social forces and their interests, the economic and cultural
constellations of a society, i.e. the modes of production and living as well as the material and
symbolic-discursive relations. Moreover, the state should not be equated with the national state but
as a multi-scalar social relation towards the local and regional level and towards the international
one (Brand et al. 2011).

Limitations of the promises of a Green Economy: The current efforts to ”green” the economy
mean that the resource dependence of the prevailing patterns of production and consumption shift
from fossil to other mineral, as well as to agricultural resources (for example, biomass for fuels,
copper for renewable energy and so on; see above; cf. Spash 2012). The greening of the economy
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is nothing else than the perpetuation of the impLiv through its ecological modernization. It will
strengthen the demand for natural resources, a demand which has already been rising due to the
spread of ”Northern” production and consumption patterns to the Global South.

Green Capitalism: A further field of inquiry should in more detail whether the current ecological
modernization of the economy might lead in some countries to a new more or less coherent mode
of development. This could be called Green Capitalism (Brand/Wissen 2015, Koch 2012). At the
level of political strategies and legitimation, such a project might be framed as a Green Economy.
A driving force of such a Green Capitalist project would be the further valorisation of nature as an
important constituent of crisis management, for the very reason that it is located at the interface of
various crisis phenomena. These phenomena evidently interact in such a way that one dimension
in particular of the multiple crisis, namely the crisis of energy and resources (including food),
offers approaches to overcome another dimension, namely the economic crisis, through signaling a
scarcity of important goods and natural resources which could be converted into commodities.
Such a project will evolve unevenly in space and time. In the medium term, it could be successful
in countries like Germany and Austria, provided that a range of social forces gather in support of it.
Such forces comprise, amongst others, the green factions of capital, sections of trade unions, and
environmental and consumer associations, all of which get also articulated through political parties
and are for the moment present in certain state apparatuses.

Concerning different sectors and their role in Green Capitalism, particularly in the energy sector,
competing strategies and countervailing tendencies exist along different lines of conflict. The
promotion of renewable energies competes (and also sometimes co-exists) with the use of fossil
resources from “unconventional” sources (fuel from deep-water oil fields or from tar sands, gas
from induced hydraulic fracturing in deep underground rock formations), which are accessible by
means of technological advances and whose exploitation – due to rising energy prices – becomes
more profitable.

Alternatives and social-ecological transformation: The impLiv is an analytical concept to show

how unsustainable patterns of production and consumption are reproduced not only through
capital and state strategies but also through everyday practices. In that sense, politics and social
contestations to really overcome the ecological crisis – or, better said: the social-ecological crisis
as part of a multiple crisis of capitalism - need to consider this deep rootedness of unsustainability.
There are promising debates like that those on degrowth, good living, commons,
environmentalism of the poor or social-ecological transformation (cf. the contributions of Akbulut,
Asara, Martínez-Alier and Paech to this handbook; Brand 2016). A reflection on the impLiv

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enables the discussions and practices around the concepts not to reduce perspectives of change to a
question of adequate state control or management strategies, nor to be politically voluntaristic.
Social change in an emancipatory direction cannot overlook the ambiguous experiences of people
related to fossilist capitalism such as forms of well-being and social inclusion. The degrowth
debate insists rightly that the link between growth and well-being is broken (Muraca 2012).
However, it still exists not only through desperate “growth strategies” of capital and governments
but also as a powerful imaginary and through everyday practices. Alternative thinking and
practices should consider this.

6. Concluding Remarks

The dominant forms of the appropriation of nature lead to a deepening and spatial expansion of the
fossilist-capitalist mode of development and its expression as the imperial mode of production and
living. The ecological crisis is thus also a crisis of the global North’s mode of living, which,
although it cannot be generalised from an ecological point of view, is currently spreading across
the globe. In a way it guarantees that despite the crisis of capitalism it upholds a certain degree of
consensus.

7. Literature Cited (31) and Key Further Reading (4 highlighted)

Aglietta, M. (1979). A Theory of Capitalist Regulation. The US Experience. London: Verso.

Altvater, E. (1993). The Future of Market. London: Verso.
Biesecker, A., Hofmeister, S. 2010. (Re)productivity: Sustainable relations both between
society and nature and between the genders. Ecological Economics 69(8), 1703-1711.
Brand, U. (2016). How to get out of the multiple crisis? Towards a critical theory of social-
ecological transformation. Environmental Values (forthcoming).
Brand, U., Wissen, M. (2015). Strategies of a Green Economy, contours of a Green
Capitalism. In K. van der Pijl (Ed.). The International Political Economy of Production (pp.
508-523). Cheltenham: Edward Elgar.

Brand, U., Wissen, M. (2013): Crisis and continuity of capitalist societal nature relations.
The imperial mode of living and the limits to environmental governance. Review of
International Political Economy 20(4), 687-711.

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Brand, U., Görg, C., Wissen, M. (2011). Second-Order Condensations of Societal Power
Relations. Environmental Politics and the Internationalization of the State from a Neo-
Poulantzian Perspective. Antipode 43(1), 149-175
Dörre, K. (2015): Social Capitalism and Crisis: From the Internal to the External Landnahme.
In Dörre, K., Lessenich, S., Rosa, H. (Eds.). Sociology, Capitalism, Critique (pp. 247-279).
London/New York: Verso.
Fairhead, J., Leach, M., Scoones, I. (2012). Green Grabbing: a new appropriation of nature?
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Foster, J.B., Clark, B. (2003). Ecological Imperialism: The Curse of Capitalism. Socialist
Register 2004. London: Merlin, 186-201.
Goldman, M. (2005). Imperial Nature: The World Bank and Struggles for Social Justice in the
Age of Globalization. Yale: Yale University Press.
Görg, C. (2011). Societal Relationships with Nature: A Dialectical Approach to
Environmental Politics. In A. Biro (Ed.). Critical Ecologies. The Frankfurt School and
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Gramsci, A. (1996). Prison Notebook, vol. 7. Quoted from the German edition. Hamburg:
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Haberl, H., Fischer-Kowalski, M., Krausmann, F., Martínez-Alier, J., Winiwarter, V. (2011).
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Jessop, B. (2007). State Power: A Strategic-Relational Approach. Cambridge: Polity.

Kloppenburg, J. R. (1988). First the Seed. The political economy of plant technology,
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Koch, M. 2012. Capitalism and Climate Change. London: Palgrave/MacMillan.
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America. Amsterdam: TNI, Rosa Luxemburg Foundation
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Discourses of the Environment (pp. 121-151). Malden, Mass: Blackwell Publishers.
Luxemburg, R. (1913/1951). The Accumulation of Capital. London: Routledge.

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Mann, G. (2009). Should political ecology be Marxist? A case for Gramsci’s historical
materialism. Geoforum 40 (3), 335–344.
McMichael, P. (2010). Agrofuels in the food regime. The Journal of Peasant Studies 37(4),
609-629.
Mitchell, T. (2011): Carbon Democracy. Political Power in the Age of Oil. London/New
York: Verso.
Myers, N., Kent, J. (2004). The New Consumers: The Influence of Affluence on the
Environment. Washington: Island Press.
Peet, R., Robbins, P., Watts, M. (Eds.) (2011). Global Political Ecology. London, New York:
Routledge.
Røpke, I. (2009). Theories of practice – New inspiration for ecological economic studies on
consumption. Ecological Economics 68(10), 2490-2497.
Ruggie, John G. (1982). International regimes, transactions, and change: embedded liberalism
in the postwar economic order. International Organization 36(2), 379-415.
Spaargaren, G. (2011). Theories of practices: Agency, technology, and culture Exploring the
relevance of practice theories for the governance of sustainable consumption practices in the
new world-order. Global Environmental Change 21(3), 813-822.
Spash, C.L. (2012). Green Economy, Red Herring. Environmental Values 21(2), 95-99
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