Forestry in the Midst of Global Changes

Christine Farcy, Eduardo Rojas-Briales, Inazio Martinez de Arano

• Publisher: CRC Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781315282350
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Tecnología e ingeniería
• Subtopic: Silvicultura

Forestry today, like many other sectors that traditionally rely on material goods, faces significant global drivers of societal change that are less often addressed than the environmental concerns commonly in the spotlight of scientific, political, and news media. There are three major interconnected issues that are challenging forestry at its foundation: urbanization, tertiarization, and globalization. These issues are at the core of this book.

The urbanization of society, a process in development from the first steps of industrialization, is particularly significant today with the predominance and quick growth rate of the world's urban population. Ongoing urbanization is creating new perspectives on forestry, inducing changes in its social representation, and changing lifestyles and practices with a tendency toward dematerialization. The process of urbanization is also creating a disconnect and in some ways is leaving behind rurality, the sector of society where forestry has traditionally developed and taken place over centuries.

The second issue covered in this book is the tertiarization of the economy. In society today, the sector of services largely dominates the economy and occupies the major part of the world's active population. This ongoing process modifies professional modalities and ways of life and opens new doors to forests through the immaterial goods they provide. It also profoundly changes the framework, rules, processes, means of production, exchanges between economic factors, and the processes of innovation.

The third issue is undoubtedly globalization in its economic, political, and social components. Whether it's through bridging distances, crossing borders, accelerating changes, standardizing practices, leveling hierarchical structures, or pushing for interdependence, globalization impacts everyone, everywhere in multiple ways. Forestry is no exception.

Forestry in the Midst of Global Changes focuses on these global drivers of change from the perspective of their relationships with how society functions. By analyzing them in depth through multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary, and even transdisciplinary approaches, this book is helping to design the forestry of tomorrow.

IVGlobalization

16Main Findings and Trends of Globalization

Yemi Adeyeye, Jiadong Ye, Sarah Sra, and Louise Adam

16.1Introduction

16.2Main Trends of Globalization

16.3Economic Globalization

16.3.1Introduction

16.3.2Trends

16.4Social Globalization

16.4.1Introduction

16.4.2Trends

16.5Political Globalization

16.5.1Introduction

16.5.2Trends

16.6Concluding Remark

References

Endnotes

16.1Introduction

For past 30 years, the globalization of social life has been accelerating and intensifying, constituting a societal process of primary importance, with large-scale and distant societies connected together in a variety of ways (Giddens and Sutton 2017). Scholars such as Held et al. (1999) and Scholte and Wallace (2001) identify globalization as a controversial or pluralistic word with many definitions and meanings since its appearance about 30 years ago, including some skepticism on its reality while agreeing on the importance of related changes. The commonly used definition focuses on economic perspectives and refers to the global process of market integration resulting from liberalization of trade, improvement, and expansion of transportation systems as well as the growth and progress of information and communication technologies. Other definitions are drawn to capture global issues including environmental protection, global politics, culture, and laws. Naghshpour (2008) characterizes globalization by the distribution of ideas, information, and people into a larger global network. Giddens and Sutton (2017) highlights “globalization as involving the fact that we all increasingly live in one world, as individuals, companies, groups and nations, and become ever more interdependent, interconnected and geographically mobile than ever before.” As Robinson and Carson (2015) point out, in contrast to “internationalization,” the term globalization implies a degree of purposive functional integration among geographically dispersed activities.

Potrafke (2015) asserts that defining and assessing globalization require the use of indices that encapsulate economic, social, and political aspects. Examples of such indices include the Kearney/Foreign Policy Magazine Global Index,1 Centre for the Study of Globalization and Regionalization Globalization Inde,2 Maastricht Globalization Index (Figge and Martens 2014), and the KOF3 Index of Globalization developed by ETH Zurich (KOF and Dreher 2017). Potrafke (2015) further highlights that KOF index, developed for assessing a country’s rate of globalization (KOF 2017), is often preferred due to its availability since 1970 for almost every country in the world.

For this very introductory chapter whose challenge is to briefly present such a broad and complex process, we are referring to the three interrelated dimensions of globalization used by KOF,4 namely, economic, social, and political dimensions. Based on the study by Clark (2000) and the book by Norris (2000), KOF Index defines globalization as “the process of creating networks of connection among actors at the multi-continental distances, mediated through a variety of flows including people, information and ideas, capitals and goods. Globalization is a process that erodes national boundaries, integrates national economies, cultures, technologies and governance, and produces complex relations of mutual interdependence” Dreher (2006). The index measures globalization on a scale from 1 to 100. The underlying variables are divided into percentiles to smooth out outliers and reduce fluctuation over time (KOF 2017). The index benefits from a continuous improvement process and is often adapted in response to changing context.

Even though we acknowledge the relevance of the debates about the respective importance of economic, social, and political dimensions and their weight as drivers of globalizing processes (Giddens and Sutton 2017), the scope of this review is to provide a concise brief of globalization as a concept, and the dimensions and prevailing trends as effected by economic, social, and political factors, which coevolve and interact across spatial and temporal scales.

16.2Main Trends of Globalization

Main trends in literature include debates about the effects and consequences of glob­alization. Examples include debates in land use changes (Meyfroidt et al. 2010; Lambin and Meyfroidt 2011; Li et al. 2017), human consumption habits (Hawkes 2006), gendered evolution of employment (Beneria et al. 2015), learning modalities (Fletcher 2015; Clark and Mayer 2016), and individual loss of the “sense of belonging” for a feeling of more freedom of choice (Giddens and Sutton 2017). Also, there is an emergence of debates about the potential coexistence of globalization with deglobalization, in an attempt to maintain some forms of stability across economic, social, and political lines (e.g., Lamy and Rudd 2016). Postelnicu et al. (2015) refers to deglobalization by the way of diminishing economic interdependence and integration between states as, for example, when the import share in gross product decreases (Van Bergeijk 2017). Example could be seen in the production sector, particularly with the United States introducing new border taxes (Carzana 2017).

As illustrated in Table 16.1, high-income countries and the member countries of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, which are predominantly in the global north, are higher on the globalization index (Grinin et al. 2012), European Union (EU) integration being also a key driver.

Table 16.1Country Ranking in 2014 According to KOF Index of Globalization (N = 193)

S/No.	Country	KOF 2017
1	Netherlands	92.84
2	Ireland	92.15
3	Belgium	91.75
4	Austria	90.05
5	Switzerland	88.79
27	United States	79.73
48	Russian Federation	68.25
71	China	62.02
73	Brazil	61.40
189	Comoros	30.84
190	Micronesia	27.96
191	Equatorial Guinea	26.16
192	Eritrea	25.07
193	Solomon Islands	23.98

Source: Dreher, A., Applied Economics, 38, 1091–1110, 2006; With kind permission from Springer Science+Business Media: Mea...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgment
• Editors
• Contributors
• Section I Setting the Scene
• Section II Urbanization of the Society
• Section III Tertiarization of the Economy
• Section IV Globalization
• Section V Lessons Learned
• Index