The debate about whether contemporary globalization is or can be made compatible with sustainable development takes us to the heart of one of the key controversies of our times. Does a globalizing economy provide new technologies, services, and sources of finance that are a pre-requisite for tackling problems of environment and development? Or is a globalizing economy the source of the problem, intensifying patterns of resource consumption and social inequalities and unable to respect finite natural limits because of its obsession with infinite growth?
The chapters in this section of the book reflect both these polarized views, from a faith in gradual ecological modernization of the global economy as institutions, norms, and behavior begin to address environmental challenges (see the contribution by Mol), to a more radical ecological perspective that questions the viability of growth and of an ever globalizing economy (as argued by Goldsmith). Between these polarities there are positions that occupy more of a middle ground, where the answer to the question “is globalization good or bad for the environment?” is more often than not: “It depends.” It depends on the sector and region, how integrated they into the global economy and how vulnerable they are to price fluctuations and global environmental changes, for example, and it depends on how effective institutions are at reducing harm, regulating impacts, and maximizing the positive aspects of globalization. This is the position adopted by Najam et al. in this section.
The debate has a long and contested history which the chapters in this section speak to, providing an account of how our current predicament came to be in the context of debates about the “Anthropocene”: a new geological era in which “human” forces and societies have become a global geophysical force (see Steffen et al.), and by charting some of the early attempts to articulate politically and institutionally what a more sustainable model of development might look like, most notably through the work of the Brundtland Commission whose famous report Our Common Future we provide a summary of here.
Steffen and his colleagues in their now-famous contribution on the Anthropocene show that “human forces have become so pervasive and profound that they rival the great forces of nature and are pushing the Earth into ‘terra incognita’.” The Anthropocene is often said in these accounts to have started in the late eighteenth century, when analyses of air trapped in polar ice showed the beginning of growing global concentrations of carbon dioxide (Crutzen, 2002: 23). The “major steps” in this shifting alignment of forces include the period from the end of the eighteenth century to 1950 and, “from the perspective of the functioning of the Earth System as a whole, the very significant acceleration since 1950” (Crutzen and Steffen, 2003: 253). This latter period, in particular, is marked out as “the one in which human activities rapidly changed from merely influencing the global environment in some ways to dominating it in many ways” (Crutzen and Steffen, 2003: 253). If we extend the analysis to the other planetary boundaries which have been “overshot” (Rockström et al., 2009) such as the nitrogen cycle and biodiversity and species loss, the evolving nature of the global political economy and the intensification of specific patterns of production, exploitation, and consumption associated with globalization, necessarily feature centrally in any explanation of causation.
If this provides the long historical background to the mounting sense of an environmental crisis, the 1987 Brundtland report Our Common Future constituted one of first attempts to articulate a global response to it, a section of which we reproduce. Indeed as the address by Gro Harlem Brundtland declares, the commission “grew out of an awareness that over the course of this century, the relationship between the human world and the planet that sustains it has undergone a profound change.” The report first coined the term “sustainable development” which it defined as “development which meets the needs of current generations without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” In many ways it sought to reconcile differences of opinion about whether development or the environment should come first as well as respond to the critiques of mainstream development models that followed in the wake of the Club of Rome report Limits to Growth in 1972. This report painted an alarming picture of resource scarcity produced by a growing economy and a rapidly increasing population putting unsustainable pressure on a finite resource base. What followed was an attempt to show how the international community could protect the environment, address poverty, and do so as part of its quest for growth. This can be observed in the emphasis on changing “the quality of growth,” integrating “environment and economics in decision-making” but unquestioningly as a project to “revive growth.”
In the essay that follows by ecologist Nicolas Hildyard, what Brundtland (and the “Earth Summit” that followed five years later in Rio de Janiero) did was seek to obscure the role of development and economic growth in causing the environmental crisis and instead, through careful political maneuvering and diplomatic stage management, present it as the necessary solution to global environmental problems. He shows how big business, from being seen as culprits for environmental damage, were now being rehabilitated as the saviors of the planet with their capital, green technologies, and cleaner production processes, hence the title of his contribution “Foxes in Charge of the Chickens.” Interestingly for Hildyard and others writing in this “political ecology” tradition, the key fault lines were not so much the global North and South, but rather between two other groups. On the one hand he saw global elites from states, corporations, the scientific community and conservative elements of the environmental movement, for whom “global management” of the environment offered the prospect of new roles, new funding, and new legitimacy. On the other hand Hidyard saw poorer communities and radical movements, for whom questions of sustainability and social justice are two sides of the same coin, excluded and marginalized by this growing “eco-cracy” of global managers that “threaten to unleash a new wave of colonialism in which the management of people, even whole societies, for the benefit of commercial interest is now justified in the name of environmental protection.” For Hildyard the question is “whose common future are we fighting for?” (The Ecologist, 1993).
Following in a similar vein of a radical ecological position, though focused less on the global governance of the environment and more on the global economy itself, the piece by Edward Goldsmith holds that globalization is antithetical to any notion of sustainability. His starting point is that “By now, it should be clear that our environment is becoming ever less capable of sustaining the growing impact of our economic activities.” What globalization does in this view is globalize and export an unsustainable model of development in the Global North to the Global South. This is achieved through investment flows and production overseen by Transnational Corporations and with the backing of powerful global institutions such as the World Trade Organization, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund. These huge organizations pressure countries to open up their natural resource sectors (such as forests and mineral reserves) to foreign exploitation. The effect is, as Goldsmith claims, “to generalize this destructive process, which means transforming the vast mass of still largely self-sufficient people living in the rural areas of the Third World into consumers of capital-intensive goods and services.”
In the chapter that follows, Arthur Mol develops a very different position. He claims that the global economy, albeit unevenly, is actually undergoing a process of “greening.” He calls this a process of “ecological modernization” whereby through shifts in business practices, institutional reforms at the regional and global level and an active global environmental movement, environmental values and perspectives are creeping into the everyday functioning of the global economy. This means that “economic processes of production and consumption are increasingly analyzed and judged, as well as designed and organized from both an economic and an ecological point of view” according to Mol. The effect of these “actors, institutions and mechanisms” that are in the making is to “tame the global treadmill of capitalism” as he puts it, by opening up opportunities for de-coupling and de-linking growth from increased pollution. This is similar in many ways to the stance taken in the essay that follows by Najam et al. who, while raising concern about the environmental consequences of the current trajectory of globalization, argue that “better governance is the key to both managing globalization and the global environment,” and “More importantly, it is also the key to managing the relationship between the two.” They lay out a series of propositions about globalization and the environment, which helpfully frame many of the essays that follow.
In terms of laying down the historical context of debates about the effect of a globalizing economy on the environment, of highlighting key milestones in global responses to environmental crisis, the Brundtland Commission and the Earth Summit, and articulating sharply contrasting views about both the adequacy and appropriateness of those responses and the overall compatibility of globalization and sustainability, this section sets up the rest of the collection.
