Rejecting Eco-Authoritarianism, Again

DAN COBY SHAHAR

University of Arizona

ABSTRACT

Ecologically-motivated authoritarianism flourished initially during the 1970s but largely

disappeared after the decline of socialism in the late-1980s. Today, “Eco-Authoritarianism”

is beginning to reassert itself, this time modeled not after the Soviet Union but modern-day

China. The new Eco-Authoritarians denounce central planning but still suggest that

governments should be granted powers that free them from subordination to citizens’ rights

or democratic procedures. I argue that current Eco-Authoritarian views do not present us

with an attractive alternative to market liberal democracy even if we take a highly pessimistic

view of our shared prospects under the latter sort of regime.

KEYWORDS

Eco-Authoritarianism; democracy and the environment; liberalism and the environment;

authoritarianism and the environment; ecological crisis

Introduction

Since the late 1960s, the problems of overpopulation, natural resource exhaustion, and

ecological destabilization have played a prominent role in our political discourse. The most

concerned voices in this discussion, collectively grouped under the banner of “Neo-

Malthusianism,” have contended that ecological problems will seriously threaten the long-

term welfare of people around the world unless drastic action is taken immediately to combat

them. Accordingly, many Neo-Malthusians have pushed for wide-ranging policy reforms to

bring our society within ecological limits and thereby avoid disaster. Others have gone even

further, suggesting that the democratic market liberal regimes that dominate western society

are a major part of the problem, with the consequence that a true solution to our

environmental predicament will only be achievable if fundamental changes are made to our

systems of governance.

Neo-Malthusian radicals have disagreed amongst themselves about what sorts of

social arrangements would be best for replacing contemporary market liberal democracy.

However, some of the most notorious proposals have clustered around a common theme:

advocacy of authoritarian central government as the most promising approach for addressing

the ecological crisis.1 “Eco-Authoritarian” positions of this sort initially appeared in the

1970s through the writings of Robert Heilbroner and William Ophuls,2 but calls for

authoritarian responses to environmental problems continue to be made today.3

1 For examples of radical and influential Neo-Malthusian perspectives very different from the ones discussed in the remainder of this paper, see Goldsmith et al., 1972; Bookchin, 1982; Dryzek, 1987. 2 For as long as Eco-Authoritarianism has been a topic of discussion, Garrett Hardin has been cited as another one of its early proponents (see, e.g., Orr and Hill, 1978; Holsworth, 1979; Leeson, 1979; Dryzek, 1987: 90-91; Walker, 1988; Dryzek, 1997: 31-33; Dryzek and Stevenson, 2011, 1865). However, I do not agree with this classification. In his early writings, Hardin was quite clear in identifying a private enterprise system based on well-defined property rights as a potential solution to the so-called “Tragedy of the Commons” to be considered alongside direct government administration (Hardin, 1968: 1245; Hardin, 1972: 110-111). Hardin also discussed at considerable length the hazards of relying too heavily on administration without a clear understanding of how public officials would be monitored and held accountable (Hardin, 1968: 1245-1246; Hardin, 1972: ch. 16). He therefore seems less like an Eco-Authoritarian than someone who was concerned about the capacity of a purely

It perhaps goes without saying that these views have been largely dismissed by most

contemporary intellectuals. In the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union and the

widespread failure of centrally-planned economies during the 1980s, advocacy of

authoritarian central planning has become highly taboo. This trend has even been reflected in

the writings of the early Eco-Authoritarians themselves, with more recent publications by

Robert Heilbroner and William Ophuls explicitly rejecting authoritarianism in favor of other

alternatives.4

However, prevailing hostility to authoritarian perspectives has masked an important

development in recent Eco-Authoritarian literature. According to today’s Eco-Authoritarians,

previous proponents of their view were right to think that market liberal democracy should be

replaced by some form of authoritarian government, but they simply went too far in

advocating complete government control of society. As I will show in the pages to come,

Eco-Authoritarians now claim that governments should not act as central planners but should

nevertheless be free to carry out public programs and intervene in the personal and economic

activities of citizens when they see fit, without having to abide by limitations emerging from

citizens’ private and democratic rights.

As we will see, the new Eco-Authoritarians take their cues primarily from the

People’s Republic of China, which has achieved considerable success by abandoning

economic central planning while retaining authoritarian power over its citizens. Unlike the

centrally-planned Soviet Union, and indeed even unlike the regime that governed China

under Mao Zedong, today’s Chinese government seems to dodge many of the criticisms that property-based regime to address all of the challenges posed by the governance of common-pool resource systems, and who therefore insisted on the need for administration to play some role in filling in the gaps. This not an authoritarian position: it is precisely what most market liberals think about these matters. Along similar lines, Paul Ehrlich and Dennis Pirages have also been cited at least once as Eco-Authoritarians (Holsworth, 1979), though they explicitly argue in Ark II for a division of powers within a (substantially reformed) constitutional government in order to prevent ecological planning from escaping democratic accountability (Pirages and Ehrlich, 1974: ch. 5). Many market liberal democrats would undoubtedly reject the particular reforms that Ehrlich and Pirages favor, but this does not make them Eco-Authoritarians. 3 See, e.g., Shearman and Smith, 2007; Friedman, 2009a; Beeson, 2010. 4 Heilbroner, 1991: 111-121; Ophuls and Boyan, 1992: 312-314.

applied to earlier experiments with authoritarianism. Today’s Eco-Authoritarians believe that

if governments built on the Chinese model could only be directed toward addressing the

ecological crisis, they would be capable of achieving a much higher degree of success than

will likely be possible under democratic market liberalism as we know it. Favorable

outcomes would not be guaranteed, of course, and a transition to authoritarian government

would come with important costs that should not be borne lightly. But since Eco-

Authoritarians believe that market liberalism is seriously ill-equipped to handle an impending

ecological crisis, they argue that their proposed alternative represents a risk worth taking.

I trust that many readers will share my hesitancy to consider authoritarianism as the

answer to any problem. However, Eco-Authoritarians are right to contend that the gravity of

an impending ecological crisis might warrant considering the seemingly-unconsiderable.

Such a discussion seems especially appropriate in light of the current absence of thoughtful

responses to new Eco-Authoritarian arguments in the contemporary literature. Given the

differences between newer views and the now-discredited positions developed in the 1970s, it

is no longer sufficient to point to the ineffectiveness of 20th century socialism as decisive

proof that today’s Eco-Authoritarians are misguided,5 and more applicable critiques have not

yet made their way into publication.

Thus this paper attempts to take Eco-Authoritarianism seriously on its own terms in

order to evaluate its merits as an alternative to market liberal democracy. As a point of

departure, I will adopt a number of pessimistic assumptions about the future of market

liberalism that Eco-Authoritarians (and many other environmentalists) will likely regard as

well-grounded. I will grant for the sake of discussion that our future environmental

challenges will be extremely severe, that private actors in the free-market will not be able to

devise methods to cope with these challenges satisfactorily, and that market liberal

5 For a particularly clear illustration of the conflation between early Eco-Authoritarian views and the newer perspectives that will be the targets of this paper, see Dryzek and Stevenson, 2011: 1865.

democracies will be hard-pressed to implement policies to effectively ameliorate these

challenges due to messy partisan wrangling of the sort that has dominated contemporary

politics throughout all of recent memory. It should be stressed that these assumptions may not

be true: all of them have been challenged at one point or another in voluminous bodies of

literature, both by optimistic market liberals who believe that our current institutions will

suffice to handle any coming ecological challenges6 and by less radical Neo-Malthusians who

believe that market liberalism can be reformed to address our problems without moving all

the way to authoritarianism.7 But I take it that if Eco-Authoritarianism cannot be sustained

with these assumptions in place, then it will not be defensible if they are relaxed in market

liberalism’s favor.

In spite of these pessimistic assumptions, I ultimately conclude that embracing Eco-

Authoritarianism would be unlikely to improve the capacity of western societies to respond to

ecological challenges over what the market-liberal status quo would offer. Thus even if

market liberal societies will predictably face severe hardships due to an impending

environmental crisis, shifting towards more authoritarian forms of political organization

should not be seen as an attractive strategy for ameliorating these problems. Indeed, while it

is hard to imagine that such a shift would generate better consequences, there is good reason

to suspect that embracing Eco-Authoritarianism would only make things worse.

I. Why Eco-Authoritarianism?

In its original form as articulated by Robert Heilbroner and William Ophuls, Eco-

Authoritarianism was a relatively straightforward response to three simple intuitions: 1) The

impending environmental crisis will be the result of unchecked autonomy in a world

characterized by ecological limits; 2) Societies governed by democratic institutions will

systematically fail to impose needed constraints on themselves that could mitigate the

6 See, e.g., Barnett and Morse, 1963; Beckerman, 1974; Simon, 1981; Lomborg, 2001. 7 For particularly ardent examples of these perspectives, see the authors discussed in footnote 2 above.

severity of the crisis; and 3) A more effective response can be mounted if those who

understand what needs to be done are empowered to take action without gaining approval

from the rest of us. I will expand on these ideas in turn.

The first intuition stated above – that the environmental crisis will be the result of

insufficiently restricted autonomy – is relatively easy to understand. If the global citizenry

were allowed to contribute freely to environmental problems without any repercussions, and

if this privilege were exercised by enough people to a large enough degree, then the result

would be “the ruin of all”8 just as in Garrett Hardin’s famous parable of the Tragedy of the

Commons.9 Directly invoking Hardin, William Ophuls contended that “the metaphor for the

commons is not merely an assertion of man’s ultimate dependence on the ecological life-

support systems of the planet, but an accurate description of the current human

predicament.”10 Thus his recommendation was essentially the same as Hardin’s: the

imposition of constraints on our liberty.11

The need for limitations as such did not provide a complete case for authoritarianism,

as any effective constraints – including voluntary or democratically-imposed ones – would

suffice to prevent ecological catastrophe. Thus the second intuition motivating early Eco-

Authoritarians was that societies of free individuals would be unable to successfully impose

limits on their own behavior through voluntary or democratic channels. Although a variety of

reasons were offered in support of this claim, two themes were recurrent. First, the citizens of

democratic countries were expected to be too incompetent, myopic, and downright

recalcitrant to willingly set aside their narrow short-term interests in order to take necessary

8 Hardin, 1968: 1244. 9 Although Ophuls refers explicitly to Hardin’s analysis, Heilbroner focuses more on the particular modes of thinking endemic to industrialized societies as the source of the problem. He argues that the tendency of industrialization to generate environmental degradation results from the conditioning of citizens to think in terms of profits and losses rather than the rhythms of nature (Heilbroner, 1974: 76-78). Although this analysis is subtly different from Hardin’s, it is consistent with his focus on the actions of those who “behave only as independent, rational, free-enterprisers” (Hardin, 1968: 1245). 10 Ophuls, 1977: 147. 11 Ophuls, 1974: 155-156.

collective actions to avoid the crisis.12 Second, it was expected that since avoiding the crisis

would require a slowing of economic growth, an explosion of internal conflict would emerge

over the way that remaining rights and benefits were to be distributed, and these conflicts

would be too messy for democracy to handle.13

These unfortunate dynamics implied that even when it was clear to intelligent,

informed onlookers that action was required in order to prevent disaster, it would

nevertheless be difficult within a democratic system for effective action to be taken. With this

recognition in mind, the third intuition motivating early Eco-Authoritarians was that the best

way forward would be to put the power of unilateral decision-making into the hands of expert

public officials who would then be able to implement and enforce the changes that would be

needed to mitigate the environmental crisis. As Heilbroner put it, “the passage through the

gauntlet ahead may be possible only under governments capable of rallying obedience far

more effectively than would be possible in a democratic setting. If the issue for mankind is

survival, such governments may be unavoidable, even necessary.”14 Ophuls was even less

equivocal:

To sum up, scarcity in general erodes the material basis for the relatively

benign individualistic and democratic politics characteristic of the modern

industrial era; ecological scarcity in particular seems to engender

overwhelming pressures toward political systems that are frankly authoritarian

by current standards, for there seems to be no other way to check competitive

overexploitation of resources and to assure competent direction of a complex

society’s affairs in accord with steady-state imperatives. Leviathan may be

mitigated, but not evaded.15

12 Heilbroner, 1974: 136; Ophuls, 1977: 160-162 and 179-180. 13 Heilbroner, 1974: 86-89; Ophuls, 1977: 186-188. 14 Heilbroner, 1974: 110. 15 Ophuls, 1977: 163.

The governance structures envisioned by Heilbroner and Ophuls would be ones in

which governments were given unlimited control over whatever aspects of social life were

implicated in producing the ecological crisis.16 As Ophuls put it, the task of charting the

future of global society would likely have to fall into the hands of “a class of ecological

mandarins who possess the esoteric knowledge needed to run it well.”17 It should be noted

that the early Eco-Authoritarians were eager to stress the importance of finding ways to

preserve as much liberty as possible within such authoritarian regimes,18 even suggesting that

eventually it could be possible for authoritarianism to give way to more equitable and

democratic systems of governance.19 Nevertheless, considerations like freedom, justice, and

public participation were ultimately regarded as luxuries that might not be affordable to

societies facing ecological disaster. Given the stakes, Heilbroner and Ophuls argued that even

our most cherished rights and values would need to be reexamined in order to ensure

survival.20

II. Problems for the Original View

In its own way, the early Eco-Authoritarian position made a certain amount of sense:

if it were true that an ecological crisis was being caused by excessive autonomy, that

democratic market liberal societies would systematically fail to generate the constraints

necessary to avoid the crisis, and that authoritarian governments would be able to keep

societies away from catastrophe through enlightened central planning, then the relative appeal

of authoritarianism would be clear.21 The problem with this position, however, was its crucial

16 Heilbroner, 1974: 129-36; Ophuls, 1977: 159-164. 17 Ophuls, 1977: 163. 18 E.g., Heilbroner, 1974: 137-138; Ophuls, 1977: 162-3. 19 E.g., Heilbroner, 1974: 138-142; Ophuls, 1977: ch. 8. Ophuls in particular is hopeful that a “fundamental transformation of worldview” might produce a smooth transition to sustainable governance that would prove his dismal prognosis false (Ophuls, 1977: 223). 20 Heilbroner, 1974: 135-136; Ophuls, 1977: 244. 21 David Orr and Stuart Hill emphasize a hidden fourth premise: that we have no other viable alternatives besides market liberal democracy or Eco-Authoritarianism (Orr and Hill, 1978: 461). Assessing the full range of alternatives to both market liberalism and Eco-Authoritarianism would go beyond the scope of this paper, so for now I will proceed as if the main rhetorical task for Eco-Authoritarians is simply to demonstrate the superiority

assumption that authoritarian governments would actually be able to generate better

outcomes through central planning.

This premise was quickly challenged in the academic literature by critics who argued

that authoritarian governments would be hard-pressed to cope successfully with their vastly-

increased size and complexity while also navigating difficult ecological challenges.22 But the

biggest blows to early Eco-Authoritarianism came from the failure of real-world experiments

with centralized authoritarianism around the world. With the disintegration of the Soviet

Union and thoroughgoing economic reform of the People’s Republic of China, it became

increasingly untenable in any area of discourse to advocate centralized authoritarianism as a

solution to any problem, never mind one requiring highly complex, efficient, and coordinated

actions by public agents.

Within a few years, pessimism about the prospects for comprehensive central

planning entered into discussions of Eco-Authoritarianism through the work of critics like

John Dryzek, Robert Paehlke, and Doulas Torgerson,23 as well as that of some of the former

Eco-Authoritarians themselves. In a 1991 update to his Inquiry into the Human Prospect,

Robert Heilbroner admitted to his and others’ “failure to appreciate fully the difficulties of

running a centrally planned economy,”24 and suggested that any feasible way forward would

probably have to include some form of market organization.25 William Ophuls also distanced

himself from his earlier authoritarian claims, writing in 1992 that:

…given the appalling record of the administrative state in this century, the

better solution is to be found in the other direction. We need a form of of their own proposal to democratic market liberalism without regard to its maximal effectiveness among all possible approaches. I take it that this is a particularly appropriate test for Eco-Authoritarianism since it is the benchmark that Eco-Authoritarian writers have generally targeted in articulating their own views. Another issue that I do not take up here is whether the moral costs of adopting authoritarianism would be worth the added comforts that authoritarianism might hypothetically bring. I leave this issue aside in large part because, as we will see, I deny that these added comforts would be likely to materialize in the first place. 22 Orr and Hill, 1978: 461-464; Holsworth, 1979: 18-20; Jennings, 1983: 378-379. 23 Dryzek, 1987: ch. 8; Paehlke and Torgerson, 1990; Dryzek, 1992: 23-26. 24 Heilbroner, 1991: 112. 25 Ibid.: 117-121.

government that is effective in obliging humankind to live with its ecological

means but that does not require us to erect an ecological Leviathan (which, as

many of my critics rightly pointed out, simply would not work in the long

run).26

By the close of the millennium, it was abundantly clear that the inherent problems

with authoritarian central planning had rendered the Eco-Authoritarian arguments of the

1970s defunct. John Dryzek eulogized, “the discourse never really got past the simplistic

draconian authoritarianism of the 1970s survivalists.”27 Meanwhile, Andrew Dobson

shrugged off the view as primarily an aberration from “the early days of the contemporary

environmental movement.”28 If the ecological crisis were to admit of a solution, it would

apparently have to come from some other source than the one identified by Heilbroner and

Ophuls.

III. Eco-Authoritarianism without Central Planning

Over the last decade, several authors have attempted to revive Eco-Authoritarianism

as a viable candidate for responding to a still-impending environmental catastrophe. The key

difference between the new versions of Eco-Authoritarianism and the originals has been their

shift away from central planning in favor of an alternative model of authoritarian government

patterned primarily after the People’s Republic of China. Although China has long since

abandoned comprehensive central planning as its primary mode of economic organization, it

has retained much of its authoritarian structure. Furthermore, the Chinese government has

26 Ophuls and Boyan, 1992: 313. In looking back on the initial version of Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity, Ophuls claims that he was not calling for such an ecological Leviathan and insists that he had recognized the problems with centrally-planned systems at the time (ibid.: 312-314). I am hesitant to endorse this version of the story and prefer to interpret Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity in a manner consistent with Ophuls’ 1973 essay, “Leviathan or Oblivion?” (Ophuls, 1973). On this reading, the Ophuls of 1977 saw reason to be concerned about comprehensive planning and hoped that it could be avoided, but believed that a benign transition to a sustainable order was somewhat unlikely. Thus a central power with the Hobbesian authority to take necessary actions would likely have to be created at least as a transitional measure until better institutions could be adopted. 27 Dryzek, 1997: 44. 28 Dobson, 2000: 114.

recently begun to direct some of its power toward efforts at increasing environmental

efficiency.29

Meanwhile, western liberal democracies have struggled to address some of their most

serious environmental challenges, particularly including the problem of global climate

change. Impatience with the glacial pace of environmental reforms appears to have led some

western commentators to look ruefully eastward and wish that their own nations would act

with more impunity. The Hoover Institution’s Ying Ma describes this emerging sentiment as

a sort of “authoritarian chic”:

Already, many…observers – pundits, government officials, and policy wonks

– wish that Washington could push through climate change reform in Chinese

fashion. In their policy narrative, climate change demands rapid, large-scale

solutions heavily subsidized by gargantuan government funding. Naturally,

China’s government-led push to confront climate change evokes their awe and

envy. After all, China’s climate agenda, unlike that in the United States,

marches on unhindered by businesses that oppose policies that may hurt their

bottom line, citizens who refuse to accept the prospect of job loss, skeptics

who question the foundations and conclusions of climate science, or

lawmakers who put the wellbeing of their districts, states, and constituents

before the aspirations of global warming activists.30

The recent Eco-Authoritarian revival can be seen as a particularly blunt manifestation

of this phenomenon. Thomas Friedman, for example, writes in The New York Times:

One-party autocracy certainly has its drawbacks. But when it is led by a

reasonably enlightened group of people, as China is today, it can also have

great advantages. That one party can just impose the politically difficult but

29 Economy 2010. 30 Ma, 2010: 40.

critically important policies needed to move a society forward in the 21st

century. It is not an accident that China is committed to overtaking us in

electric cars, solar power, energy efficiency, batteries, nuclear power and wind

power.31

To Friedman, then, the promise of the Chinese model for overcoming political opposition is

increasingly being borne out in practice, with significant ramifications for the future of

American politics.

Some scholars of Chinese politics and economics have been similarly impressed by

the possibilities embodied in China’s system of governance. Peter Hugh Nolan, for example,

hopes that by carrying on in its current authoritarian path, “China’s own survival can

contribute to global survival and sustainable development, by offering a beacon as an

alternative to the US-dominated drive toward global free market fundamentalism.”32 Mark

Beeson likewise suggests that if ecological challenges become particularly severe, ‘good’

authoritarian governments in the Chinese model “may become not only justifiable, but

essential for the survival of humanity in anything approaching a civilised form.”33

In their recent book, The Climate Challenge and the Failure of Democracy, David

Shearman and Joseph Wayne Smith take this trend to its radical extreme, arguing that the

prospect of catastrophic global climate change effectively spells an end to liberal democracy

as a viable form of social governance.34 Following the familiar Eco-Authoritarian formula,

they contend that liberal democracies will systematically fail to address environmental

problems because of the influence of selfish economic interests and consumption-hungry

31 Friedman, 2009a. See also Friedman, 2009b. 32 Nolan, 2005: 20. 33 Beeson, 2010: 289. 34 Shearman and Smith, 2007. It is worth noting that even aside from the prospect of ecological catastrophe, the authors are skeptical of the value of democracy and consider some form of authoritarianism to be much more in line with basic human nature (see particularly chs. 4-5 of their book).

citizens on short-sighted politicians.35 The resulting crises, they claim, will inevitably

facilitate the emergence of more authoritarian political structures to restore order.36

Shearman and Smith explicitly acknowledge that comprehensive central planning is

unattractive as a solution to the problems produced by market liberalism’s failures.37

Accordingly, they recommend a “firmly regulated” authoritarian alternative, citing as their

model not China but the tiny island nation of Singapore.38 The authors acknowledge that

Singapore’s current policies have been driven primarily by economic rather than

environmental imperatives, but they express virtual certainty that a technocratic authoritarian

government like Singapore’s “could be developed to drive vital environmental outcomes in

the interests of humanity’s future.”39 They even go so far as to invoke Plato’s famous

metaphor of the “ship of state” on the way to suggesting that a virtuous ruling class of

“ecoelites” could be raised and educated within such authoritarian regimes to provide

effective guidance for ecologically-challenged societies.40

Although most intellectuals continue to dismiss accounts like these as far-fetched and

implausible, the marginalization of Eco-Authoritarian viewpoints has not led to their

disappearance. On the contrary, United Nations researcher Christopher Hobson has recently

expressed concern that perceptions about the environmental superiority of authoritarianism

may soon become an obstacle to efforts to promote democratization around the world.41 In

this light, the absence of decisive responses to new Eco-Authoritarian arguments is

disconcerting.

IV. The Dubious Track Record of Actually Existing Authoritarianism

35 Ibid.: 91-96. 36 Ibid.: 121-124. 37 Ibid.: 124. 38 Ibid.: 124-126. 39 Ibid.: 126. 40 Ibid.: 140-141. See an earlier application of the same metaphor in Ophuls, 1977: 160-161. 41 Hobson, 2012: 979-983.

As Eco-Authoritarianism has re-emerged into contemporary environmental discourse,

a number of scholars have begun to pay closer attention to the environmental and political

performance of actual authoritarian societies, primarily including but not limited to China.

This scrutiny has revealed a largely-mixed track record including some important successes

alongside significant shortfalls. Critics of China in particular have questioned the ability of

the Communist Party to successfully implement and enforce its high-minded directives,42

noting that sometimes “being aggressive has no bearing on being effective.”43 Reservations

about the actual effectiveness of authoritarian environmental policies have been echoed in

discussions of other regimes in countries like Egypt,44 Iran,45 and Thailand.46

Bolstering these concerns, a recent study by Hanna Bäck and Axel Hadenius has

suggested the existence of a more general “J-shaped” relationship between democratization

and administrative efficiency across various countries and time periods. According to Bäck

and Hadenius, “administrative quality is higher in strongly authoritarian states than in states

that are partially democratized; it is highest of all, however, in states of a pronouncedly

democratic character.”47 They suggest that this may be because highly democratic states can

rely on a well-developed civil society for help in making sure that policies are well-calibrated

to particular contexts and for constructive feedback on policies once they are implemented.48

The authors note that authoritarian governments can sometimes perform better than partially-

democratized societies with poorly-developed civil societies, but that they have thus far been

hard-pressed to find an effective substitute for the genuine citizen participation that enables

42 See, e.g., Economy, 2010: ch. 4; Lo, 2010; Ma, 2010: 41-42; Lo, 2010; Gilley, 2012: 295-299. 43 Lo, 2010. 44 Sowers, 2007. 45 Doyle and Simpson, 2006: 758-764. 46 Johnson and Forsyth, 2002. 47 Bäck and Hadenius, 2008: 2. Bäck and Hadenius base their assessments of administrative quality on ratings provided by the Political Risk Services Group’s International Country Risk Guide, a publication seeking to inform clients in private industry on the potential risks of initiating business operations in countries around the world (Political Risk Services, 2005). 48 Ibid.: 15-17.

successful democracies to formulate and implement their policies successfully.49 Thus

although authoritarian governments may be free from certain policy-making constraints faced

by governments in liberal regimes, administrators in even the most successful authoritarian

countries have historically failed to match the levels of state capacity enjoyed by citizens of

prosperous democratic countries like Finland, New Zealand, and the Netherlands.50

The dubious performance of actually existing authoritarian governments may be

thought to cast some doubt on the viability of Eco-Authoritarianism as a response to the

ecological crisis. Thus Anthony Giddens has recently defended democracy against Shearman

and Smith by observing that “Totalitarian states have generally had poor or disastrous

environmental records. So also have most of those that have undergone processes of

‘authoritarian modernization,’ such as China, Russia or South Korea.”51 What Giddens fails

to appreciate, however, is the extent to which contemporary Eco-Authoritarians accept his

observations. Shearman and Smith, for example, begin The Climate Change Challenge and

the Failure of Democracy by announcing, “We agree that existing authoritarian societies,

largely based upon Marxist doctrines, have had an appalling environmental record. We accept

that there is no example of an existing authoritarian government that does not have a record

of environmental abuse.”52

It is critical to recognize, then, that the case for Eco-Authoritarianism is not built on

the assertion that global society should collectively strive to be more like the People’s

Republic of China, the Republic of Singapore, or any other modern authoritarian nation.

Rather, it is built on the assertion that the system of governance instantiated in China and

Singapore has more potential to resolve the environmental crisis than market liberal

democracy. Accordingly, the roles of China and Singapore in Eco-Authoritarian arguments 49 Ibid.: 17-18. 50 Ibid.: 10. The authors note that Singapore is “an extreme outlier,” nearly matching the performance of the most effective democratic governments. 51 Giddens, 2009: 73. 52 Shearman and Smith, 2007: 2.

are not so much those of examples to follow uncritically as they are those of imperfect

illustrations of an ideal type. Eco-Authoritarians believe that real-world societies – including

China and Singapore themselves – should strive to be more like the imagined system of

governance that those nations approximate and represent.

By criticizing the performance of real-world authoritarian regimes, we can certainly

raise some concerns about the viability of the Eco-Authoritarians’ vision: if attempts to

implement this vision have been widely unsuccessful, then this may suggest that the vision

itself is impotent as an ideal, much in the same way that the ideal of enlightened central

planning was a bad ideal in early Eco-Authoritarian literature. But today’s Eco-Authoritarians

can quite plausibly object that current authoritarian governments are far from representing the

full potential of the system of governance that they instantiate. Thus a decisive refutation of

Eco-Authoritarianism would have to go beyond empirical observations and show why the

main changes it implies would be unattractive on a more theoretical level.

V. The Genesis and Stability of an Eco-Elite

Traditionally, critics of authoritarianism have worried that unrestrained power granted

to government officials could fall into the wrong hands, resulting in a serious potential for

tyrannical despotism.53 Despotism is obviously problematic due to the harms it typically

generates for citizens living under its rule, but in the current context we may also worry that a

despotic regime would end up neglecting to prioritize environmental protection, thereby

failing to ameliorate the crisis that would have motivated the shift toward authoritarianism in

the first place. In order to avoid this problem, Eco-Authoritarians would need to provide

reason to think that following their prescriptions would mean putting our collective futures

not into the hands of injurious despots but rather into those of administrators who possess

both the capacity to address an impending environmental crisis effectively and the motivation

53 Locke 1764 [1689]: Bk. II, ch. 19; Hume, 1987 [1741]; Madison, 2001 [1788].

to do so. This challenge has two interrelated aspects: first, it must be shown that a capable

and benevolent “eco-elite” could be generated in the first place to rule over our society; and

second, it must be shown that a system of rule by “eco-elites” could be effectively

perpetuated over a long period of time.

To my knowledge, the only contemporary Eco-Authoritarians who have taken up this

challenge are also the most extreme proponents of the view: David Shearman and Joseph

Wayne Smith. In The Climate Change Challenge and the Failure of Democracy, Shearman

and Smith contend that successful Eco-Authoritarianism would require leaders of a caliber far

higher than we find in contemporary society, and that producing such leaders would require a

radically different system of education. This new system would be built around superior “real

universities” that would purportedly “train holistic thinkers in all of the arts and sciences

necessary for tough decision making that the environmental crisis confronts us with.”54 The

products would be “true public intellectuals with knowledge well grounded in ecology,”55

who would be charged with preserving “remnants of our civilization when the great collapse

comes” as “the new priesthood of the new dark age.”56

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the authors give only sketchy details on exactly how “real

universities” would achieve these felicitous results. Their main proposals in The Climate

Change Challenge and the Failure of Democracy seem limited to focusing scholarly research

on problems that are important to human well-being,57 expanding the role of information-

sharing among the intellectual community,58 and accelerating the development of programs in

environmental studies.59 Although many of these proposals seem reasonable and even

attractive, they hardly seem like the sorts of revolutionary changes that would equip

54 Shearman and Smith, 2007: 133. 55 Ibid.: 133-134. 56 Ibid.: 152. 57 Ibid.: 143-147. 58 Ibid.: 147-149. 59 Ibid.: 151. This theme is developed further in Smith et al., 2007: 152-170.

graduating students with the capacities and motivations needed to effectively rule over

complex modern societies.

Even if a capable and benevolent eco-elite could be produced, a further hurdle for

Eco-Authoritarianism would involve demonstrating that the quality of elite rule could be

maintained over time. Shearman and Smith do not take up this aspect of the issue in a

substantive way, and to my knowledge neither does any other contemporary Eco-

Authoritarian. But the challenge of sustaining a capable and benevolent ruling class over time

is a notoriously difficult one for an authoritarian regime to overcome. As the eco-anarchist

philosopher Alan Carter has quite reasonably worried:

Even if a particular leader does turn out to be genuinely benevolent, even if he

or she is not corrupted by the exercise of power or the need to retain power,

how can it be guaranteed that those who inherit his or her position will be

equally benevolent? Hierarchical structures, by their very nature, make it easy

for the most competitive, most ruthless and least caring to attain power.

Moreover, the centralized exercise of authoritarian rule is an ever-attractive

goal for would-be usurpers, whose vision is usually less pure than those whom

they usurp, as the history of many coups attests to.60

At the very least, it seems that Eco-Authoritarians owe us some account of how their

proposed regimes could predictably avoid corruption over time.

The lack of serious attention to these concerns among Eco-Authoritarians is troubling,

but such objections may not ultimately be decisive. The functionality of modern authoritarian

administrations in China and Singapore suggest that we can sometimes end up with

acceptable public officials without having groundbreaking mechanisms in place for training

and maintaining high quality leadership. Even with only middling officials in power, an

60 Carter, 1996: 115.

authoritarian political structure might carry an advantage in dealing with an environmental

crisis if its capacity for implementing unpopular policies were sufficiently valuable. I have

suggested that Eco-Authoritarians see the main strength of their proposal arising not from the

superior wisdom of potential leaders, but rather from the ability of an authoritarian

government to move beyond the messiness and partisanship of everyday politics in order to

implement policies that are both necessary and democratically unfeasible. If Eco-

Authoritarians believe that authoritarian administrations would end up populated with

officials who were capable and benevolent enough, even if not perfectly so, then this may be

sufficient for their argumentative purposes. The power to take decisive action where market

liberal democracies would founder in gridlock could be enough to push their argument

through.

VI. The Chimera beyond Politics

Thus far, I have spoken as if the challenge of generating a capable and benevolent

eco-elite is simply one of ensuring that sufficiently good people are given the reigns of

society. Eco-Authoritarians seemingly take it for granted that if sufficiently virtuous

executives were provided with sufficiently expansive powers to address an impending

environmental crisis, then they would do what needed to be done whether or not the rest of

the general public approved of this. But things are not so simple. It is one thing to say that a

regime has the power to take action without regard to individual rights, democratic

procedure, or any other legal constraint. It is another thing entirely to claim that a regime

could actually use that power to meet its objectives while maintaining its effectiveness over

the long run.

In this section, I will argue that authoritarian regimes face a choice between

independence from citizens’ preferences and the effectiveness of their own administrations. It

might be possible for authoritarian regimes to achieve the kind of autonomy from public

sensibilities that Eco-Authoritarians advocate, but this autonomy would only be possible

through measures that would predictably decrease officials’ effectiveness. Likewise, it might

be possible for authoritarian regimes to achieve genuine effectiveness in formulating and

implementing their policies, but this effectiveness can only be achieved and maintained by

remaining attuned to the demands of the general public.

The experience of the Soviet Union in the 1980s suggests that the connection between

authoritarian political structures and immunity from the public will is far from automatic.

Gorbachev’s decision to open channels of free public deliberation and criticism under

policies of ‘Glasnost’ and ‘Perestroika’ quickly led to massive internal pressures for reform

and ultimately the disintegration of the authoritarian administration itself.61 Once unleashed,

popular demands for political autonomy and self-government proved difficult to quell, even

with renewed efforts at suppression by the central government.62 As Ronald Suny notes, “The

development of civil society and coherent, conscious nations within the USSR inexorably

transformed Gorbachev’s efforts at state-building into a liberating process of state-

dismantling.”63

Some observers of modern-day China have suggested along similar lines that the

Communist Party maintains its power over an increasingly-critical public only by

consistently giving the people what they want: particularly increased economic opportunity

and improved standards of living.64 This means that the continued success of the Party in

maintaining control of the country may depend on its continued success in producing

favorable outcomes. As political scientist Yuchao Zhu has recently mused:

By nature, a performance based legitimacy is very fragile. Given the high

discontent developing in Chinese society and the increasingly confrontational

61 Suny, 1993: ch. 4; Malia, 1994: chs. 11-12; Brown, 1996: ch. 8. 62 Suny, 1993: 137-138; Malia, 1994: 442-443; Brown, 1996: 264-265. 63 Suny, 1993: 132. 64 Zhong, 1996: 217; Zhu, 2011: 134; Li, 2013: 43-44.

state-society relationship in various localities despite the façade of Hu-Wen’s

“harmonious society,” good governance provides the regime with breathing

room rather than long term political allegiance and social consent. There could

still be a legitimation crisis if any dramatic and destructive developments

occur.65

History seems to teach us that the only reliable way to achieve true autonomy from

citizens’ demands is through an active and sustained commitment to suppressing would-be

dissenters and to imposing policies without compromise. For both the Soviet Union and

People’s Republic of China, the price of political openness was the risk of instability and

political upheaval when citizens came to disapprove of their leaders’ actions, and there is

good reason to think that this outcome was not a coincidence.66 It is only by preventing

robust civil discourse and open dissent from emerging in the first place through consistent

repression that authoritarian governments have been able to retain and exercise their power

with relative impunity.67

The good news for Eco-Authoritarians’ position is that when pursued consistently,

political repression does seem to work quite well at achieving its purposes: suppressive,

uncompromising authoritarian regimes have demonstrated an often-terrifying ability to

insulate themselves from the wills of their constituents. However, such regimes have also

been notoriously incapable of formulating and implementing policies to actually make their

nations better-off. I contend that this fact should not surprise us: suppressive,

65 Zhu, 2011: 139. 66 The idea that authoritarian administrations cannot maintain their power without suppressing open public discourse and activism has been memorably cast as one horn of “Gorbachev’s Dilemma,” named for the Soviet leader who would eventually be impaled by it (Methvin, 1987). The other horn, we will see below, is a stable totalitarianism that quickly undermines its own efficacy and functioning. As one Polish defector put the dilemma: “The paradox of Communism is that, without totalitarian methods, the system can hardly survive, but with them, its rotten foundations cannot be restructured. Totalitarianism is a weapon that cuts both ways: it defends the ruling bureaucratic party elite but, on the other hand, undermines the pillars on which the power of this elite is based” (R. Ludwikowski, quoted in Methvin, 1987: 42). 67 Perhaps the most visible contemporary example of this phenomenon comes from the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. Incidentally, the experiences of the Soviet Union and People’s Republic of China before moving in the direction of reform are powerful illustrations of this point as well.

uncompromising authoritarian regimes face serious challenges that more open, politically-

sensitive administrations do not. For one thing, an absence of free and open public discourse

makes it easy for administrators to get locked into narrow, rigid ways of thinking that impede

their ability to make good decisions. A fearful and uninvolved citizenry is also not likely to

provide the sort of honest, informative, and critical feedback that would enable administrators

to calibrate policies to the details of local circumstances, detect their own mistakes, and catch

misbehaving officials who undermine the pursuit of public goals. Thus bureaucrats who are

insulated from public opinion through the naked exercise of state coercion may quickly find

themselves operating in a bubble, making it difficult to formulate and implement good

policies regardless of their own personal virtues as administrators.

It is partly for this reason that some real-world authoritarian regimes have recently

been moving in the direction of greater interaction with the public rather than less. In 2002,

Larry Diamond memorably hailed an “unprecedented growth in the number of regimes that

are neither clearly democratic nor conventionally authoritarian,” noting that while many

nations have embraced certain avenues for public participation in politics, they have not gone

so far as to adopt the full raft of reforms normally associated with liberal democracy

including “not only democratic elections but solid protection of civil liberties under a strong

rule of law.”68 Such “hybrid” regimes have become particularly prevalent in Southeast Asia,

leading some commentators to suggest that these structures may represent not “halfway

houses”69 between authoritarianism and liberal democracy but rather genuine political

alternatives of their own.70

Although these movements toward public inclusion have been driven in part by

popular and international demands for democratization, one should not overlook an

increasing recognition by authoritarian governments that state agendas may be better 68 Diamond, 2002: 25. 69 This language comes primarily from Case, 1996, who attributes it to Huntington, 1991: 137. 70 E.g., Orts, 2001; Jayasuriya and Rodan, 2007; He and Warren, 2011.

promoted by fostering citizen involvement rather than excluding it. For example, as Elizabeth

Economy has argued at length, the People’s Republic of China has deliberately become

increasingly dependent on efforts by non-governmental organizations, local constituencies,

and the media to ensure the successful formulation and implementation of its environmental

policies, particularly on matters of ecological conservation, urban renewal, and pollution

prevention.71 She writes:

China’s leaders have allowed the establishment of genuine NGOs, encouranged

aggressive media attention to environmental issues, and sanctioned independent legal

activities to protect the environment, partly to compensate for the weakness of its

formal environmental protection apparatus. Grassroots NGOs have sprung up in many

regions of the country to address issues as varied as the fate of the Tibetan antelope,

the deterioration of China’s largest freshwater lakes, and mounting urban refuse. And

nonprofit legal centers have emerged to wage class action warfare on behalf of

farmers and others whose livelihood and health have suffered from pollution from

local factories.72

As Maria Francesch-Huidobro has recently chronicled, the Republic of Signapore has also

been making progressively more room for civil society in the shaping of the nation’s

environmental governance.73 These trends reinforce the suggestion discussed in section IV

that today’s most effective democratic regimes can trace much of their success to the

constructive impacts of citizen participation in political processes.

Although it remains to be seen whether so-called “hybrid” regimes will be able to

match the administrative efficacy of the world’s best-performing democracies, it nevertheless

seems fair to suppose for the sake of discussion that authoritarian governments may

eventually be able to achieve a very high level of state effectiveness through increased 71 Economy, 2010: ch. 5. 72 Ibid., 21. 73 Francesch-Huidobro, 2008.

inclusion of citizens into the political process. If this is to be the case, however, it will only

come alongside a commitment to abstain from the sorts of suppressive, uncompromising state

tactics that would make possible the sort of administrative immunity that Eco-Authoritarians

applaud. A government that quashes dissent and ruthlessly imposes its will on its citizens will

never be able to foster the kinds of open discursive environments upon which modern

authoritarian states have increasingly come to rely for effective policy-making. In practice,

then, it seems that authoritarian regimes have to choose between the immunity from public

demands extolled by Eco-Authoritarians and the well-functioning civil society that makes

possible the high level of administrative efficacy that Eco-Authoritarians see as necessary to

address an environmental crisis.

If this is true, then the remaining case for Eco-Authoritarianism crumbles. In the

previous section, I argued that a shift toward authoritarianism could be defended if the

capacity to impose politically-unpopular policies were sufficiently valuable, even if it turned

out that an Eco-Authoritarian regime would likely be populated by administrators of

imperfect capacity and benevolence. But now it seems that this apparent advantage is

essentially worthless. In order to employ its capacity to impose favored measures in the face

of public opposition, an authoritarian regime would have to employ repressive tactics that

would predictably erode its efficacy in formulating and implementing policies. And if it did

not employ this capacity, then it would find itself bound by the same political realities that

supposedly render democratic market liberal regimes incapable of addressing the

environmental crisis. At best, then, Eco-Authoritarianism would seem to be capable of more

or less matching the performance of market liberalism: at worst, its officials would find

themselves trapped in a bubble of suppressive, uncompromising inefficacy.

If Eco-Authoritarians cannot claim the capacity to implement unpopular policies as a

point in their favor, then it is not clear what they can say to assuage our concerns about

giving essentially unlimited power to only moderately capable and imperfectly benevolent

administrators. The objection would not necessarily be that a political transition of this sort

would be disastrous: after all, I have suggested that “hybridized” authoritarian regimes might

potentially be able to achieve a level of functioning equal to that enjoyed in democratic

countries. Rather, the point would be that this transition would come at a clear cost – namely,

our individual and political rights – and it would present us with no clear benefit.

Accordingly, it is hard to see why we should accept Eco-Authoritarianism even if it looks like

democratic market liberalism is unlikely to deliver favorable results.

Conclusion

As we have seen, continuing concerns about an impending environmental crisis have

led to the re-emergence of authoritarian prescriptions in today’s public discourse. This time,

however, Eco-Authoritarians have learned from the mistakes of their intellectual predecessors

and offer proposals that dodge many of the criticisms that rightly felled the arguments of

Heilbroner and Ophuls. Contemporary Eco-Authoritarianism cannot be dismissed simply by

pointing to the failures of 20th century socialism as a real-world test of central planning.

In this essay, I have attempted to take today’s Eco-Authoritarians on their own terms

in order to show why authoritarianism is still not the right answer to the problems embodied

by our current ecological predicament. Even if market liberal democracies will predictably

perform poorly in responding to an impending environmental crisis, it is unlikely that a

transition to authoritarianism would produce better results, and there is good reason to think

that such a transition would merely exacerbate our problems. Accordingly, I think it is fair to

say once again that if a solution is to be found to the environmental crisis, it will not come

from Eco-Authoritarianism.

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