Globalization and the Environment E-Book

Pete Newell

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 398

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

Globalization and the Environment critically explores the actors, politics and processes that govern the relationship between globalization and the environment. Taking key aspects of globalisation in turn - trade, production and finance - the book highlights the relations of power at work that determine whether globalization is managed in a sustainable way and on whose behalf.

Each chapter looks in turn at the political ecology of these central pillars of the global economy, reviewing evidence of its impact on diverse ecologies and societies, its governance - the political structures, institutions and policy making processes in place to manage this relationship - and finally efforts to contest and challenge these prevailing approaches.

The book makes sense of the relationship between globalisation and the environment using a range of theoretical tools from different disciplines. This helps to place the debate about the compatibility between globalisation and sustainability in an explicitly political and historical context in which it is possible to appreciate the ‘nature’ of interests and power relations that privilege some ways of responding to environmental problems over others in a context of globalisation.

Leseprobe

Globalization and the Environment

The book is dedicated to my family and above all to my wife Lucila, daughter Ana and son Camilo for their constant love, support and perspective on what is important in life and without whom the fight for a globalization that is worthy of the labels ‘sustainable’ and ‘just’ would be a lot harder to maintain.

Globalization and the Environment

Capitalism, Ecology & Power

PETER NEWELL

polity

Copyright © Peter Newell 2012

The right of Peter Newell to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2012 by Polity Press

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ISBN: 978-0-7456-6471-2

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Contents

Preface

Acknowledgements

Abbreviations

Tables and Boxes

1 Globalization and the Environment: Capitalism, Ecology and Power

2 The Political Ecology of Globalization

3 The Political Economy of Global Environmental Governance: Power(in) Globalization

4 Global Trade and the Environment: Whose Rules Rule?

5 Global Production and the Environment: Racing to the Top, Bottom or Middle?

6 Global Finance and the Environment: Gambling on Green

7 Conclusions: Ecologizing Globalization/Globalizing Ecology

References

Index

Preface

Globalization and the Environment critically explores the actors, politics and processes that govern the relationship between globalization and the environment. Taking key aspects of globalization in turn – trade, production and finance – the book highlights the relations of power at work that determine whether globalization is managed in a sustainable way and on whose behalf.

Each chapter looks in turn at the political ecology of these aspects of globalization, reviewing evidence of their impact on diverse ecologies and societies; their governance – the political structures, institutions and policy making processes in place to manage this relationship; and finally efforts to contest and challenge these prevailing approaches.

The book makes sense of the relationship between globalization and the environment using a range of theoretical tools from different disciplines. This helps to place the debate about the compatibility between globalization and sustainability in an explicitly political and historical context in which it is possible to appreciate both the ‘nature’ of interests and power relations that privilege some ways of responding to environmental problems over others in a context of globalization.

This book has been around fifteen years in the making. Constantly disrupted and sidelined by other personal commitments and academic and political obligations, it has been slow-cooked rather than flash-fried, but should ‘taste’ all the better for the fusion of insights from different research projects and theoretical explorations that this has allowed and which saturate the current book.

It builds upon an on-going interest as an academic, activist and concerned citizen in the relationship between globalization and sustainable development. Much of the empirical material and fieldwork and many of the insights that feature in the book, however, derive from eighteen years of research and engagement with environmental politics in a broad range of settings, on a diversity of issues, in a large number of countries. The content of the book reflects an evolving research agenda concerned with different aspects of globalization and sustainable development: from projects on global climate politics and carbon markets to research on agricultural biotechnology, and from work on issues of corporate accountability and responsibility to projects on global and regional trade negotiations and the governance of energy finance. It also reflects insights from work in countries as diverse as Argentina and India, Ethiopia and Mexico, China and South Africa, and Kenya, Bolivia and Costa Rica. I have benefitted hugely from working in and for environmental and development non-governmental organizations (NGOs), conducting consultancy for international organizations, many of which feature in the book, providing policy advice to and working with a number of governments and from conducting training for, and being granted research access to, many corporations around the world. This has allowed me insights into the day-to-day functioning of these organizations and the dilemmas they face, an exposure which enables a richer and more personal understanding of the people and organizations that, as researchers, we sometimes tend to analyse in more abstract terms.

The book will be of interest to students of International Relations, Environmental Studies and Development Studies, Geography and Sociology.

Acknowledgements

This book has been a very long time in the making. The idea for it was first conceived in 1997 at a time when debates about globalization and its potential to transform the theory and practice of world politics were at their height, but when attention to the environmental dimensions of this was often ignored. My first attempt to get a handle on some of the issues at stake resulted in a special issue of the IDS Bulletin on the theme of Globalization and the Governance of the Environment, published in 1999.

Since that time much has changed. My interest in the ‘nature’ of the relationship between globalization and sustainable development came to be pursued through projects on business regulation and corporate accountability, on social movements and trade politics in Latin America, and on the global governance of biotechnology, as well as through theoretical interests in different strands of critical political economy and historical materialism. Much of the contents of this book reflect that journey, the research undertaken along the way through a multitude of projects in different parts of the world for diverse audiences, and the intellectual evolution and learning that accompanied it.

I am grateful for research support from the Department for International Development, including through the Development Research Centres they supported of which I was a part, the Economic and Social Research Council in the UK and many other governments, donors and NGOs that have funded particular studies and pieces of consultancy work that inform the book. I would also like to extend my appreciation to those publishers that have waived permission to draw upon and update elements of work previously published by them. The basis of the material in chapter 3 was first published in the Review of International Studies (volume 34, 2008) and some of chapter 2 has been published in Peter Dauvergne’s Handbook of Global Environmental Politics (2012, Edward Elgar). Chapters 4 and 5 contain substantially revised and updated material previously published in the Journal of International Development (volume 13, 2001) and in my chapter in the book The Politics of International Trade in the 21st Century (2005, Palgrave).

The personal journey has also incorporated several changes of job – from Sussex (Institute of Development Studies) to FLACSO Argentina to Warwick University, and from Oxford University to the University of East Anglia and finally back to Sussex at the Department of International Relations. Working in Departments of Development Studies and in Schools of Environment and Geography has served, I hope, to enrich my awareness of the variety of ways of approaching the central questions which frame this book beyond my core discipline of International Relations, even if exposure to such eclecticism has certainly made the path towards completion of the book longer than it needed to be.

Needless to say, the torturous route to completion has implied the accumulation of a number of personal debts. I am grateful, in particular, for the support ofJan Aart Scholte at Warwick, and Diana Liverman at Oxford for creating the space to make progress, albeit fitful and painstakingly slow, on this book. Nicola McIvor and Jon Phillips also provided valuable and much appreciated research assistance at critical moments. I would also like to thank Emma Hutchinson and David Winters at Polity for gentle guidance in steering the book to completion and for their understanding of delays along the way.

Peter Newell

Brighton

2012

Abbreviations

AIDA

The Interamerican Association for Environmental Defense

ALCA

Área de Libre Comercio de las Américas

ATCA

Alien Tort Claims Act

BRIC

Brazil, Russia, India, China

CAFTA-DR

Central America-Dominican Republic Free Trade Agreement

CAS

country assistance strategy

CBD

Convention on Biodiversity

CDM

clean development mechanism

CDR

community-driven regulation

CEO

Chief Executive Officer

CERES

Coalition for Environmentally Responsible Economies

CFCs

chlorofluorocarbons

CIF

Climate Investment Fund

CITES

Convention on the International Trade in Endangered Species

CO2

carbon dioxide

CSD

Commission on Sustainable Development

CSO

civil society organization

CSR

corporate social responsibility

CTE

Committee on Trade and Environment

CTF

Clean Technology Fund

EC

European Commission

ECA

export credit agency

ECGD

Export Credit Guarantee Department

EDF

Environmental Defense Fund

EU

European Union

FAO

Food and Agriculture Organization

FDI

foreign direct investment

FSC

Forest Stewardship Council

FTA

free trade agreement

FTAA

Free Trade Area of the Americas

G8

Group Eight Countries

G20

Group of Twenty

GABB

BioBio Action Group

GATS

General Agreement on Trade in Services

GATT

General Agreement on Tariff s and Trade

GDP

gross domestic product

GEF

Global Environment Facility

GHG

greenhouse gas

GM

genetically modifi ed

GMO

genetically modifi ed organism

HIPC

highly indebted poor countries

HSBC

Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation

ICC

International Chamber of Commerce

ICCR

Interfaith Centre for Corporate Responsibility

ICSID

International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes

IEA

International Energy Agency

IFC

International Finance Corporation

ILO

International Labour Organization

IMF

International Monetary Fund

IPE

International Political Economy

IPR

intellectual property rights

IR

International Relations

ISO

International Organization for Standardization

IT

information technology

IUCN

International Union for the Conservation of Nature

LETS

local exchange trading schemes

MAI

multilateral agreement on investment

MDB

multilateral development bank

MDRI

Multilateral Debt Reduction Initiative

MEA

multilateral environmental agreement

MIGA

Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency

MNC

multinational corporation

MNE

multinational enterprise

MST

Movement of the Landless (Movimento dos trabalhadores sem terra)

NAFTA

North American Free Trade Agreement

NEPA

National Environmental Policy Act

NGO

non-governmental organization

NIEO

New International Economic Order

ODA

Overseas Development Assistance

ODS

ozone-depleting substances

OECD

Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development

OPEC

Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries

PPM

process and production methods

PRSP

Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper

REDD

Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation

SAL

Structural Adjustment Loan

SAP

Structural Adjustment Programme

SCF

Strategic Climate Fund

SEC

Securities and Exchange Commission

SME

small and medium-sized enterprise

SPS

sanitary and phytosanitary

SRI

socially responsible investment

TBT

technical barriers to trade

TCC

transnational capitalist class

TINA

There Is No Alternative

TNC

transnational corporation

TREMs

trade-related environment measures

TRIPS

Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights

UK

United Kingdom

UN

United Nations

UNCED

United Nations Conference on Environment and Development

UNCTC

United Nations Centre for Transnational Corporations

UNDP

United Nations Development Programme

UNEP

United Nations Environment Programme

UNFCCC

United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change

US

United States

USA

United States of America

USAID

United States Agency for International Development

WIPO

World Intellectual Property Organization

WRI

World Resources Institute

WTO

World Trade Organization

WWF

World Wide Fund for Nature

Tables and Boxes

Tables

2.1 Key concepts in historical materialism

2.2 A typology of political ecologies

3.1 Conventional and critical approaches to global environmental governance

6.1 World Bank climate finance in brief

Boxes

1.1 The state of our planet

1.2 Definitions of globalization

4.1 Trade miles

4.2 WTO rules for environmental protection

5.1 International business regulation in brief

5.2 Rebalancing investor rights and responsibilities

6.1 The public and private governance of finance: some examples

Chapter 1

Globalization and the Environment: Capitalism, Ecology and Power

2012 marks twenty years since the Earth Summit on Environment and Development was held in Rio in 1992 and the fortieth anniversary of the Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment. Discussed at the time as the summit to save the earth, it is remarkable that twenty years on from Rio, many of the issues and debates look and sound familiar, as frustration at the lack of tangible progress in responding to environmental threats grows and intensifies. The principal challenges of delivering sustainable development appear as elusive as when the term entered mainstream policy discourse in 1987, with Brundtland’s celebrated report Our Common Future (WCED 1987).

Despite nearly four decades of intense institutional activity aimed at containing and ultimately reversing an array of environmental threats and claims by a range of actors to have greened their activities, many environmental problems, despite some successes, show evidence of getting worse. The tragic roll-call is summarized in box 1.1.

Many of these problems result from decades, or in some cases even a century or more, of human activity including population growth and rapid industrialization. But none of the key indicators or trends shows signs of significant improvement or reversal, despite global endeavours to do so. Why then, despite rapid advances in human development, economic progress and the application of modern technology, paralleled by a large body of international environmental law and a great many global environmental institutions, do things appear to be getting worse? It is this basic anomaly that needs to be explained if we are to advance sustainable development in a context of globalization.

As the Global Environmental Outlook report noted over 10 years ago:

The global human ecosystem is threatened by grave imbalances in productivity and in the distribution of goods and services. A significant proportion of humanity still lives in dire poverty, and projected trends are for an increasing divergence between those that benefit from economic and technological development, and those that do not. This unsustainable progression of extremes of wealth and poverty threatens the stability of the whole human system, and with it the global environment . . . Environmental gains from new technology and policies are being overtaken by the pace and scale of population growth and economic development. The processes of globalization that are so strongly influencing social evolution need to be directed towards resolving rather than aggravating the serious imbalances that divide the world today (UNEP 1999: xx; emphasis added).

Box 1.1 The state of our planet

•  Half of the world’s tropical and temperate forests are now gone. The rate of deforestation in the tropics continues at about an acre a second.

•  75 per cent of marine fisheries are now overfished or fished to capacity.

•  About half the wetlands and a third of the mangroves are gone.

•  There are more than 200 dead zones in the ocean due to over-fertilization.

•  Freshwater withdrawals doubled globally between 1960 and 2000.

•  Species are disappearing at rates about a thousand times faster than normal.

•  Over half of the agricultural land in drier regions suffers from some degree of deterioration and desertification.

•  20 per cent of the corals are gone and another 20 per cent severely threatened.

•  Human activities have pushed atmospheric carbon dioxide up by more than a third.

•  Persistent toxic chemicals can now be found by the dozen in nearly every one of us.

Source: Speth (2008: 1-2)

The extent to which this predicament is intensified and exacerbated by an increasingly integrated global economy lies at the heart of one of the most contentious debates of our time. Is the current organization of the global economy compatible with the pursuit of sustainable development? Are we capable of securing the planet’s future with the economic and political institutions we currently have at our disposal? What forms of governance and collective action are possible in a context of globalization? Can the undoubted wealth which globalization generates (for some) be steered towards more equitable and sustainable forms of development (for all), or is the very idea of sustainable development in a context of globalization an oxymoron?

A globalizing capitalist political economy provides the context in which the challenges of sustainability have to be met given the imperative of near-term action. The fate of the economy and the planet are intimately interwoven. Just as the history and evolution of globalization has had a profound influence on the nature of environmental politics, so too ecological problems bring about changes in the ‘nature of globalization’: what forms of resource extraction are possible by whom, at what cost and under what constraints, as well as of course constituting a manifestation of globalization in their own right. Environmental change, therefore, produces new forms of globalization just as surely as globalization creates new patterns of environmental change and accelerates existing ones.

For good or for bad then, the fate of the planet’s ecology is increasingly bound up with the fate of contemporary capitalism, or what we are referring to here as globalization. This means the contradictions that are intrinsic to capitalism become ever more apparent in the ecological and social systems with which the global economy interacts, upon which it is based and which ‘sustain’ it. As Marx noted in Capital, ‘the original sources of all wealth’ are ultimately ‘the soil and the labourer’ (1974: 475). We are faced with the juxtapositions of unprecedented levels of material comfort and human development for some parts of the world while millions of the world’s inhabitants live in poverty. We have witnessed spectacular and unprecedented forms of technological advance and diffusion at the very time that the environmental and social costs of some such innovations have become increasingly apparent. Calls for vast increases in finance for environmental initiatives, most notably to address climate change ($100 billion a year by 2030), will be achieved through an intensification of the very processes of production and consumption which have created human-induced climate change. As the quotation above from the Global Environmental Outlook suggests, important progress has been achieved, gains have been made, but the drive to accumulate, produce and consume on an ever expanding scale currently directly undermines and cancels out the effect of these measures. In order to address the question of whether the global economy, as currently constituted, is capable of addressing the challenges of sustainable development, it is critical to understand how and for whom globalization works in order to understand the prospects for effective action to promote sustainable development.

Power: The Politics of Globalization

Underlying the questions posed above is an unpopular assumption that globalization can be managed or steered or that it is, in some general sense, organized. Contrary to many popular accounts of globalization, which construct the notion of a world out of control, in which volatile capital and footloose transnational corporations move rapidly around the world without control or direction, this book shows that globalization has always been, and continues to be, driven by deliberate actions and non-actions on the part of states, international organizations and the private actors that they often serve. This is as true of global finance, where governments have removed controls on capital and provided bailouts for banks with vast sums of public money, as it is for trade, where governments have subjected themselves to the decision-making authority of the World Trade Organization, or production, where they have sought to develop legal accords to promote and protect the investment rights of transnational companies. Debates about the desirability of constructing a new financial architecture or creating a ‘green new deal’ also suggest that most governments, when they choose to exercise such powers, can direct market activities towards collective goals such as protection of the environment or financial stability. The problem is that most of the time they choose not to do so.

It is key to understand, then, that the relationship between globalization and the environment is mediated by policies, institutions and processes from the local to the global level and in the public and private sector and not, for the most part, anonymous and uncontrollable economic forces as befits the popular caricature. This makes globalization first and foremost a political process: it results from deliberate actions and non-actions by political actors wielding political power. Differential distributional impacts often derive from the process by which decisions are made: who is represented, who participates, who makes policy, how and for whom.

Which Globalization?

The history of the relationship between a globalizing economy and the environment can be said to stretch back at least several hundred years. Indeed, some scholars have attempted to trace the rise and fall of civilizations to environmental factors, providing us with a ‘green history of the world’ (Ponting 2007). Yet the globalization that is the subject of this book is that which is relevant to contemporary patterns of environmental governance and change. Both the latest stage in the historical development of capitalism and the rise of material, institutional and discursive responses to the ecological crisis can, for the most part, be dated back to the 1970s when unprecedented levels of integration were brought about through policies such as the removal of capital controls and the conclusion of trade agreements which, when combined with developments in technology and communications, enabled businesses to internationalize their operations. This period of globalization in the global economy also coincides with the era of multilateral environmental agreements and the globalization of the environmental regulations of leading states from the time of the Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment in 1972 onwards. The fact that the globalization of economic activity and the intensification of environmental degradation that prompted environmental summitry coincide is not of course coincidental, in so far as the former exacerbates the latter. The emergence of contemporary forms of global environmental governance in a liberal economic order has also significantly shaped the norms and principles which guide and underpin international environmental diplomacy, however. Steven Bernstein refers to this as the ‘compromise of liberal environmentalism’, which predicates environmental protection on the promotion and maintenance of a liberal economic order (Bernstein 2001).

But before proceeding further, what do we mean by globalization? There are, of course, numerous definitions of globalization (box 1.2). The range of definitions reflects attempts to capture the complex and dense interdependencies that increasingly exist across all levels of interaction between economic, political, social and cultural spheres, though clearly in some spheres, some parts of the world and for some people more than others. Many definitions are broad and all-encompassing. Mittelmann (2000: 5), citing Berresford, notes that:

the term globalization reflects a more comprehensive level of interaction than has occurred in the past, suggesting something different from the word ‘international’. It implies a diminishing importance of national borders and the strengthening of identities that stretch beyond those rooted in a particular country or region.

Often emphasis is placed on the increasing speed and intensity of exchanges (by implication in finance and communications). Giddens (1990: 64), for example, suggests that ‘Globalization can thus be defined as the intensification of worldwide social relations which link distant localities in such a way that local happenings are shaped by events occurring many miles away and vice versa’.

Box 1.2 Definitions of globalization

‘. . . the growing interconnectedness and interrelatedness of all aspects of society’ (Jones 2006: 2)

‘globalization refers to the widening and deepening of the international flows of trade, capital, technology and information within a single integrated global market’ (Petras and Veltmeyer 2001: 11)

‘globalization is a transformation of social geography marked by the growth of supra-territorial spaces’ (Scholte 2000: 8)

‘globalization is what we in the Third World have for several centuries called colonization’ (Khor 1995)

‘a process (or set of processes) which embodies a transformation in the spatial organization of social relations and transactions – assessed in terms of their extensity, intensity, velocity and impact – generating transcontinental or interregional flows and networks of activity, interaction and the exercise of power’ (Held et al. 1999: 16)

It is this construction of time-space compression that has given rise to popular notions of ‘one-worldism’, and has nurtured fears about the potential of globalization to homogenize economic and cultural life, captured in references to the ‘McDonaldization of society’ (Ritzer 1993). It is also this notion of intricate patterns of interdependency that is said to connect the fate of nations in an unprecedented way. We have long had debates about the organization of world systems and the existence of dependency between the global North and global South, or the ‘core’ and ‘periphery’ as it is sometimes referred to (Wallerstein 1979), to capture the uneven nature of this development. We have also had experience of the way in which crisis spreads from one pole of the economy to another, whether in the form of the Great Depression in the 1930s, which promoted the saying that ‘when the US catches a cold, the rest of the world sneezes’, or more recently in the 2008 financial crisis which started as a sub-prime crisis in the US housing market and rapidly went global. Crises are contagious and, as David Harvey reminds us, are not solved by capitalism but merely moved around (Harvey 2010). Perhaps what is notable about this latest stage in global capitalism is the enhanced potential for ‘boomerang effects’, where actions and decisions taken in one part of the world can have rapid, if not immediate, impacts elsewhere because of the level of integration of economic systems. The East Asian financial crisis in 1997 underscored this new reality in alarming terms, as did forest fires in the region some years later. Global environmental change does so even more profoundly through the spread of nuclear contamination or, more slowly but equally devastating, climate change.

Globalization/Global Ecology

Those aspects of globalization which interface with global ecology are of course numerous, including environmental change as both a manifestation and a cause of much globalizing activity. But the focus here will be the key drivers of contemporary globalization: trade, production and finance. There are, of course, cultural dimensions and manifestations of globalization that relate to the environment, including the role of media and advertising and the cultures of consumption and materialism that they propagate (Dauvergne 2008). They relate strongly in this sense to structures of production and a broader economic system, in which continual expansion of capital and the creation of new markets and desires is imperative to growth. The importance of this aspect of the globalization of material desire through global advertising and media is reflected in the growth of activism aimed at questioning wasteful consumption and raising awareness about the social and environmental costs of the ever increasing use of resources (Newell 2004). Other drivers of environmental change clearly also include migration, population and transport, to name but a few. Their governance and non-governance by national and international institutions is profoundly important for patterns of natural resource use. Such drivers, in turn, are a product of deeper economic and social forces that encourage population growth as a survival strategy in conditions of abject poverty; movement, internally and across borders, in search of work or freedom from oppression and war, following capital to zones of affluence and opportunity, or in the case of transport, the construction of infrastructures to encourage and facilitate investment.

However, it is patterns of production, trade and flows of finance, and their governance and un-governance by a growing range of actors that are most central to the interface between globalization and ecology, as the structures that literally create environmental change and shape the context in which it can be responded to. This is because those charged with tackling environmental problems and promoting sustainable development are the same actors that create the conditions for the expansion of trade, production and finance which generates environmental harm in the first place. It is imperative to be clear about the contradictions and strategic dilemmas that flow from this situation if we are to meaningfully advance a project of socially just sustainable development in a context of globalization.

For this reason, while focusing on these economic dimensions of globalization as the key structures that have to be ‘greened’ and realigned with ecological imperatives if the multiple challenges of sustainability are to be achieved, I argue that globalization can best be thought of as a political project. It should be understood in the context of the historical setting in which it is evolving and at the same time helping to define. In this sense it has to be viewed at once as an ideological and material project with a corresponding institutional infrastructure, rather than an objective description of global reality. Locating the process as the product of a particular historical and political moment helps us to understand for whom the discursive, institutional and material project of globalization works, and how. It also draws our attention to the social forces that promote and benefit from the existing organization of globalization and from patterns of unsustainable development, and serves to delineate opportunities for reform and possibilities of transformation. We return to these themes in chapters 2 and 3.

Ecology is also deeply political. Each of the main chapters of the book on trade, production and finance include a section on political ecology. This refers to a large literature by this name which seeks to provide a framework for understanding human-society or ‘socio-natural’ relations (Paulson et al. 2003; Robbins 2004). Specifically, it examines the interrelations of politics and power, structures and discourses with the environment. Political ecology is a broad label, therefore, for an eclectic set of theoretical approaches that take as their point of departure the fact that all ecology is political and all politics are ecological (Bryant and Bailey 1997; Stott and Sullivan 2000; Forsyth 2003; Peet and Watts 2004; Robbins 2004). This framing, as opposed to merely talking about environmental impacts, draws attention to the social relations which shape questions of access to resources, exposure to harm and responsibility for action, differentiated as they are by dimensions of class, gender and race (Newell 2005b). This also allows us to understand the source of grievance and the nature of the demands around which groups mobilize, which are discussed at the end of each chapter, which highlight issues ofjustice and inequities in processes of decision making, as well as the distribution of benefits and harm associated with different patterns of global resource use. The benefits of employing a political ecology lens are further discussed in the next chapter.

States of Caricature

One of the central debates in the literature on globalization is about the role of the state and in particular whether states have lost or conceded power to global economic actors and institutions. Perhaps nowhere is the importance of ideology in these debates better revealed than in the construction of narratives around state power and incapacity. Globalization may have certain corrosive effects on the sovereignty and territoriality of states, but this does not render them politically impotent in the way many accounts suggest (Ohmae 2004). The economic changes associated with globalization in many, but not all, cases have been produced and continue to be produced by state actions and non-actions, albeit by some states much more than others. Reaffirming state agency through reference to historical precedents (Hirst et al. 2009) and comparative experience (Weiss 1998) is important for situating contemporary globalization and for engaging in debates about the future positive potential of state action for sustainable development in a context of globalization. Challenging narratives that ‘There Is No Alternative’ (TINA) is important normatively and can be done with reference to ample empirical evidence which highlights the multiple forms that capitalism takes, depending on the social and political context in which it is embedded, the critical role that the state performs through acts of intervention or strategic abstention (Evans 1995; Weiss 1998), as well as the alternatives to a model of neo-liberal globalization which some states, regions and communities around the world are constructing.

We also need to go a step further, however, by looking inside the state. It is important to appreciate how some parts of the state have internationalized or globalized more than others and are more subject to the disciplines of global markets than others (Görg and Brand 2006). Through connections to global institutions with mandates in the policy areas for which they are responsible, as well as interactions with networks of financiers and foreign capital, state bureaucrats can play a key role in ‘domesticating’ external pressures for reform aimed at creating a favourable climate for business (Newell 2008b). While this has been the case for some time with regard to ministries of trade and commerce for example, new challenges are created where the state’s ability to protect its citizens’ rights to health or work or to guarantee access to critical natural resources such as water is compromised by global accords such as the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) which subject them to market disciplines (World Development Movement 2002). The ‘developmental space’ or policy autonomy of governments to prioritize domestic poverty alleviation objectives over those of enabling foreign investment is sharply constrained by such developments (Wade 2003; Gallagher 2005), negotiated under pressure and often without leverage, or by state elites with little regard for the potential consequences for the citizens they notionally represent. As we will see later in the book, the same concern arises with respect to the scope governments have to adopt environmental measures and policies which conflict with international trade and investment rules. The question is ‘whose rules rule’ and how can we account for this politically? Emphasizing constraints on state policy, often self-imposed by other more powerful elements of the state or by international economic institutions, does not provide support for generic claims of state impotence. Rather, it reflects the ways in which some political programmes are supported while others are challenged or reversed by transnational policy elites.

Naturalizing Globalization

Much of the literature on globalization seeks to present it as apolitical, natural and inevitable; natural in that it is just a continuation of earlier periods of expansionist capitalism which have shown a trend towards internationalization over the last century as new sources of accumulation are sought around the globe (Harvey 2010). Marxist political economists, in particular, propose that globalization is best understood as the latest chapter in the evolving history of capitalism and does not, as such, constitute a break with previous eras (Lewis 1996; Rosenburg 2000). Indeed, there is evidence in the Communist Manifesto that Marx and Engels foresaw the coming of globalization as an inevitable by-product of capital’s hunger to conquer new markets and territories and to find new consumers for their products. They note:

The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country . . . In the place of old wants, satisfied by the productions of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes (Marx and Engels 1998 [1848]).

There is also a tendency in other strands of the globalization literature to argue that, since globalization is inevitable, states have no choice but to adapt to the new reality. Globalization is represented as a driverless machine that no actor can control. The question becomes one of accommodation and adaptation to that which cannot be controlled. At a popular level and in policy discourse, terms such as TINA bear testimony to this ideology of impotence. Similarly, economists often frame the question in terms of how, and not whether, to engage, as if there is no choice, no agency, no alternative (Kaplinsky 2001).

The effect of removing questions of power and agency from the study of globalization is to present the phenomenon as apolitical and benign: guided by anonymous private actors and technological forces beyond the realm of state politics. This makes it very difficult to determine the causes of change and the appropriate sites for reform. It also serves to obscure the intimate links between state managers charged with addressing problems of environmental degradation and poverty, and the capital they depend upon for political and economic survival. Emphasizing the inevitability and linearity of processes of globalization serves to entrench the view that states have to adapt to, rather than direct, the changes taking place in the global economy. Hence, it performs an important ideological function: the de-legitimization of some policy options on the grounds that they are no longer tenable, and the promotion of others as inevitable and desirable. Discourses of inevitability absolve governments of blame for the consequences of reckless investment and irresponsible speculation, who can deflect the responsibility onto unaccountable market actors over whom, they allege, they have no control. Former President Fernando Henrique Cardoso claimed that he does not rule Brazil, because globalization is swallowing up less powerful states. He claimed both that the ‘increase in inequality and exclusion that globalization fuels is intricate and difficult to counter’ and that ‘globalization is inevitable, as are its consequences, its disasters, exclusion and social regression’ (quoted in Mittelmann 2000: 240). For Mittelmann (2000: 240) his comments reveal ‘that globalization can be appropriated by political actors and used as an excuse for the lack of a project for political reform, a mark of the failure of the holders of state power to contest evolving global structures and to craft a political solution’.

Similarly, restricting public expenditure and resisting calls for higher social and environmental standards can be justified on the grounds that responding to these demands will lead to capital flight and loss of investment: a fear that those business actors opposed to more stringent forms of environmental regulation frequently invoke. Governments, as well as business and civil society actors, benefit from constructing globalization in a particular way. Differentiating between the constraints that globalization actually imposes upon governments, as opposed to those they choose to emphasize for strategic reasons is, of course, a difficult task. But it remains important to de-mystify ‘the market’ and reveal the power relations behind this abstraction.

One way of doing this, drawing on the work of political economists such as Karl Polanyi, is to show, firstly, how markets are always created by and embedded within institutions and social relations and, secondly, how the nature of that relationship has, historically speaking, been subject to dramatic change. Polanyi, for example, invokes the notion of a ‘double-movement’ to describe attempts to re-embed market activities that followed nineteenth-century experiments with laissez-faire economics. Polanyi helped to explode the myth of the self-regulating market by showing how state actions are crucial to the creation and maintenance of market activities. In The Great Transformation (Polanyi 1980 [1944]), with a clear resonance to contemporary trends in globalization, he showed how unprecedented market expansion and social dislocation were followed by demands on the state to counteract the deleterious effects of the market. This helps us to get beyond the temptation to view contemporary globalization as the inevitable model of the future and to expect moves and counter-moves in the battle to define the direction of the global economy as ideologies of economic governance evolve, and thinking about the appropriate role of the state in economic (and environmental) management is constantly re-appraised. The shifting attempt to manufacture a consensus around the state’s role in development demonstrates this process at work. The evolution of thinking can be discerned from a reading of the World Development Reports of the World Bank over the course of the late 1980s and into the 1990s, where by 1997 the report The State in a Changing World (World Bank 1997a) reaffirms the centrality of the state for delivering development; a belated recognition of the key role of so-called ‘developmental states’ in Asia (Leftwich 1994), where state-led industrialization yielded such success, and a notable departure from the anti-state neo-liberal rhetoric that preceded it.

Rather than presenting globalization as an endpoint in the economic evolution of society, as discourses around the end of history tend to (Fukuyama 1993), it is important to understand how the alleged consensus on the desirability of market-led development has been achieved. It is important to recall, for example, the way in which many states have been ‘adjusted’ to the realities of the global market. Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAPs), conditionalities, tied aid and the threat of retaliatory actions through global institutions such as the World Trade Organization (WTO) have been some of the mechanisms by which the policy elites in the global North have been able to use their leverage to promote their preferred form of globalization in the postcolonial world (Hoogvelt 1997; Payne 2005). This underscores, once again, the importance of understanding state power, both in terms of capacity and resilience, to shape globalization and safeguard policy autonomy from global market actors and institutions.

The Approach of this Book

What can this book add to debates about globalization and the environment? There is now an extensive literature, much of it engaged with throughout this book, which deals with different aspects of the relationship between globalization and the environment, whether it be the relationship between trade and the environment, business and the environment or finance and the environment. Each of these dimensions of globalization has received extensive policy and academic treatment. Fewer books try to capture the big picture of this relationship, however, focusing on the globalization of environmental crises (Oosthoek and Gills 2008); specific case studies) as with Gabriela Kütting’s (2005) book on Globalization and the Environment, which focuses on West African cotton in the global political economy; or specific themes such as environmental reform initiatives: like Arthur Mol’s (2003) book on Globalization and Environmental Reform. General surveys of competing perspectives on globalization and the environment such as Clapp and Dauvergne’s (2005, 2011) book Paths to a Green World, or Speth’s (2003) edited collection Worlds Apart: Globalization and Environment and monograph The Bridge at the Edge of the World (Speth 2008) meanwhile provide an invaluable base for understanding the themes and issues raised in this book. Other collections, while useful, are either now very out of date (Newell 1999) or in the case of Elmar Altvater’s (1996) book, inaccessible to those readers with little or no German.

What is arguably missing, and which this book seeks to provide, is a contemporary, coherent, critical analysis of the way in which the relationship between globalization and the environment is being governed: by whom, for whom, and with what social and ecological implications. It does not provide a narrow description of institutional responses to environmental threats in a context of globalization however, since there are numerous books that do that already. Rather, it looks at how (global) ecologies and economies interrelate, how that relationship is mediated by politics, including institutions, but more importantly at the broader relations of power of which they are a part and in which they are embedded. Going beyond presenting a static picture, or one in which globalization is an all-powerful hegemonic project, it also explores the politics of contention and contestation about who wins and who loses from how resources are exploited in conditions of globalization, looking at patterns of resistance and mobilization for reform aimed at showing that another world, a more sustainable one, is possible. In assessing and seeking to explain these trends it draws from an eclectic range of literatures from a range of disciplines including Politics and International Relations, Development Studies, Environmental Studies and Geography. This is important to capturing the sorts of social and ecological relations and patterns of governance and politics that characterize the environment in a context of globalization that cannot be adequately understood from the perspective of any one discipline.

Why is this necessary? I have tried to illustrate above that power, politics, institutions and policy processes are key to understanding the relationship between diverse trends commonly attributed to globalization and their impact upon, and interrelationship with, the environment. The seemingly obvious statement that it is politics and power that mediate and indeed define globalization and its relationship to global environmental change is at odds with many orthodox accounts and representations of these relationships by key development actors and academics. Contrary to assumptions that markets alone determine outcomes in environmental as in other spheres of social life, this book shows that all market activity is inherently political. It reflects choices, embodies biases and ideologies and reproduces the social relations of which it is a part.

Since institutions and political processes in the public and private sphere are the source of decisions about which areas of the economy to globalize, how fast and under what conditions, it should be clear that all globalization is, first and foremost, a political project. Institutions can serve to promote, mediate and offset the impacts of particular patterns of trade, production or finance on the environment. Their ability to do so, of course, differs hugely between firms and states, depending, amongst other things, on their capacity, resources and global market position. Many states in parts of the world on the periphery of the global economy, including areas of sub-Saharan Africa, for example, are less centrally involved in mediating financial and trade flows critical to sustainable development, resulting from their lack of capacity to perform those roles or the lack of overall interest by foreign investors in investing in countries with poor infrastructures and weak institutional capacity. Institutions, either by their presence or absence, exercise a strong overall effect on who has access to which resources and on what terms. The nature of this relationship needs to be desegregated by type of globalization, and further still by sector and region and type of environmental problem. The importance of this will become clear in the chapters that follow, organized around the globalization of trade, production and finance in turn.

The focus on governance in this book goes beyond a focus on the institution of the state or global governance bodies. It directs our attention towards the processes of governing, managing, steering and organizing that account for patterns of global resource use, but which emanate not only from the centres of political authority we are accustomed to analysing (the state and international institutions) but from market and civil society actors engaged in the production of a variety of mechanisms of social regulation and governance. This is a broader notion of governance, therefore, in which authority in a formal sense is more dispersed, less concentrated only in traditional loci of power such as the state, where decision making on matters of routine importance to how resources are used implies a wide range of political and social actors whose interventions need to be understood and engaged with.

There is a broad set of theoretical and conceptual resources that can be used and refined to address the challenge of adequately explaining the relationship between globalization and the environment which are explored in chapters 2 and 3. There the case is made that a political economy approach to the relationship between globalization, governance and ecology is best placed to adequately capture these diverse trends and assess their significance. The challenge is two-fold: firstly, to understand and account for the ways in which different aspects of globalization impact upon, reconfigure and alter existing patterns of resource use and environmental governance in the broadest sense. Secondly, at the same time, to understand the extent to which they may be giving rise to new forms and patterns of environmental governance, albeit ones which are often overlooked by contemporary accounts of governance and environmental governance in particular.