Grabbing ‘Green’: Cynical Reason, Instrumental Ethics and the Production of ‘the Green Economy
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper traces the institutionalization of Environmentalism as a pre-condition for the production of ‘The Green Economy,’ particularly the containment of the oppositional possibilities of an environmentalist politics within the institutional and organizational terrain of a transnational managerial and capitalist class. This is a context in which many environmental organizations – once the site of planning, mobilizing and implementing opposition and resistance to the environmentally destructive practices of corporate industrialism – have become part of a new project of accumulation grounded in enclosure, access and the production and exchange of new environmental commodities. This transformation reflects what Sloterdijk (1988) has termed cynical reason – an enlightened false consciousness; and my concern in the paper is to think through ‘The Green Economy’ and its coincident instrumental ethics as an iteration of cynical reason and an expression of institutionalized power. Specifically, I focus on the development of ‘global environmental governance’ as a statist project that concentrates sanctioning authority and resource allocation in centers of accumulation (e.g., the Convention on Biological Diversity and its funding mechanism the Global Environment Facility) and facilitates the containment of Environmentalism as an oppositional politics through demands that it assume conventional forms of organization, projectification and professionalisation and through facilitating a redefinition and redeployment that shifts environmentalism from a space of hope to an instrumentalist mechanism in rationalist projects of accumulation.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it