Dimensions of Limits to Environmental Management: Reections Drawing on Recent Scholarship in the Field of Science and Technology Studies Ingmar Lippert 1 Augsburg University 1 Introduction This paper addresses the limits to environmental management in an explorative approach. I argue, first, that limits identified in recent studies of environmental management can be well read in a realist mode. Second, however, a reading with the lenses of performativity and enactment enables us to recognise two kinds of limits of the realist reading: the limiting entities can be reconstructed as enactments and in their performativity; and the construction of the realist limits reading can be opened up to give floor for a more interventionist reading. Finally, this text questions the mode of research enabling “us” 2 to serve emancipatory reconfigurations. Overall this paper has a shared agenda of on the one hand spelling out and generalising the dimensions of limits to environmental managements and on the other of reflecting critically about our engagements with management practices. Underlying this discussion are critical theoretical (and, too little, practical) engagements with the hegemonic practices of environmental management as ecological modernisation. What does this mean? I am using the concept of environmental management (now) to refer to all kinds of directed engagements of humans with environments in which humans (by all kinds of techniques and technologies) aim to alter the trajectory of environmental change. The ecological modernisation mode of environmental management refers to practices of environmental management which can be conceptualised as partially overlapping with the discourse of environmental management which arose since the 1980s, spreading from Western European countries globally. We have spelt out the critique of both the conceptions of ecological modernisation as well as the limits of Ecological Modernisation Theory (EMT) elsewhere. 3 Here is a brief summary: Humans have practiced forms of environmental management for a long time, thousands of years (Boesrup 1988), and the impacts of these forms of management, including unintended consequences, on local and regional scale were easily identified. While the hegemonic narrative about environmental movements locates global environmental change and risks in the very recent past (like risks of climate change and nuclear catastrophes), the detrimental environmental consequences (at global scale) of specific patterns of human intervention in nature were perceived already over a hundred years ago (Grove 1996): scientists and nation-states had been informed about global climate change. Obviously, if I may make this simplistic point, the combination of expertise and modern governments did not result in the kind of societal engagements with its environments which we are looking for. Rather, the engagement we find is subordinated to capitalist dynamics. The discourse of sustainable development is precisely part of this subordination; this is what I argued a couple of 1