International Political Economy and the Environment

 Talking about the International political economy will start with a target on international forms of inequality and the types of unscrupulous relationships that exist between countries. Since we're thinking about the environment, we're going to kind of just spell out how those forms of exploitation result in a host of injustice and inequities, both environmentally and economically, but also as well as, socially. We live in a very highly laminated world economy with core countries at the middle of things, enjoying the highest quality of life, not to mention quantity, if we look at demographic factors: that's where the life expectancy is greatest. On the opposite end of the spectrum, are the peripheral countries, which are the poorest. In many cases life expectancy flitter around 49-50 years old for these countries, so they're delayed far behind on several indicators. Environmental problems are no exception. The main countries enjoy high levels of consumption of an extensive range of materials and, oftentimes, production of those goods, or the by-products of that production, are experienced in the peripheral or the semi-peripheral countries--which are somewhere in the middle of the core and peripheral countries in the scheme of things The question is, how can unequal exchange between core, peripheral, and semi-peripheral nations be halted? That's one of the core questions, to bring about some form of social justice and sustainability. So just briefly, thinking about definitions, a "core nation" involves maintaining a diverse economy and a heavy trade of imports and exports. The vast majority of exports tend to be higher-end consumer goods, and imports tend to be natural resources or lower-order kind of manufacturing products. Peripheral nations are the poorest as mentioned, tend to be highly agricultural or suffer from the resource curse as it's been called--this kind of narrow export economy develops and these nations depend very heavily on the export of a narrow range of exports. semi-peripheral nations have features of that sometimes, but they also can look like core countries, in that they often are the host of different types of manufacturing but usually not the higher-order, high-cost manufacturing goods. The core countries exporting high-profit consumer goods, importing cheap labor and raw materials; semi-peripheral countries having somewhat of a mixture of those characteristics; peripheral countries of course are importing the high-profit goods and they're exporting the cheap labor and materials, which is a very disadvantageous location in the world system.

At the heart of the world economy, and now this gets us a little past the initial thinking of world Systems theory, incorporates some contemporary thought particularly with the rising role of multinational corporations’ heart of things, facilitating global trade. Now it's corporations that have replaced the nation-state in this kind of quest to find new markets, new resources, new workers, and so forth. Multinational corporations are, of course, guided by a desire to make a profit, and do so in a highly competitive context. Those that are not profitable tend to perish, and those that are tend to continue. So, you know, multinational corporations will sort of shop around looking for the best place to do business due to their desire to maximize profits. That of course means cutting corners where it's possible, externalizing costs to the environment, paying the minimal amount for labor because that's going to maximize profits. Usually, they can find a willing partner: a peripheral or semi-peripheral nation that's willing to provide what multinationals are looking for. Because this is a competitive global economy many nations are almost blackmailed into accepting rather poor business practices and there's almost no oversight. This is one of the interesting things about the world system, the world economy, is that global corporations, multinational, transnational corporations-they don't really have anybody to answer to. There is no international governing body that they have to follow some kind of international laws. we've looked at elsewhere, also focused on environmental outcomes but with similar claims about how the economy works under capitalism, and the way corporations are caught up in this competitive game to out-compete one another and find the cheapest path the profit at the expense of labor and the environment. We see the global economy does increase the distance between consumption and production and that's something else that separates contemporary world economic dynamics from older forms which were somewhat more localized--not entirely, the colonial system of course had global dimensions but the day-to-day production and consumption of goods were much more localized under colonialism and of course before colonialism. One model for regulating multinational corporations is to have a higher level of global governance. That means maybe using existing frameworks such as the United Nations which is a league of countries that negotiate with one another but the United Nations is not itself truly a governmental body and it doesn't regulate corporations and regulate countries. The United Nations does not directly challenge multinational corporations, it certainly doesn't challenge the underlying global capitalist system, profit motive and generally believes that good economic decisions will be green, making the ideology of the UN more consistent with an ecological modernization paradigm. There's also the World Trade Organization, which does regulate multinational corporations, but this is not a governmental body either. It's in fact a private tribunal where decisions are made behind closed doors. There's no Democratic input whatsoever. So, there's really not much concern with anything besides economic justice between the different participatory nations and companies. What these can do, is they can provide even poor countries with a certain amount of assistance and support, they can provide resources, expertise, and they can help countries fight out their environmental battles, or their labor battles as the case may be. This is driven at first by grassroots actions within the peripheral or semi-peripheral nations but eventually evolves into some kind of institutional form. That is how we know social movements are succeeding. As we've seen with the environmental movement, that's has been the case to a large degree, and there are several organizations out there. So, the key question is: can we govern the world? We have this race to the bottom, so to speak, multinational corporations racing each other to find the cheapest resources and labor, cutting corners as much as possible to increase profits, so that shareholders are happy and continue to hold on to their shares of the companies, and so forth. The greatest resistance coming from grassroots social movements, which are global and scale, and international organizations that they have created, and in fact, interact with and rely upon it. They of course want to change the global governance structure and ultimately the rules of the global economy, to hold all factors more accountable. The question here is can progress be made without radical changes to global structure? Once again, I think that brings us back to the fundamental difference between an ecological modernization paradigm and ideas associated with the global political-economic perspective. All this discussion of the global political economy really needs to be put in perspective by thinking about the extent to which there are global injustices and global inequalities.