STATE, SOCIETY, AND THE ENVIRONMENT: HEGEMONIC ENVIRONMENTALISM IN SINGAPORE

Abstract

Singapore’s international reputation has long been constituted by an image as a “Garden City”, where the state combines a prosperous, urbanised metropolis with a clean and green environment. This seems at odds with the current realities about the climate, as movements have emerged around the world highlighting the failures of governments to protect the environment. This paper investigates the nature of Singapore’s state-society relations in the environmental realm. It does so by first tracing Singapore’s overarching state-society relations as hegemonic, where the continued rule of the PAP has been secured through the consent generated by a unity of its state-directed capitalist developmental model, undergirded by the ideological underpinnings of pragmatism, survival, technocratic, and paternalistic governance. It then extends this analysis into the environmental arena, using Gramsci’s concept of hegemony to analyse the nature of state-environmental civil society relations. It then makes the argument that Singapore’s environmental governance can be characterised as a form of hegemonic environmentalism, where environmental civil society has arisen under the leadership of the state through a combination of material and ideological means. As a result of this, it concludes that environmental groups are largely shaped and constrained by the hegemony of Singapore’s state capitalist developmental model.