Globalization and the Environment

Capitalism, Ecology and Power

Pete Newell

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780745664712
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Globalisation
• Index: Politics & International Relations

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.

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, th...