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Perspectives on Natural Resources in the Global Economy: Polity Series Review
Abstract
Polity's ‘Resources’ series is a set of scholarly books, each of them dealing with a single resource or resource-based commodity from a generally global or international perspective. As of this writing, nine books have been published in the series, six of which I review here. The series is a welcome contribution to interdisciplinary and overall critical perspectives on the social and environmental dimensions and implications of the international appropriation, production and exchange of natural resources. While there is no clear disciplinary bent or theoretical foundation running across the volumes, together the books develop a transnational perspective, stressing the linkages between specific sites of appropriation and production, on the one hand, and broader political economic networks of processing, finance, coordination, commercial distribution and social regulation, on the other. The books should serve as valuable references to researchers in academic, government and non-government institutional settings, but should also prove valuable for undergraduate teaching on contemporary natural resource industries and their social regulation.
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This and the subsequent papers in this special issue set out the contours of Marxian urban political ecology and call for greater research attention to a neglected field of critical research that, given its political importance, requires urgent attention. Notwithstanding the important contributions of other critical perspectives on urban ecology, Marxist urban political ecology provides an integrated and relational approach that helps untangle the interconnected economic, political, social and ecological processes that together go to form highly uneven and deeply unjust urban landscapes. Because the power-laden socioecological relations that shape the formation of urban environments constantly shift between groups of actors and scales, historical-geographical insights into these ever-changing urban configurations are necessary for the sake of considering the future of radical political-ecological urban strategies. The social production of urban environments is gaining recognition within radical and historical-materialist geography. The political programme, then, of urban political ecology is to enhance the democratic content of socioenvironmental construction by identifying the strategies through which a more equitable distribution of social power and a more inclusive mode of environmental production can be achieved.
We provide a complete characterization of the set of Markov-Perfect Equilibrium (MPE) of dynamic common-property resource games a la Levhari and Mirman (1980). We find that all MPE of such games exhibit remarkably regular dynamic behavior. Surprisingly, however, and despite their memoryless nature, MPE need not result in a "tragedy of the commons", i.e., overexploitation of the resource relative to the first-best solutions. We show through an example that MPE could, in fact, lead to the reverse phenomenon of underexploitation of the resource. Nonetheless, we demonstrate that, in payoff space, MPE are always suboptimal.
People around the world are confused and concerned. Is it a sign of strength or of weakness that the US has suddenly shifted from a politics of consensus to one of coercion on the world stage? What was really at stake in the war on Iraq? Was it all about oil and, if not, what else was involved? What role has a sagging economy played in pushing the US into foreign adventurism? What exactly is the relationship between US militarism abroad and domestic politics? These are the questions taken up in this compelling and original book. In this closely argued and clearly written book, David Harvey, one of the leading social theorists of his generation, builds a conceptual framework to expose the underlying forces at work behind these momentous shifts in US policies and politics. The compulsions behind the projection of US power on the world as a "new imperialism" are here, for the first time, laid bare for all to see.
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"Technology is not the answer to the population problem. Rather, what is needed is 'mutual coercion mutually agreed upon'--everyone voluntarily giving up the freedom to breed without limit. If we all have an equal right to many 'commons' provided by nature and by the activities of modern governments, then by breeding freely we behave as do herders sharing a common pasture. Each herder acts rationally by adding yet one more beast to his/her herd, because each gains all the profit from that addition, while bearing only a fraction of its costs in overgrazing, which are shared by all the users. The logic of the system compels all herders to increase their herds without limit, with the 'tragic,' i.e. 'inevitable,' 'inescapable' result: ruin the commons. Appealing to individual conscience to exercise restraint in the use of social-welfare or natural commons is likewise self-defeating: the conscientious will restrict use (reproduction), the heedless will continue using (reproducing), and gradually but inevitably the selfish will out-compete the responsible. Temperance can be best accomplished through administrative law, and a 'great challenge...is to invent the corrective feedbacks..to keep custodians honest.'"
- McEvoy