Bureaucracy, risk, and environmental crisis discourse

The article focuses on the interactions between the modern bureaucracy system, complex technological systems and the current ecological crisis. The main integrative line of analysis follows a development of Max Weber's idea of the dynamics of innovation and routinisation, which applies to the current environmental discourse. The concept of ecological crisis is clarified, as it is an important condition for a sound environmental policy. The crisis of the interactions between human society and nature as the preferable further definition would enable also an alternative innovation of environmental policy - confronting the routine calculative bureaucratic and technocratic definitions hitherto dominant - thus enabling a new form of open, discoursive and integrative politics of flexible adaptation of modern institutions and value systems, responsive to the cultural difference.