Globalisation and the Environment

11 Key excerpts on "Globalisation and the Environment"

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  The SAGE Handbook of Political Geography

  • Kevin R Cox, Murray Low, Jennifer Robinson, Kevin R Cox, Murray Low, Jennifer Robinson(Authors)
  • 2007(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications Ltd

    (Publisher)

  In addition to general calls for global responses to address global environmental problems such as climate change, there is also proliferation of new actors such as non-governmental organizations, debate about the relationship between trade and envi-ronment, and new environmental regimes that encompass both specific international laws and inter-governmental organizations. Transnational institutions, such as the United Nations and the World Trade Organization, have become increas-ingly involved broadly in environmental debates and more narrowly in environmental management. There are also new challenges related to envi-ronmental security and the ecological politics of empire (Klare, 2001; Dalby, 2002b; Global Envi-ronmental Politics , 2004). Commentators often discuss this combination of trends in terms of chal-lenges to the traditional nation-state framework and the rise of ‘global governance’ as an alternative (e.g. Global Environmental Politics , 2003; Lifton, 2003). However, it is important to be cautious about making statements regarding overarching change. Political geographical approaches to global processes greatly enhance our understanding of the dynamics of environmental governance and politics more broadly. Geographers have contributed not only to our knowledge of ‘trans-state organization’ (Roberts, 2002) but have been among those who have most strongly challenged the notion that globalization entails the end of the nation-state (e.g. Jessop, 2002; Dicken, 2003, chap. 5). Alternative notions of scale are particularly important in this regard: moving from a static notion of scales as ontologically given objects that impact each other to a relational notion in which scales are fluid, contested, and simultane-ously material and discursive significantly impacts how we understand and analyze the ‘global’ (Herod and Wright, 2002).

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  Environmental Policy and Politics in the European Union

  • Tom Delreux, Sander Happaerts(Authors)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Red Globe Press

    (Publisher)

  In terms of the dynamics of global environmental politics, it means that a large portion of the industrialized world is coming to international negotiations as a single negotiating bloc. This cer-tainly simplifies international negotiations and, to the extent the EU manages to act in a united way, it creates a larger potential political weight for the EU (see Chapter 10). The Global Context 53 Globalization as a driving force The multi-dimensional process of globalization, which the world has witnessed since the 1980s, has had a profound impact on Europe’s environment and on the EU’s role in global environmental politics. Understood as the spreading of a Western model of production and a consumerist lifestyle, globalization has large environmental con-sequences. Indeed, this model of production and consumption is based on intensive energy use, on increased material inputs and on the creation of environmental externalities. The diffusion of this model results in pollution, natural resources depletion, pressure on renewable resources, etc. (Bruyninckx 2013; Mol et al. 2005). The spreading of industrialization to Asia and Latin America has caused notable pollution, issues of waste management and deg-radation of natural resources. Countries like China, India, Brazil, Mexico and others are by now major contributors to global envi-ronmental problems such as loss of biodiversity, global warming, deforestation and trade in hazardous waste (Bruyninckx 2013). In a very short time period they have become important and neces-sary actors in the formation of global environmental regimes. The impact on the EU’s international environmental diplomacy is obvi-ous (see Chapter 10). Whereas focusing on a limited number of key Western countries was sufficient to reach a functional consensus in the past, much more complex negotiations, with demands from new major players on the international scene, are nowadays the rule (Happaerts 2015).

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  Rio

  Unravelling the Consequences

  • Caroline Thomas(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  1992 ] for examples from international relations). In this article I examine whether the seeming centrality of environmental concerns is not in fact mistaken by reference to two dimensions of the role of environmental politics: within international relations as practice, and within the academic subject of international relations. I argue that there are powerful reasons, essentially political, that may keep the environment on the periphery in each setting.

  Such a view may well seem heretical to those who work within the environmental politics area. However, my overall claim is that too often practitioners and academics alike fall into the trap of being drawn by the ethical, moral or even common-sense logic of their argument or position without sufficient attention being paid to the ‘realities’ of political and economic power. As someone who works in probably the most conservative academic discipline, one which reifies the state as the centre-piece of political and economic analysis, I want to put forward a set of reasons why environmental politics may be destined to stay on the periphery of international relations (and of the discipline of international relations).

  Perhaps an historical precedent is to be found in the politics and study of European integration. In the 1950s and early 1960s, the logic of integration as a practice and as an (often interrelated) academic field, forecast the end of the states-system. Whether by functional stealth or by neo-functional co-option the state was to be overtaken by other actors. Arguably a similar neglect of high politics is present in most contemporary environmental work as was present in the heady days of European integration. Moreover, the states-system has faced many challenges before, and since, that posed by European integration. Yet for all its faults, and crucially for all its constraining and silencing of alternative notions of political community, the states-system remains the dominant political structure of international relations.

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  The Globalization and Environment Reader

  • Pete Newell, J. Timmons Roberts, Peter Newell, J. Timmons Roberts, Pete Newell, Peter Newell, J. Timmons Roberts(Authors)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  Part III Explaining the Relationship between Globalization and the Environment Introduction This section brings together four pieces that set out to explain how globalization is affecting the environment. The first by Clapp and Dauvergne lays out a framework of four ways of looking at environmental problems, and the following pieces are examples of those approaches. The World Bank chapter exhibits a market environmentalist position on how to solve the problem. The Newell piece includes political economy and political ecology in what can be seen as a “social green” approach to globalization and the environment. Finally the Levy, Haas, and Keohane piece provides a classic “institutionalist” approach to solving global environmental issues. The issues covered in the pieces are diverse, and reveal quite different proposals of ways forward. In their widely used teaching book on global environmental politics Paths to a Green World, Jennifer Clapp and Peter Dauvergne outline a series of different approaches or worldviews regarding the relationship between globalization and the environment. The framework places scholars, policy-makers, bureaucrats, business people and activists who consider themselves environmentalists into four categories. Their categorization is based on each group’s beliefs about the roots of environmental problems, on their sense of whether the Earth is fragile or resilient, and whether they think governments, firms, or individuals are the most likely to contribute to solving the problems. Market liberal environmentalists – who we heard from in the last section – acknowledge failures of the economic system to include ecological impacts, and believe that pricing pollution or establishing trading systems provide the best ways of managing them. By ‘internalizing’ environmental costs, their true value gets factored into decisions about production and investment

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  Environmental Political Thought

  Interests, Values and Inclusion

  • Robert Garner(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Bloomsbury Academic

    (Publisher)

  Thus, one obstacle to the development ENVIRONMENTAL POLITICAL THOUGHT 88 of stringent national environmental laws is the pressure that is likely to be applied by business organisations, which see themselves being econom-ically disadvantaged since they have to pay the costs of environmental protection while their competitors in other countries do not. Thus, one of the major justifications for the European Union’s initial intervention in environmental matters was precisely on the grounds of harmonising national laws rather than any specific interest in environmental protec-tion per se (Simpson, 1990 : 29). More often than not, though, traditional environmental problems have had direct supranational consequences. Moreover, the international dimension of environmentalism has become more prominent because of the identification of genuinely global problems, such as climate change and ozone depletion, in the 1980s. Only global co-operation can hope to solve these problems. What were originally national or regional prob-lems have, with the threat to the ozone layer and the climate added to the equation, taken on a global character. Deforestation, for instance, has long been identified as an environmental problem, but whereas the destruction of the rain forests was once a regional concern, affecting the stability of rainfall and river patterns and promoting soil erosion, the recognition that deforestation contributes to climate change transforms it into an issue of global significance. Similarly, the massive increase in road transport has many local, regional and national effects but, as an important source of CO 2 emissions, it is also now inextricably linked with climate change and the international attempts to deal with it. The environment and approaches to international relations Perceptions of international environmental regimes are coloured by the general approach to international relations adopted.

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  Globalization

  Theory and Practice Second Edition

  • Eleonore Kofman, Gillian Youngs, Eleonore Kofman, Gillian Youngs(Authors)
  • 2003(Publication Date)
  • Continuum

    (Publisher)

  PARTI Globalization, International Relations and Political Geography This page intentionally left blank CHAPTER 1 International Relations as we Enter the Twenty-first Century GILLIAN YOUNGS Globalization has become the new term for signifying dramatic changes in the nature of international relations in the latter part of the twentieth century and the dawning of the new century. It has become increas-ingly pervasive in the practices of politics, economics and culture as well as in their mediated communications. But are its meanings any clearer now that it has become so commonplace than when the first edition of this collection was published seven years ago (Kofman and Youngs, 1996)? Not necessarily. This chapter investigates how globalization might be considered to have replaced international relations as a description of not only how the world is, but also how we as individuals and collectivities of different kinds understand our place within it, and the diverse communications processes and tools intrinsically linking inner reflexive and communal symbolic aspects to concrete events and developments. Globalization signals a number of things in contrast to international relations. It emphasizes a global rather than a national context. This is not to deny national settings but to indicate that they themselves sit within a larger context, and that a notion of them as bounded separate entities is not necessarily the best conceptual priority for thinking about the world. Globalization also suggests a processual approach to world affairs: that we are dealing with realities in motion on the large scale of the globe. It is more dynamic than international relations, which identifies the relations between the defined entities of states as the key focus for assessing what is happening in the world. Globalization leaves it more open as to which relations, sited where, might be important to any particular social process.

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  Global Environmental Politics

  Power, Perspectives, and Practice

  • Ronnie D. Lipschutz(Author)
  • 2003(Publication Date)
  • CQ Press

    (Publisher)

  Second, globalization encourages consumption, which leads to increased volumes of wastes, both toxic and otherwise, from extraction, processing, transportation, assembly, packaging, and use. Third, globalization affects social, institutional, and orga-nizational relations. These changes can obstruct solutions to environmental problems while encouraging activities that further damage the environment. Chapter 4, “Civic Politics and Social Power: Environmental Politics ‘On the Ground,’ ” begins with an aphorism by the late congressional representa-tive Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neill, D-Mass.: “All politics is local.” O’Neill, revered and reviled for his staunch liberalism, recognized that he had to respond to the needs of his constituents, who were more concerned about their neigh-borhoods than the planet. He also saw, however, that it is people who are po-litical, who engage in politics, and who, ultimately, must be persuaded that actions are both good and to their long-term benefit. All environmental pol-itics is, ultimately, about the local: about landscapes, land use, people’s beliefs and practices, and insults to the environment that originate in and affect     specific places and regions. Some of these matters manifest themselves glob-ally (for example, global warming), although it is specific places and spaces that feel their effects. Others have a much more localized character (for ex-ample, soil erosion), originating from specific local sources and behaviors and motivating specific local actions in response. But who can act to protect the environment? In recent decades, the envi-ronmental movement, acting through what can be called social power, has in-creasingly been able to affect environmental politics and policy all over the world.

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  An Introduction to Political Geography

  Space, Place and Politics

  • Martin Jones, Rhys Jones, Michael Woods, Mark Whitehead, Deborah Dixon, Matthew Hannah(Authors)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  10

  Political geography and the environment

  Introduction: what are environmental politics anyway?

  Can I (Mark Whitehead) let you into a little secret? This is, perhaps, not the best secret for someone writing a chapter on the form and nature of environmental politics to admit, but I must confess to finding it very difficult to effectively define and/or discern where environmental politics begins and other manifestations of political life end. What I can say with some certainty is that this definitional difficulty I experience is not a product of a lack of effort. I teach lecture courses, write newspaper articles, convene seminars, and regularly blog and micro-blog on environmental politics. But the more I think about, talk on and practise what I believe to be environmental politics, this elusive phenomenon (or more accurately collection of phenomena) appears to slip my grasp.

  My problem does not derive from the fact there are no clear definitions of what environmental politics is all about. For many, environmental politics is synonymous with environmentalism: that collection of interconnected political movements that first started to emerge in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. While there are various shades and strengths of environmentalism (ranging from strong to weak , and dark green to light green ), what appears to unite this movement is a desire to ensure that environmental considerations are a part of political debate, and a factor within related forms of decision-making (see Pepper 1984, 1996; Dobson 1995). On these terms environmental politics is often reduced to the political defence and protection of nature. Understanding environmental politics on these terms is helpful to the extent that it enables it to be situated alongside, and differentiated from, other political movements such as liberalism (which is animated by the defence of personal freedoms), socialism (which is inspired by the needs of the working classes) and feminism (which takes up the struggle for equal rights for women). The defence of Nature, in essence, becomes the touchstone upon which environmental politics can be identified and assessed. But this association between environmental politics and Nature is also unhelpful, and problematic, on a number of fronts (Castree 2012). At one level, this perspective tends to assume that there is a pristine world out there, which is somehow separate from human activity, and can thus be defended (N. Smith 1984). But this idea of first

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  Globalization and the Environment

  Capitalism, Ecology and Power

  • Pete Newell(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Polity

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 3

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

  We saw in the previous chapters how the relationship between globalization and the environment is first and foremost a political one. It is shaped by decisions and non-decisions, interventions and non-interventions, proactive policy and active neglect on behalf of powerful actors, social forces and classes that together shape the ‘nature’ of globalization. This chapter builds on that general understanding to develop a critical political economy account of global environmental governance in particular. This helps to inform the discussion of the governance of trade, production and finance in the chapters that follow, and provides us with the tools to think about the potential for, and barriers to, effective environmental reform in a context of globalization. I argue that such an approach is able to enhance our comprehension of the practice of environmental governance by emphasizing historical, material and political elements of its (re) constitution and evolution. It is argued that an account of this nature is better placed to address the key questions which drive our enquiry into environmental governance in a context of globalization. These are:

  •  What is to be governed? (and what is not?) •  Who governs and who is governed? •  How do they govern? •  On whose behalf? •  With what implications?

  The first part of the chapter reflects on the insights and limitations of conventional interpretations of environmental governance. The second part articulates the need for a differently grounded approach, driven both by the analytical weaknesses of existing approaches as well as changes in the global system that require more sophisticated and critical approaches to explanation. The third part elucidates the key elements of a political economy approach, assembling diverse theoretical tools towards this end and providing examples of the insights they generate in practice that help to respond to the questions identified above. The chapter concludes with reflections on the benefits that might be derived from such an approach that will inform the rest of the book.

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  Environment

  An Interdisciplinary Anthology

  • Eugene Jolas, Andreas Kramer, Rainer Rumold(Authors)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • Yale University Press

    (Publisher)

  8 Globalization Is Environmental The famous picture taken from the moon proclaims Earth to be a single globe, one world. The activities of globalization interconnect regions, countries, cities, villages, and farms, but also jobs, products, regulatory practices, services, banking, markets, and industries. Globalization means different things to differ-ent people because it affects them in markedly different ways. It is a contested concept with supporters, skeptics, and opponents. Generally, it is the free move-ment of products, resources, plants, animals, and, in some cases, people around the world. It can include the free movement of ideas and knowledge. Freedom is a cherished value but creates conflicts and dilemmas: one person’s freedom to travel or migrate may be another person’s threat of communicable disease or job insecurity. Economic globalization benefits many, but its freedom is not distrib-uted equally. Increasingly, important decisions about which raw materials, prod-ucts, jobs, and even ideas will cross borders are made by powerful, sometimes unaccountable multinational corporations, many of which command more re-sources than do most sovereign states. This reality is fairly new, for a global economy requires secure transport, com-munication, and trade over long distances. After European explorations in the late Renaissance, some optimists foresaw a prosperous, peaceful world linked by commerce and even the abolition of slavery. Yet global trade is subject not only to economic but also to political and military power. Historically, it is insepara-ble from the checkered legacies of imperialism and colonialism. The British Em-pire achieved a form of globalization with mixed results: significant benefits to many regions of Asia, Africa, Europe, and North America, but also exploitation, slavery for a protracted period, and colonial rule.

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  International Politics

  Power and Purpose in Global Affairs

  • D'Anieri, Paul D'Anieri(Authors)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Cengage Learning EMEA

    (Publisher)

  433 CHAPTER FOURTEEN: The Global Environment and International Politics BARRIERS TO COOPERATION Beyond collective action problems, there is a general set of obstacles that tend to arise on many international environmental issues. Conflict with Free Trade Agreements International environmental protection often complicates the issue of free trade. Environmental regulations are sometimes viewed as barriers to trade, and some important regulations have been struck down by the WTO for that reason. Competing Economic Priorities The goal of environmental protection is a much greater priority for some countries than for others. For the poorest people of the world, envi-ronmental protection is a luxury that appears unaffordable. The same thing is true for societies as a whole. For Third World governments with debts to pay, increasing exports to pay off those debts is likely to be a higher priority than protecting the environment, especially when they are under pressure from the World Bank or the IMF. However, it is not only poor countries that put economics ahead of the environment. Countries bat-tling an economic downturn might hesitate to increase environmental regulation. The most prominent state refusing to sign the Kyoto Protocol on climate change is the United States, which fears the economic consequences of reducing fossil fuel use. Complexity Environmental problems overlap with many other policy concerns, such as development and free trade. Environmental goals can also be at odds with each other. For example, hydroelectric and wind power are seen as energy that is “clean” and does not increase dependence on foreign sources. But hydroelectric dams have a huge impact on river systems and often force people to relocate, and wind farms spur opposition because they are unsightly, cause noise pollution, and disrupt migrating birds. Because bureaucracies tend to work within their own “silos,” coordinating policies so that they do not undermine each other is very difficult.

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