Contemporary capitalisms and their social relation to the environment

This paper analyses the socio-economic context into which environmental policies and ecological sentiments emerge through empirically studying the relation to the environment of di erent kinds of capitalism. The as- sociation and interaction of the relation to the environment with other key social relations, e.g. the labour- capital relations, are studied and discussed. To achieve this, I draw from Regulation Theory and augment its analytical framework with an explicit environmental dimension. I then conduct an empirical analysis of the diversity of contemporary capitalism including the social relation to the environment for a sample of thirty-seven OECD and BRICS countries. Five kinds of capitalism are identi ed: the Northern-continental European, the Southern-central European, the Anglo-Saxon and Paci c, the Emerging Countries and the Two Giants. A main result is the correspondence between social relations to the environment exhibiting ecology-prone socio-political stances and a lower domestic natural resources intensity with labour oriented capital-labour relations, welfare- oriented states and openness to foreign suppliers. However, the results show that countries that are the most ecology-prone are also the ones that have the most relocated their environmental impact, con rming that global capitalism is not an ecological system. Implications of this pattern for a socio-ecological transition are discussed.