This paper explores the relationship between environmental attitudes, governance discourses, and drivers of environmental politics. Data from the International Social Science Program (ISSP) environmental modules from 1993 and 2000 contain discernible patterns among countries for items dealing with ecocentric and pessimistic environmental attitudes broadly related to the DSP and NEP.
A proposed conceptual model is utilized to interpret the results of the ISSP datasets, through a bi-axial dimension scale: Ecological consciousness together with epistemological commitment, to indicate the environmental knowledge orientation of the respondents among four archetypes. Attitudes of people and changes over time are relat ed to overarching environmental discourses, such as ‘green governmentalism', ‘ecological modernization', and ‘civic environmentalism' through movements within the typology. Moreover, drivers of environmental politics that include: Political opportunity structures, environmental NGOs, natural disasters and conditions, and cultural dynamics, may also be considered in order to understand specific contexts of different regions and countries.
Initial findings show that majority of industrialized countries are clustered in the rational ecologist categorization with respondents possessing strong ecological consciousness and optimism towards the role of modern institutions, science, and technology in solving environmental problems. Though certain countries such as Japan and those from the developing world seem to have varying propensities within their respective populations, the general disposition for most of the respondents in the ISSP datasets may be interpreted as conducive to principles and approaches of green governmentalism and ecological modernization.
