‘We Have the Facts’—How Business Claims Legitimacy in the Environmental Debate

Abstract

The author examines how business associations legitimate their input to environmental policy as ‘rational’ and how they exclude others from the policy debate by characterising them as ‘nonrational’. This is compared with the theories of reflexive modernisation, such as Beck's, and with ecological modernisation. With the aid of an empirical case study of business associations and their environmental lobbying, the author shows how business associations both draw on and shore up a rhetoric of ‘expertise’ and ‘rationality’ in an attempt to legitimate their own ‘subpolitical’ role whilst evading the accountability attached to more politically visible groups.