Many writers either glorify globalization or vilify it, particularly for its destructive environmental effects. In this book environmental sociologist Arthur Mol provides a more balanced understanding of the relationship between globalization and environmental quality. Mol bases his arguments on his theory of ecological modernization, which holds that although processes of modernization and globalization often result in environmental degradation, they also can encourage policies and programs designed to arrest degradation and improve environmental quality. Building on earlier ecological modernization studies that focused on Europe, North America, and East and Southeast Asia, Mol takes here a more global perspective. He also addresses the increasing roles of nonstate actors, especially international institutions, nongovernmental organizations, popular movements, and transnational corporations. After examining the confusion created by the failure to distinguish among globalization, global capitalism, and neoliberalism, Mol analyzes both globalization's destructive environmental consequences and its contribution to global environmental reform. Elaborating on the subject of reform, he focuses on three case studies, one involving the economic triad of the European Union, the NAFTA region, and Japan; one involving the relationship between the triad and developing countries; and one involving three developing countries: Vietnam, the Netherlands Antilles, and Kenya.

Globalization and Environmental Reform: The Ecological Modernization of the Global Economy

Approaches in the social sciences have experienced a shift toward the themes of time and space, at least over the past three decades. This shift was clearly announced in the invitation made by Anthony Giddens in the early 1980s to retreat from the considerations of time and space as simple containers of social action. Furthermore, several other authors have pointed out at least three shortfalls of the status quo before 1980s: i) the lack of the temporal dimension in the sociological explanation of modernity, ii) the dismissal of the spatial particularity in the accounts of social change, and iii) the need to temporalize the geographical inquiries. How are social sciences accounts and social actions affected by transformation to the spatio-temporal structures of society? That is the general inquiry that inspired this thesis. The notion of spatio-temporal restructuration is introduced to capture the processes of restructuration that are taking place in the social sciences and in social life. Consequently, the study of the spatio-temporal structures of society includes epistemological and phenomenological research. A reorganization of social science spatio-temporal explanatory frameworks is proposed through epistemological research. A phenomenological investigation refers to the dialogical relationship between spatio-temporal arrangements and regimes, which together define the spatio-temporal structures of society. These two conditions of the research in spatio-temporal restructuration –epistemological and phenomenological- explain the twofold structure of the thesis.

The spatio-temporal structures of society : modernity and ecological modernization as restructurations of time and space

The territorial transformations driven by the opening of the Chilean economy to the free market forty years ago have been analyzed from multiple perspectives. One of them was proposed in 2003 by Antonio Daher, describing certain regions as “commodity-regions”, referring to those whose economic activity focuses on the export of one or two goods, as a way of insertion in global markets. In this work we revisit this concept and problematize it from the perspective of political ecology, based on four dimensions (production, boom and crisis cycles, materiality of commoditized nature, and identity) applied to two cases: Antofagasta Region (mining of the copper) and Los Lagos Region (salmon farming). Our argument is that, to understand the territorial transformation that these regions have experienced, we must first recognize the project of territorial neoliberalization; and second, politicize the analysis of the project by considering the materiality of nature that will be commoditized.

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Nuevas aproximaciones teóricas a las regiones-commodity desde la ecología política

Mining and socio-ecological systems: A systematic review of Sub-Saharan Africa

Studies on ecological modernization have produced a fruitful discussion concerning the connection between society and nature based on the evolution of socio-political institutions. However, the que...

Ecological modernization from the actor’s perspective: Spatio-temporality in the narratives about socio-ecological conflicts in Chile

This article discusses the notion of economic sustainability from an ecological modernization perspective. The main thesis is that the pursuit of sustainability may reinforce socio-ecological conflicts. In this context, we propose that ecological modernization is based on four interrelated characteristics of sustainability, which, jointly, increase the pressure on local ecosystems: (i) land achievement or territorial expansionism and (ii) unequal environmental role distribution, both of which are territorial orientations; (iii) sustainable economic entrepreneurship and (iv) goal-oriented sustainability, both of which are motivations for social action. The latter has a paradoxical effect, which becomes apparent when sustainable extractive enterprises acquire regional extensions and multiply the socio-ecological conflicts at the local level. Applied to the mining industry in Chile, the analytical model reveals the necessity to redefine sustainability from a multi-scalar perspective by showing how the expansion of extractive clusters reinforces the local competition for water, energy, land, work, and living conditions. The main argument disentangles the notion of sustainability as a normative referent – an ideal state of sustainability that should be pursued socially – from sustainability as factual phenomena, which are the different forms to materialize sustainability in a particular place and time. This distinction allows us to propose the thesis of the depoliticization of the socio-ecological conflicts associated with the search for sustainability in the framework of global productive restructuration.

Fernando Campos-Medina

Papers

Could the Search for Sustainability Reinforce Socio-ecological Conflict?: The Mining Industry in Chile and Its Impact at the Local and Regional Level