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Pimping Climate Change: Richard Branson, Global Warming, and the Performance of Green Capitalism
Abstract
On 21 September 2006 UK über-entrepreneur and Virgin Group Chairman Richard Branson pledged approximately £1.6 billion, the equivalent of all the profits from Virgin Atlantic and Virgin Trains for the next ten years, to fighting climate change. Since then, Branson has restated his commitment to action on global warming, including investment in technologies for sequestering carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. In this paper, I critically examine and engage with Branson’s announcements as a specific entrée into a dialog about so-called ‘green capitalism’. I am particularly interested in the role of the entrepreneurial subject in environmental policy and environmental action. There are glaring problems associated with green capitalism as a mash-up of environmentalism with capitalism. One of these is the tethering of environmentalism to a political economy whose mantra is growth for growth’s sake, or, in Marx’s terms, accumulation for accumulation’s sake. This has been discussed by some as the problem of capitalism’s ecological metabolism or ‘metabolic rift’. Yet, while accumulation for accumulation’s sake may well be anathema to progressive environmentalism and sustainability, I argue that this is not only an objective, quantitative problem but also one of the qualitative dimensions of produced nature and the cultural politics of environmentalism. Appreciation of this can be gleaned by reexamining Marx’s discussion of the role of the bourgeois subject in the relentless drive to reproduce and expand capital accumulation via anarchic, entrepreneurial investment. Green capitalist orthodoxy relies on this source of innovative dynamism, but in the process obscures or overlooks the fact that accumulation for accumulation’s sake is by definition guided by the anarchic and amoral search for profitable realization of surplus value. Moreover, in order for green capitalism to succeed, its legitimacy must be secured. I argue that this legitimacy derives in part from specific performances of green capitalism by entrepreneurial elites, also made evident by Branson and his commitments to climate action. All of this raises questions about the political, cultural, and ecological character of green capitalism, issues brought to the fore by Branson’s brand of climate activism.
... Green capitalism refers to "a set of responses to environmental change and environmentalism that relies on harnessing capital investment, individual choice, and entrepreneurial innovation to the green cause" (Prudham 2009(Prudham , 1595. This definition implies environmental compatibility of capitalism, and hence, the term "green capitalism" obscures the second fundamental contradiction of capitalism. ...
... Empirical studies show natural sustainability is incompatible with long-term economic growth since the savings yield from the increased efficiency is offset, or even over-compensated, by the increasing demands and consumption triggered by higher productivity and lower costs (Naess and Høyer 2009). Also, capitalist industries tend to only develop profitable technologies, and these marketable innovations often cause new social and ecological problems, such as land grabbing, the rising price of food crops, and deforestation (Prudham 2009). Further, the green capitalism system regards market-based approaches and technological innovations as the best cost-effective scenarios for addressing social and ecological problems, and competitions and expansions are highly favourable (Tietenberg 2006). ...
... Further, the green capitalism system regards market-based approaches and technological innovations as the best cost-effective scenarios for addressing social and ecological problems, and competitions and expansions are highly favourable (Tietenberg 2006). This justifies and fastens the treadmill of production and makes the whole system fall into the logic of "accumulation for accumulation's sake" (Prudham 2009(Prudham , 1594. ...
The conflict between climate change and economic growth is one of the most significant dilemmas of our era. Under the prevalent discourse of sustainable development and green economy, many believe that market-based approaches can address environmental problems under the current capitalist economic regime. This article aims to analyse Ant Forest, a gamified green initiative launched by the biggest fintech company in China, to combat climate change through cultivating users’ green lifestyles. Based on semi-structured interviews with the game-users, the paper argues that there is an inconsistency between the environmental value of Ant Forest and the real impact it has on the participants’ consumption behaviour. As a capitalist green initiative based on consumption and market forces, Ant Forest reflects the basic logic of competition and expansion. In addition, it enhances the users’ reliance on its related business entities and further alienates the users from the rest of nature by creating a knowledge gap that impedes its users from fully knowing the environmental implications of their consumption behaviour.
... First, by establishing a market in greenhouse gas emissions via instruments such as carbon pricing and 'cap and trade' emissions trading schemes (World Bank, 2021). Second, by promoting technological innovation to cut emissions or to sequester atmospheric carbon (Lovins & Cohen, 2011;Prudham, 2009). These green capitalist moves aim to innovate a new climate-friendly industrial revolution that will in turn fuel economic growth and future prosperity (Tienhaara, 2014, pp. ...
... This liberal (or neoliberal) environmentalism (Bernstein, 2001) aims to replace natural capital (such as rainforests) with 'human ingenuity and technological development' (Whitehead, 2014, p. 263). It has been an approach to environmental policy favoured by many right-of-centre political parties in the West (Dawson, 2010, p. 316;Prudham, 2009Prudham, , p. 1597Watts, 2002Watts, , p. 1316, though it has also been embraced by others, including parts of the labour movement (Sweeney, 2015) and UN climate change policy-makers (Bernstein, 2001). While often silent over the negative effects of a market economy upon the environment, in its more strident manifestations proponents argue that the capitalist market economy is the only means whereby the environment may be saved from human depredations (Lovins & Cohen, 2011, p. 7). ...
... While often silent over the negative effects of a market economy upon the environment, in its more strident manifestations proponents argue that the capitalist market economy is the only means whereby the environment may be saved from human depredations (Lovins & Cohen, 2011, p. 7). Critics have responded to such claims that green capitalism can successfully address anthropogenic climate change by noting capitalism's inherent drive for growth and accumulation (Prudham, 2009(Prudham, , p. 1596; its dependence on exploitation of natural resources ('extractive capitalism') and associated North/South injustices (Dawson, 2010, p. 328); while also noting that it is an exercise in greenwashing the negative consequences of neoliberalism (Croeser, 2021). ...
Green capitalism is an approach that attempts to use free-market mechanisms to mitigate anthropogenic climate change. Its advocates argue that the market supplies the best means to innovate technological solutions that can compete with existing polluting practices. Using a relational, post-anthropocentric and materialist ontology, this article analyses the micropolitics underpinning the capitalist market economy in terms of production and market assemblages and the affective forces within them. This novel approach reveals previously overlooked more-than-human affects within these capitalist assemblages. These affects generate the unintended and inevitable consequences of a capitalist economic framework: growth, waste and inequalities. Based on this micropolitical assessment, the article uses the example of the electric car to conclude that green capitalism is inadequate to address the climate crisis, and offers an alternative approach.
... By broadening the analysis to the SDGs as a whole, this study contributes to vital interdisciplinary discussions and debates concerning business, development and environmentalism. These include works examining the processes by which profit-seeking is made compatible with doing good, e.g., nature protection and climate change mitigation through safari parks, ecosystem services and carbon offsets (e.g., Prudham, 2009;MacDonald, 2010;MacDonald & Corson, 2012;Dempsey, 2016;Igoe, 2017), and sustainability is marketized through the promotion of green and ethical consumption coupled with various certification schemes (e.g., Goodman, 2010;Adams & Raisborough, 2010;Richey & Ponte, 2011;Lekakis, 2012;Igoe, 2017;Pye, 2019). As these studies have shown, these processes entail turning challenges -in relation to issues such as conservation, climate change or humanitarian crisis -into apolitical problems that can be quantified and solved via market mechanisms. ...
... As these studies have shown, these processes entail turning challenges -in relation to issues such as conservation, climate change or humanitarian crisis -into apolitical problems that can be quantified and solved via market mechanisms. Additionally, they often divert the focus away from societal factors to an emphasis on the individual, such as the innovative entrepreneur, the famous celebrity or the affluent consumer, as a powerful actor (Prudham, 2009;Goodman, 2010;Lekakis, 2012;Kapoor, 2013;Igoe, 2017;Richey & Brockington, 2019). Adding to this body of work, this article examines how these processes impact apparatuses, discourses, and practices pertaining to sustainability and development within the context of the SDGs. ...
... The ability of businesses to make a profit, of course, is one of the reasons they are highlighted as powerful partners (cf. Prudham, 2009). This accords with SDG 17, that encourages partnerships between governments, the private sector and civil society, urging that action is ''needed to mobilize, redirect and unlock the transformative power of trillions of dollars of private resources to deliver on sustainable development objectives" (United Nations, n.d.). ...
As a consequence of the UN’s promulgation of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the concept of development is being redefined and revitalized. Development is being turned into “doing good” by anyone and anywhere, and relevant for everyone and everywhere. Furthermore, business has been bestowed with a significant role in this process. What are the consequences for imagining and practicing development when development has been reconceptualized, operationalized and marketed by businesses? Drawing on text analysis and event ethnography at business conferences on sustainability held in a frontrunner SDG country, Denmark, this article identifies three key trends as for-profit narratives of doing good gain prominence. First, doing good is increasingly defined in terms of the SDGs, but businesses strategically emphasize specific goals, thereby compromising a more integrated substantive approach to sustainability grounded in the needs of those affected. Second, profit-making and doing good are often presented as symbiotic, and doing good as part of core business. The idea of transformational partnerships between for-profit and non-profit actors, resulting in organizational changes by all involved, is also part of this trend. This leads to a problematic blurring between the categories of for-profit and non-profit. Third, for-profit narratives of doing good are marketing business endeavors by invoking “nearby sustainability superheroes” (individuals, e.g., consumers or employees, performing heroically nearby). In contrast, non-profit narratives of doing good have traditionally justified interventions by evoking a “distant other in need” (a suffering, socially and geographically distant, individual or social group). The implication that the distant other is passively waiting to be saved is problematic, but so is encouraging individuals to put themselves into the picture as what can be termed “selfie-humanitarians.” By foregrounding their own reflection, these (apolitical) heroes can easily lose sight of the historical–geographical structural issues that perpetuate inequality.
... The accumulation of wealth through green industrialisation by the "climate barons" of the 21 st century is increasingly widening inequalities in Global North economies and throughout the world. In a critique of the anachronic commitment of billionaires to climate crisis solutions, Prudham (2009Prudham ( :1594 argues that "green capitalist orthodoxy relies on ... innovative dynamism, but in the process obscures or overlooks the fact that accumulation for accumulation's sake is by definition guided by the anarchic and amoral search for profitable realization of surplus value". The apparently inherent links between a response to the climate crisis imbued by capitalistic infinite growth and accumulation of wealth clearly clashes with the effort at sustainability of the climate response. ...
... The apparently inherent links between a response to the climate crisis imbued by capitalistic infinite growth and accumulation of wealth clearly clashes with the effort at sustainability of the climate response. We argue that, in line with Mitchell's (2020b) capitalist colonisation of the future, Prudham's (2009) cultural politics of the green transition, and Curran and Tyfield's (2020) duality of green innovations, the current paradigm of climate solutions places the burden on current and future generations of dispossessed classes. This section addresses the ways in which inequalities are constituted through power relations defining the green transition and its corollary of climate extractivism. ...
This article theorises the processes of colonisation, wealth accumulation, and inequalities creation that the current paradigm of a resource‐hungry green transition enacts on the most vulnerable populations. We suggest that the extractivist logics and related technical fixes are leading to a “climate necropolitics”. In this, the socio‐economic system is increasingly defined by classes’ carbon exposure and consumption. Through the “green growth” of late capitalism, we theorise the advent of four carbon‐defined classes. Bounded by the access to climate tech capital and consumption of low‐carbon products, these include the ultra‐carbonised, decarbonised, still‐carbonised, and uncarbonised classes—with the first two acting as dominant classes and necropolitical agents sustained by the remaining lower classes. Inspired by Marxist scholars, we suggest that the current status quo is untenable and will result in class warfare during which coalitions between classes could reorient the “make live and let die” of the current green transition paradigm.
... Here, playing part in building a green and sustainable city is embedded in housing development discourse and practice. We unpack developers' strategies of urban green grabbing and their insertion into broader circuits of green capitalism (Prudham, 2009;Wallis, 2009) towards seizing green rent gaps. In doing so we seek to make a broader contribution to the role that greening plays in urban development through the financialization of nature Wissen 2014, Ouma et al., 2018;Sullivan, 2013) and the financialization of urban growth (Weber, 2002(Weber, , 2015Rutland, 2010), from the perspective of residential real estate developers. ...
... In other words, developers not only produce urban space and make space for capital, but also engage in social forms of production because their development interests and actions are shaped through relations with the state, investors, consumers and civil society more broadly (Ballard and Butcher, 2020;Leffers and Wekerle, 2020) and their associated discourses and practices. As public officials, urban planners and environmental nonprofits increasingly push the green city agenda, more explicitly articulated socio-ecological forms of production increasingly characterize real estate developers as more extensive/intensive forms of urban greening make new markets, and forms of profit, possible, especially in the context of green capitalism (Prudham, 2009;Sullivan, 2013). This process arguably affects real estate value(s) at multiple levels. ...
In the movement towards building greener and more sustainable cities, real estate developers are increasingly embracing not only green building construction but broader strategies and action related to urban greening. To date, their motivations and role in this broader urban greening dynamic remains underexplored, yet essential to dissect how greening is sustained and real estate development legitimized in revitalizing neighborhoods. With an eye to better understand green urban capitalist development processes underway amidst financialized nature and urban growth, and the equity impacts they entail, we explore residential real estate developers urban greening discourses and practices. Through a novel dataset of 42 interviews with private and non-profit residential real estate developers in 15 mid-sized American, Western European and Canadian cities, we uncover three differentiated but interconnected discourses around (i) financial benefits, (ii) consumer- or investor-driven demand and (iii) social dimensions behind developers’ interest in urban greening. We argue that developers embark on urban green grabbing through “green” discursive and material value appropriation and rent extraction strategies. Urban green grabbing is conceptually useful in depicting who benefits and how/when developers extract additional rent, surplus value, social capital and/or prestige from locating new residential projects adjacent to new or up-and-coming green amenities. Our work contributes to debates about urban greening's perceived position as a value-producing and rent-extracting good from both a political economy and political ecology perspective.
... 145-147), capitalists' involvement in governance also entails a performative dimension (cf. Prudham, 2009). As capitalists continue to contribute resources, ideas, pledges, or mere presence to water infrastructure development in Tiruppur, it legitimates their involvement as central figures in discussions on Tiruppur's urban environmental futures. ...
... As capitalists continue to contribute resources, ideas, pledges, or mere presence to water infrastructure development in Tiruppur, it legitimates their involvement as central figures in discussions on Tiruppur's urban environmental futures. Ironically, their continued participation and patronage sustain and enhances their elite status in the economy and society (Prudham, 2009). This status allows them to actively use infrastructure or sustainability fixes to pursue their visions for industrial-economic growth, which benefits their business and caste "community" (both being tightly intertwined), and sideline equity in visions for Tiruppur's futures. ...
This dissertation examines the governance of water infrastructure in the face of water scarcity amidst rapid economic, demographic, and spatial expansion in Tiruppur, a small industrial city known for its knitwear exports in Tamil Nadu, India. Using a range of methods, including research in municipal, state, and industry archives, ethnography, and participatory action research, a richly detailed account of a hybrid waterscape is presented. This account follows the flows of water in the stages of infrastructure production, operation, and use across Tiruppur’s urban core and recently merged rural peripheries over time, and carefully traces the complex ways in which the state and multiple publics interact to produce and address differentiated experiences of water scarcity. The dissertation also interrogates how scale shapes state-society interactions and planning outcomes, where scale is defined as a combination of city size, secondary position in administrative hierarchies, and limited political-economic reach.
The analysis of planning as governance is articulated in dialogue with literatures on public-private partnerships, the material politics of infrastructure, the politics of collective consumption, and political dynamics of access in hybrid waterscapes. In Tiruppur, elite publics, including local capitalists from the Gounder caste, organize through overlapping caste and business networks to partner with higher tiers of the state to produce water infrastructures and planning projects that serve their visions for Tiruppur as an export-oriented growth machine while providing them with unparalleled access to water. City level bureaucrats and planners are constrained by infrastructural and administrative norms governing water access that emerge from the city’s small scale and rural past, leading them to improvise by providing water through a range of non-piped sources. This, and the work of street-level bureaucrats, the “watermen,” who operationalize everyday water distribution, help produce Tiruppur’s hybrid waterscape. In contrast, non-elite publics who bear the unequal burdens of water scarcity in this hybrid waterscape are unable to organize and contest inequalities in access. In part, this is because their water access and experiences of scarcity are fragmented, shaped as they are by a finely differentiated socio-spatial structure produced by industrial restructuring in Tiruppur, which makes establishing stable material connections to the state difficult. The collective quiescence contributes to persistent, entrenched inequalities in water access despite successive, incremental expansions to municipal piped water infrastructures. Through the case of Tiruppur, this dissertation, thus, demonstrates that planners seeking to expand equitable access and ensure just, water-secure urban futures in rapidly growing small cities must be prepared to address particular socio-material legacies and attend to specific state-society dynamics that underlie governance.
... In many regards, the international environmental movement divided itself during the period between those movements and organizations that preferred alliances with the private sector (public-private-partnerships) and those who questioned the capacity of the capitalistic economy to respond effectively to global environmental challenges (Brand 2012, Prudham 2009, Lertzman and Vredenburg 2005. More recently, academics from different continents have begun questioning the capacity of political concepts such as "development" and "sustainable development" to satisfy human needs, aspirations and different conceptions of what may constitute a "good life" (Khotari et al. 2014). ...
... When the son of Omar Torrijos Herrera, Martín Torrijos Espino (2004-2009, assumed the presidency of Panama, the Ngäbe were passing through a complicated situation facing the imminent advance of mining and hydroelectric projects in their autonomous territory. ...
Facing the global ecological crisis, international organizations, national governments, financial institutions and private business have supported the idea of a green economy searching for win-win scenarios and public-private partnerships. Unfortunately, this perspective does not usually consider alternative conceptions of well-being, justice and happiness. The case of the Barro Blanco hydroelectric project in Western Panama warns against the underlying assumptions of the prevailing environmental discourse of sustainable development. Unless development projects start considering different opinions, ideals and expectations, there will be the possibility for protracted conflict and severe environmental damage as happened with the forceful flooding of Ngäbe communities in a hydroelectric reservoir linked with the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) of the Kyoto Protocol. As negotiations continue for new market-based mechanisms to mitigate climate change, lessons should be learned from the Barro Blanco debacle to find new pathways that reduce greenhouse emissions and at the same time respect human rights and indigenous worldviews and territoriality.
... Numerous ultrarich philanthropists such as Jeremy Grantham, among others, had similarly strong interests in combatting climate change. Our archetype of the environmental entrepreneur is Richard Branson, whose contribution as a prophet of green capitalism was the subject of a careful study by Scott Prudham in his article "Pimping Climate Change" (104). Branson belongs to a high-powered group of investors who are seeking ways to make money from the decarbonization of the economy. ...
... Critics point out that new technology will not change the tendency of capitalists to exploit nature (and people) (104). This is unlikely to halt the inherently anti-environmentalist tendencies of capital. ...
Celebrity advocacy for environmental causes has grown dramatically in recent decades. An examination of this expansion and the rise of causes such as climate change reveals the shifting politics and organization of advocacy. We address these changes to the construction and interpretation of celebrity advocacy and detail how they have produced a rich variety of environmental celebrity advocates. We also account for differences between legacy (e.g., radio, TV, newspapers) and online celebrities and their practices (e.g., hash-tag publics, brandjacking, online communities). Environmental celebrity ad-vocates' performances can be divided into nine tropes, each characterized in part by the particular varieties of environmentalism that they promote. We present the tropes and discuss their five cross-cutting themes. We conclude with a set of questions for future research on celebrity environmentalism.
... Numerous ultrarich philanthropists such as Jeremy Grantham, among others, had similarly strong interests in combatting climate change. Our archetype of the environmental entrepreneur is Richard Branson, whose contribution as a prophet of green capitalism was the subject of a careful study by Scott Prudham in his article "Pimping Climate Change" (104). Branson belongs to a high-powered group of investors who are seeking ways to make money from the decarbonization of the economy. ...
... Critics point out that new technology will not change the tendency of capitalists to exploit nature (and people) (104). This is unlikely to halt the inherently anti-environmentalist tendencies of capital. ...
Celebrity advocacy for environmental causes has grown dramatically in recent decades. An examination of this expansion and the rise of causes such as climate change reveals the shifting politics and organization of advocacy. We address these changes to the construction and interpretation of celebrity advocacy and detail how they have produced a rich variety of environmental celebrity advocates. We also account for differences between legacy (e.g., radio, TV, newspapers) and online celebrities and their practices (e.g., hashtag publics, brandjacking, online communities). Environmental celebrity advocates’ performances can be divided into nine tropes, each characterized in part by the particular varieties of environmentalism that they promote. We present the tropes and discuss their five cross-cutting themes. We conclude with a set of questions for future research on celebrity environmentalism.
Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Environment and Resources, Volume 45 is October 19, 2020. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.
... Whitehead (2014, 263) has suggested, following Bernstein (2000), that Brundtland established the foundation for 'liberal environmentalism', a position on environmental protection that downplays the contribution of economic growth and free markets to current environmental crises (Rees 2003). This perspective is given a further neoliberal twist in 'green capitalism', in which profit and entrepreneurialism are considered the means to save Earth from climate change by the development of technologies to reduce carbon emissions or geo-engineering to capture greenhouse gases already polluting the atmosphere (Prudham 2009(Prudham , 1596. ...
... For example, the latter can be applied to predict, model and enact possible environmental, political and economic futures; to develop technologies such as carbon capture that can reduce the concentrations of atmospheric greenhouse gases; and to act altruistically to protect the non-human elements of the environment. 8 However, this is not to re-privilege (post)human reason and ingenuity by the back door (for instance, by assuming that the market and technology can together solve climate change, as argued by 'green capitalists' (Prudham 2009(Prudham , 1596Zysman and Huberty 2014), nor is it a return to an earlier humanist 'exemptionalist' thesis (Dunlap and Catton 1994) that once again separates (post)humans from the rest of the environment. A posthuman environmental ethos is no longer concerned merely to assure that the Earth's resources remain in place for a few more (post)human generations, or to replace (post)human with non-human privilege. ...
Despite the current environmental crises of anthropogenic climate change and environmental degradation afflicting the world, dualisms of culture/nature, human/non-human and animate/inanimate sustain a perspective on 'the environment' in which the human and the cultural are privileged over the natural world and other species. Policies on 'sustainable development' are likewise predicated upon efforts to assure future human prosperity. Our objective in this paper is to establish an alternative, post-anthropocentric perspective on environmental sustainability. Drawing on feminist materialist scholarship supplies an ontology to critique humanist approaches, and establishes the foundation for a posthuman sociology of environment, in which (post)humans are an integral but not privileged element. We consider the implications of this perspective for both sustainability policy and 'climate justice' (Schlosberg. and Collins, 2014). A posthuman ontology leads to the conclusion-perhaps surprisingly, given the anthropogenic roots of current climate change-that some unusual human capacities are now essential to assure environmental potential.
... Existing critical research on the intersection of corporations and climate change situates climate action within green capitalism and ecological modernization, giving rise to the term "climate capitalism" (Bohm, Misoczky, & Moog, 2012;Hamilton, 2013;Newell & Paterson, 2010;Nisbet, 2014;Prudham, 2009;Sapinski, 2016). Climate capitalism refers to "a model which squares capitalism's need for continued economic growth with substantial shifts away from carbon-based industrial development" (Newell & Paterson, 2010, p. 1). ...
... In those investigations, scholars have deployed innovative theoretical framings to reveal the uneven social, economic, and environmental impacts of tool use, noting where and/or how climate burdens and benefits accrue differently across space. Such framings include science and technology studies (STS) and the performance materiality of tools (MacKenzie, 2009), governmentality as a means to situate emphases on self-governance (Paterson & Stripple, 2010), post-structural studies on discourse (Prudham, 2009), and wider political economy frameworks (Bumpus and Liverman 2008;see also Stripple & Bulkeley, 2014). Future investigations into SBTs and CRAs can build on and enhance academic debates situated within these theoretical framings. ...
With the retreat of the United States from the Paris Climate Agreement, the campaign to enroll corporations and other private sector actors into the climate governing arena has accelerated. The tools used by such actors in addressing climate change are similarly expanding. While carbon footprints and carbon offsets have been previously underscored as the chief climate action tools to date, climate risk assessments and science‐based targets have been proposed as new quantitative tools to mobilize corporate action against climate change. This article presents a review of these two tools, arguing for more comprehensive and sustained scholarly investigation into each. Following overviews on the early developments of each tool, related academic research is considered in an effort to point toward future research priorities. These priorities emphasize generating empirical data around each tool's origins, diffusion, and impacts (social, economic, and environmental) so that more robust academic debates might occur on the role of science‐based targets and climate risk assessments in advancing effective polycentric climate governance.
This article is categorized under: Social Status of Climate Change Knowledge > Knowledge and Practice
Policy and Governance > Private Governance of Climate Change
... This system perspective echoes the view that commercial organisations are repositioning themselves in the sustainability discourse, moving from "being part of the problem" to "being part of the solution" (Prudham, 2009;Visser and Kymal, 2015). For example, one study shows that global retailers are increasingly creating the necessary frameworks (e.g. ...
Purpose
This study explores the use of digital tools to support the sharing of sustainability information in the transition towards sustainable supply chain management in food supply chains.
Design/methodology/approach
The qualitative study reports on a Swedish food supply network, consisting of interviews with retailers/restaurants, wholesalers, and farmers/processors. By applying the analytical lens of responsibilisation, the abductive study reveals the complexities and barriers in transitioning to a sustainable food industry with the help of digital tools.
Findings
The findings demonstrate that perceived responsibility for corporate sustainability was limited to the national legislative framework. This limitation is evidence of an evaded regime of responsibilisation across supply chain actors. Additionally, the use of digital tools to support sustainability information sharing was largely absent in strategic orientations. This selective or withheld sustainability information translated into a gatekeeping mechanism that potentially hinders collective efforts to achieve sustainability.
Practical implications
The findings indicate that Swedish food actors are currently in a waiting position regarding the use of digital tools to promote sustainability information sharing. More specifically, industry actors perceive the need for an updated regulatory sustainability framework that supports a faster, digitally supported transition towards a sustainable food industry. Policymakers should be more proactive to incentivise industry actors to develop and adopt digital tools promoting corporate sustainability.
Originality/value
Responding to the call for more research into the empirical reality of supply chain actors and their approaches towards digitalisation and sustainability, this study bridges the gap between conceptual studies and practice. Furthermore, this study refines the theory of responsibilisation by shedding light on the underlying mechanisms of sharing sustainability information within a food supply network. It suggests that there exists an evaded regime of responsibilisation whereby governmental agencies are assigned the greatest responsibility to drive corporate sustainability, and, in the absence of such regulatory requirements, the sharing of sustainability information is limited.
... The topic of climate change has gained attention recently (Fuzzi et al., 2006). Even though a number of factors make it impossible to make specific announcements about what climate change entails, global warming is still expected to worsen (Prudham, 2009;Levin et al., 2012). Naturally, a large portion of rural residents in Africa and Southern Africa reside in lowincome areas; Musina municipality is no exception. ...
Purpose
This study aims to investigate issues of natural resource management (NRM), conservation and ecotourism leadership on rural livelihood in Musina Local Municipality, Limpopo Province, South Africa. It concentrated on the existing and probable effects of ecotourism and integrated rural activities and their environmental influences on climate change and vice versa, subsistence and sustainability. The study utilizes a broad literature review, focus group discussions and field observations to investigate the municipality’s biodiversity, holistic livelihoods and tourism resource and facility concerns with climate change implications in the study area, with data analyzed manually and also by means of cross tabulations and central tendencies. A harmful link between ecotourism-induced environmental impacts and integrated rural activities that retain potential climate change consequences is found to exist in the vicinity. Nevertheless, it is fathomed in line with the study findings that when tourism actions adhere to the justifications of sustainable and responsible tourism management, they can result in better ecotourism products that foster environmental sustainability and enhance rural livelihoods. Therefore, the study has identified a need for decent ecotourism facilities and activities and a managerial approach to diminish climate change hazards and spur subsistence for local communities in the municipality. Within its rationale and ability, the study presents an analysis of conservation, ecotourism management, environmental degradation and responsible tourism qualities regarding climate change consequences within the municipality.
... geography, but also in ecological economics and political ecology, the acceleration of commodification and privatization processes and their potentially negative social-ecological consequences are subject of critical debates (Smessaert et al., 2020). In this context, terms such as market environmentalism (Bakker, 2005;, neoliberal conservation , green capitalism (Prudham, 2009;Scales, 2014), neoliberal environmentality (Fletcher, 2010), and liberal environmentalism (Dempsey, 2016) is based on the paradigm that economic incentives are particularly effective in guiding human behavior (Allen, 2018;Fletcher, 2010). ...
As ecosystems around the world continue to degrade, the implementation of ecologically effective and socially just conservation instruments is critical. Payments for ecosystem services (PES) are an increasingly popular tool. PES are voluntary and conditional incentives for the provision of ecosystem services, rewarding landowners for their conservation efforts. Some PES programs target local communities that collectively meet contractual obligations (collective PES, C-PES). Proponents see C-PES as a promising tool for successful nature conservation, while critics argue that the introduction of market principles into areas not previously characterized by them can have negative effects, such as the erosion and replacement of well-functioning local community institutions and the crowding out of intrinsic conservation motivations. Against the background of these controversies, this dissertation aims to contribute to answering the question of how paying local communities for their conservation efforts supports or hinders the social-ecological transformation towards sustainability. Paper I reviews definitions and systematizations of program-related commodification processes and local land tenure structures, and their links to social-ecological program outcomes. Based on a framework developed in the first paper, Paper II examines 29 C-PES programs worldwide regarding their ES-related degree of commodification. Paper III focuses on human-environment conflicts in the context of conservation performance payments for wolverines and lynxes in Sweden, which are made to indigenous Sámi communities. Overall, the findings of the three papers suggest that C-PES programs do not in themselves address leverage points for a sustainability transformation, but can only be fully effective when implemented in a careful and inclusive manner, ensuring that they contribute to a larger institutional change across scales and when they support closer connections between people and nature.
... Some approaches also invoke a metabolic school of thinking, which it is claimed can serve as a critical engine of change to the capitalist mode of environmental change. This critique is grounded in the concept of "metabolism," a term originated by Karl Marx to describe the interaction between society and nature, particularly in how capitalist modes of production inevitably lead to a "metabolic rift," a disruption of the natural cycles and processes essential for life on Earth (Prudham, 2009(Prudham, : 1600. ...
In this paper, it is argued that the economy as a social system is a conditio sine qua non to the environmental observations of the other social systems. Economic code of payment or nonpayment pre-code environment, observed from the other social systems (for example, politics and science). By using this approach, the paper discusses the ways in which capitalism as an economic program is interpreted by other systems most of the time as the conditio sine qua non for their own autopoiesis regarding ecological challenges.
It is debated that green capitalism is a form of a functionally differentiated economic system which is made as a conditio sine qua non for the other systems observation of ecological challenges. In the time dimension, money as a medium of economic system (and payment or nonpayment) comes first, and with it, tries to determine the ways other systems can observe ecology - and it is successful.
... In this way, carbon offsetting mirrors the same form of "unequal ecological exchange" through which oil is extracted from the global periphery and becomes inserted into the infrastructures in the core, where they reinforce the industrialized countries' superior levels of productivity (Hornborg, 2006). Beyond material carbon flows, Bridge (2010) further identifies "carbon control," "carbon conduct," and "carbon mobilization" as commodified aspects in carbon economies, which also opens up larger questions of governance and social constructions surrounding the commodification of carbon, and, ultimately, carbon's "social metabolism" (Clark & York, 2005;Prudham, 2009) as it affects global relationships of resources, states, and their interests. ...
... The climate agenda is regulated through international, national or sub-national policy institutions related to carbon footprint management. Climate change is often seen as an economic problem, namely as one of market failure [Prudham, 2009]. This perspective assumes that excess greenhouse gases are emitted into the atmosphere due to negative externalities (pollution), and accordingly, there is a need to put a price for this environmental damage [Walenta, 2018]. ...
The problem of climate change is a global challenge that requires a joint solution at various levels—global, regional, national, and individual. At the same time, modern global and economic processes are characterized by two significant trends: the growth of regionalization and the intensification of deglobalization, which cannot but affect the architecture of the climate agenda. In this article, we review the current state of the multilevel climate agenda and discern the factors of this agenda that affect the activities of multinational enterprises in the context of deglobalization. We conclude that we should expect further fragmentation in the climate regulation system at the global level, which will affect the configuration of global value chains (GVC) of companies. The regionalization of GVCs increases the importance of regional interaction and building relationships between business and government on climate issues to ensure economic competitiveness along the entire value chain from upstream to downstream.
... 2) The promotion of technological innovation is considered the foundation for climate change mitigation and adaptation (Lovins & Cohen, 2011;Prudham, 2009). We can see the focus on market-based and technological solutions leading to a climate-friendly industrial revolution that will in turn fuel economic growth and future prosperity (Tienhaara, 2014). ...
... The economy still subsumes everything else, yet as a corrective to the excesses of capitalism, it looks different in an explicit curriculum characterized by homo responsabilis. The curriculum is increasingly moralizing its key subjects: the consumer subject who needs to recycle and keep their carbon footprint in check (see Jones, 2010); the employee/manager subject who needs to both be aligned with economic objectives of their employer and make sure that their employer is aligned with their values, opposing corporate irresponsibility and 'blow[ing] the whistle if needed' (Vallentin, 2015); the social entrepreneur subject who is to step in to address market and government failures and 'solution' to environmental and social malaise (Prudham, 2009); the investor subject who is to actively participate in incentivizing sustainable business through socially responsible investments (Goldstein, 2018); and also the corporate/employer subject, who has to reframe everything that the corporation does as 'responsible' and 'sustainable' (e.g. Banerjee, 2008). ...
In the responsible turn in business school education and management learning, the responsibility approach is proposed as a possible panacea against a hidden curriculum which leads to damaging business practice. The explicit promise of responsible management learning and education is that homo oeconomicus can be re-formed in the image of a responsible business subject, what we here call ‘ homo responsabilis’. We explore how a business school curriculum centred on responsibility affects key subject positions such as consumer, employee, manager, entrepreneur, investor and leader. In three responsible management learning and education illustrations at our business school, we observe three layers of responsibilization of the individual: responsibilization for self-enhancement, responsibilization for economic prosperity and responsibilization for social and environmental sustainability. We find that these three layers of responsibilization impact business school subjects in several problematic ways: excessive moral burdening of consumers, overburdening of self-managing employees and fantasmatic gripping of prospective entrepreneurs. Our contribution to critical studies of responsible management learning and education is twofold: (1) we show how explicit responsible management learning and education curricula tend to extend the neoliberal HC, and (2) we complement studies calling for re-politicizing responsible management learning and education by suggesting transformative learning ways to generate explicitly ethico-political imaginations that can help in resisting individual responsibilization in business school education.
... Philanthropists advance their own business interests, co-opt environmental groups, promote neoliberal discourses and short-sighted initiatives, and lack transparency and accountability (West 2014, McGoey 2015, Vallely 2020, Betsill et al. 2022. The wealthy's environmental discourse is a type of 'green capitalism' (Prudham 2009), a 'benevolent mask' (Brockington and Duffy 2011, p. 13) to cover their real intentions and contradictions (Holmes 2012). Nevertheless, billionaires increasingly spend amounts that surpass mere investment for future profits. ...
Several billionaires have recently emerged as leaders of climate governance. So far, little research has examined how they legitimize their involvement in climate networks. We argue that billionaire governance entrepreneurs have high levels of resources but low procedural legitimacy. They pursue output legitimacy to support their political action, highlighting their effectiveness in managing climate issues. Their main strategies, depoliticization, outgrouping, and technical solutionism, may give them short-term legitimacy but risk undermining their long-term goals of addressing climate change. We analyze the discursive legitimation strategies of a successful billionaire entrepreneur in transnational climate governance, Michael Bloomberg. Our empirical analysis is based on the study of more than 800 statements, speeches, and news releases related to Bloomberg’s climate action from 2010 to 2021. It contributes to the study of entrepreneurship, leadership, philanthropy, and transnational actors in climate governance.
... 4 Michael Bloomberg, Tom Steyer, and Jeff Bezos, to name a few, as well as less known climate philanthropists such as Jeremy Grantham, Chris Hohn, or Nat Simons, are the directors of a green capitalist drama in which they occupy the starring roles. Through their self-centered philanthropy, they "not only stage the political and cultural fusion of capitalism and environmentalism as green capitalism; they also act to augment the economic foundations of bourgeois power by making the entrepreneur a central figure in climate policy, and, by extension, environmentalism" (Prudham, 2009(Prudham, , p. 1596. They also conveniently distract our attention from their own responsibilities in the climate crisis, either through their lavish lifestyles and personal carbon footprints, or their business ventures. ...
... En todo el mundo se está llevando a cabo una batalla contra los poderes corporativos de facto, contra la insaciable sed por más recursos, contra la mercantilización de la vida de las personas; por ello, las clases dominantes se encuentran a la defensiva, ya que la insatisfacción crecerá hasta que las demandas del poder popular sean realmente integradas en el desarrollo de una nueva sociedad más justa y democrática(Smith, 2015).Para que el ecocapitalismo tenga éxito, es necesario legitimarse a través de políticas claras, donde previsiblemente las élites emprendedoras doblarán esfuerzos para oponerse a todo aquello que reduzca sus márgenes de ganancias. La ortodoxia capitalista busca reproducir y expandir la acumulación por medio de la inversión empresarial con las mejores condiciones y menores trabas posibles, y en esa búsqueda amoral de privilegios y revalorización de la plusvalía, es donde germinan las desigualdades laborales y la sobreexplotación de los recursos(Prudham, 2009).Los entusiastas del ecocapitalismo afirman que el mercado es el principal medio para responder de manera coordinada a los retos ambientales, a través de la integración de aspectos ambientales dentro de la economía de consumo, también se propone el diseño de tecnologías que permitan minimizar los costes ambientales y potenciar la producción, sin alterar de manera significativa las relaciones sociales y productivas existentes en el modelo capitalista. De tal manera que exista el uso racional de la naturaleza, no negando el impacto sobre la misma, sino desarrollando mecanismos para administrarlos, compensarlos o amortiguarlos(Rodríguez D. , 2011).Los dos pilares sobre el cual se desarrolla el capitalismo verde son la innovación de las tecnologías para optimizar y minimizar daños ecológicos, y la expansión de los mercados a escala mundial, lo cual denota que esta evolución verde del capitalismo no se encuentra alejada de sus axiomas originales, por lo tanto, la tecnología verde será el soporte del nuevo sistema. ...
La sociedad actual se encuentra con varios dilemas coyunturales en aspectos tales como la economía, el desarrollo social, el desarrollo productivo y los impactos ambientales derivado del modo de vida contemporáneo. Existen evidencias científicas suficientes para demostrar que el cambio climático es una realidad con repercusiones para las presentes y las futuras generaciones, sin embargo, existen grupos negacionistas que utilizan argumentos acientíficos para justificar sus modelos de desarrollo donde prima el objeto material individual sobre los sujetos colectivos. En las propagandas que se difunden en los medios masivos, se puede visualizar el uso reiterado de elementos ambientales para proyectar una imagen ecológica de un producto o una empresa, sin embargo, muchas veces son ilusiones grandilocuentes que ocultan el lado oculto y siniestro de un sistema que solo percibe a la naturaleza como una fuente inagotable de recursos aprovechables. El presente artículo trata de analizar las concepciones sobre las cuales se basa el denominado ecocapitalismo, el mismo que busca la rentabilidad económica a través de modelos sostenibles que reduzcan los impactos negativos al ecosistema. Por lo tanto, se detalla el contexto del crecimiento económico y la sintomatología ambiental en los últimos años, seguidamente se comparan los discernimientos conceptuales sobre el ecocapitalismo y se construye un punto de vista particular para establecer si el desarrollo de las herramientas: eco-energía, eco-eficiencia y reciclaje son capaces de responder a los retos medioambientales.
... Again and again, the demands of building a successful empire trumped the climate imperative." Scott Prudham (2009), similarly argued that Branson's environmentalism did nothing to limit further capitalist expansion, including the resource extraction and use this entails. However, while these authors may show that Branson is far from an environmental hero, his precise impact on biodiversity is unclear and needs more research. ...
Over fifty years of global conservation has failed to bend the curve of biodiversity loss, so we need to transform the ways we govern biodiversity. The UN Convention on Biological Diversity aims to develop and implement a transformative framework for the coming decades. However, the question of what transformative biodiversity governance entails and how it can be implemented is complex. This book argues that transformative biodiversity governance means prioritizing ecocentric, compassionate and just sustainable development. This involves implementing five governance approaches - integrative, inclusive, adaptive, transdisciplinary and anticipatory governance - in conjunction and focused on the underlying causes of biodiversity loss and unsustainability. Transforming Biodiversity Governance is an invaluable source for academics, policy makers and practitioners working in biodiversity and sustainability governance. This is one of a series of publications associated with the Earth System Governance Project. For more publications, see www.cambridge.org/earth-system-governance. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
... A second perspective transforms LE into a 'neoliberal environmentalism', in which entrepreneurialism and capitalism's never-ending quest for profit will save Earth from climate change and other environmental degradations through environment-friendly technological innovation (Prudham, 2009(Prudham, : 1596. Proponents argue that a market economy is the best means to reverse these impacts through human ingenuity and entrepreneurialism, while ensuring the continuity of the economic growth that they argue has been the engine of both national and individual prosperity since the industrial revolution. ...
... Again and again, the demands of building a successful empire trumped the climate imperative." Scott Prudham (2009), similarly argued that Branson's environmentalism did nothing to limit further capitalist expansion, including the resource extraction and use this entails. However, while these authors may show that Branson is far from an environmental hero, his precise impact on biodiversity is unclear and needs more research. ...
Increasingly heated debates concerning species extinction, climate change and global
socioeconomic inequality reflect an urgent need to transform biodiversity governance.
A central question in these debates is whether fundamental transformation can be achieved
within mainstream institutional and societal structures. Chapter 12 argues that it cannot.
Indeed, mainstream neoprotectionist and natural capital governance paradigms that do not
sufficiently address structural issues, including an increase of authoritarian politics,
might even set us back. The way out, the chapter contends, is to combine radical
reformism with a vision for structural transformation that directly challenges neoliberal
political economy and its newfound turn to authoritarianism. Convivial conservation
is a recent paradigm that promises just this. The chapter reviews convivial
conservation as a vision, politics and set of governance mechanisms that move
biodiversity governance beyond market mechanisms and protected areas. It further
introduces the concept of “biodiversity impact chains” as one potential way to
operationalize its transformative potential.
... Diğer taraftan yeşil girişimciliğe yönelimin pek çok faydası bulunmaktadır. Öncelikle kirliliğin azalması ve buna bağlı olarak canlı sayısının artması, atık yönetimi ile bir ürünün birden çok kullanımı ve dönüşüme tabi tutularak doğal kaynakların azalmasının yavaşlaması/durması, çölleşmenin azalması/durması, asit yağmurları ve küresel ısınmanın azalması, sağlıklı bireyler ve çevrenin artmasına imkân sağlayacaktır (Lotfi vd., 2018(Lotfi vd., : 2308Prudham, 2009Prudham, : 1595Harini ve Meenakshi, 2012: 81-83;Allen ve Malin, 2008: 829,830). ...
ENG:Nowadays, green entrepreneurship has become a rising trend with the environmental problems caused by the increasing economic activities with globalization. Green entrepreneurship, which is a future oriented concept, has become the focus of interest of researchers when scientific studies on global environmental problems and solutions have increased recently. Green entrepreneurs at national and international levels can offer innovative solutions with green strategies to the environmental problems faced, especially global warming and climate change The aim of this study is to examine the green entrepreneurship based on protection and improvement of environment and notable examples in the scale of the world and Turkey. In this context, green entrepreneurship is discussed in the conceptual framework; the characteristics and typology of green entrepreneurs and competitive environmental strategies that contribute to the development of green entrepreneurship are examined. In addition, examples of green entrepreneurship operating by prioritizing green jobs and sustainability are examined in the study.
TR: Günümüzde küreselleşmeyle birlikte artan ekonomik faaliyetlerin neden olduğu çevre sorunlarıyla beraber yeşil girişimcilik, yükselen bir eğilim haline gelmiştir. Küresel çevre sorunları ve çözüm önerilerine yönelik bilimsel çalışmaların arttığı son dönemde, geleceğe yönelik bir kavram olan yeşil girişimcilik de araştırmacıların ilgi odağı haline gelmiştir. Ulusal ve uluslararası boyutta yeşil girişimciler, küresel ısınma ve iklim değişikliği başta olmak üzere karşı karşıya kalınan çevre sorunlarına yeşil stratejilerle inovatif çözümler sunabilmektedirler. Bu çalışmanın amacı çevrenin korunması ve iyileştirilmesini esas alan yeşil girişimciliği ve dikkat çeken örneklerini dünya ve Türkiye ölçeğinde incelemektir. Bu kapsamda, yeşil girişimcilik kavramsal çerçevede ele alınarak yeşil girişimcinin özellikleri, tipolojisi ve yeşil girişimciliğin gelişimine katkı sağlayan rekabetçi çevre stratejileri irdelenmiştir. Ayrıca çalışmada, yeşil işleri ve sürdürülebilirliği ön planda tutarak faaliyet gösteren yeşil girişimcilik örnekleri ele alınmıştır.
... The rhetoric on climate change has recently become ubiquitous in science, politics and media (Prudham, 2009;Boykoff & Goodman, 2009). Theories on the communication of climate change (Koteyko, Thelwall, & Nerlich, 2010) and the essential role governments play (Nisbet, 2010;Greenfield & Williams, 2008) are debated but few sources that clearly outline principles for the best practice of climate change communication, or highlight examples where it has been done effectively, have come to light. ...
Climate change represents one of the most complex communication challenges for governments in advanced neoliberalism democracies like Australia: to increase social capital and generate mass public support for the economic and lifestyle changes that will be required to make climate change policy effective. Drawing on an examination of secondary data on current theories used to underpin climate change communication and cross-analysis of theory and a case study from Australia, the researchers develop four pre-theoretical principles for the practice of climate change communication in Australia. Future research could build upon these pre-theoretical principles to better understand the complexities and challenges involved in climate change communication.
... A second perspective transforms LE into a 'neoliberal environmentalism', in which entrepreneurialism and capitalism's never-ending quest for profit will save Earth from climate change and other environmental degradations through environment-friendly technological innovation (Prudham, 2009(Prudham, : 1596. Proponents argue that a market economy is the best means to reverse these impacts through human ingenuity and entrepreneurialism, while ensuring the continuity of the economic growth that they argue has been the engine of both national and individual prosperity since the industrial revolution. ...
Climate change policy is a contested field, with rival perspectives underpinning radically different policy propositions: from encouraging the market to innovate technical solutions to climate change through to the replacement of a market economy with an eco-socialist model. These differing policy options draw upon a variety of economic concepts and approaches, with significant consequent divergences in their policy recommendations. In this paper, we consider policy as assembled from a wide range of sociomaterial components-some human, others non-human. Using a 'new materialist' toolkit, we explore four contemporary climate change policies to unpack these policy-assemblages, and assess the different uses made of economics in each assemblage. We conclude that none of these contemporary policies is adequate to address climate change. Yet despite the incommensurability between how these disparate policies use economic concepts and theories, we suggest a materialist synthesis based on a comprehensive climate change policy-assemblage.
... The second manifestation is more hubristic concerning market mechanisms. Advocates promote a "neoliberal environmentalism," in which technological innovation to support environmentalism becomes a new growth industry within a market economy (Lovins & Cohen, 2011;Prudham, 2009Prudham, , p. 1596. While acknowledging anthropogenic impacts on the environment, they argue that a market economy holds the best hope of reversing these impacts through ingenuity and entrepreneurialism, while ensuring the continuity of the economic growth that they argue has been the engine of both national and individual prosperity since the industrial revolution (Zysman & Huberty, 2014, p. xiii). ...
National and international policy-makers have addressed threats to environmental sustainability from climate change and other environmental degradation for over 30 years. However, it is questionable whether current policies are socially, politically, economically, and scientifically capable of adequately resolving these threats to the planet and living organisms. In this paper we theorize and develop the concept of a "policy assemblage" from within a new materialist ontology, to interrogate critically four policy perspectives on climate change: "liberal environmentalism"; the United Nations policy statements on sustainable development; "green capitalism" (also known as "climate capitalism") and finally "no-growth economics." A materialist analysis of interactions between climate change and policies enables us to establish what each policy can do, what it ignores or omits, and consequently its adequacy to address environmental sustainability in the face of climate change. None, we conclude, is adequate or appropriate to address climate change successfully. We then use this conceptual tool to establish a "posthuman" policy on climate change. Humans, from this perspective, are part of the environment, not separate from or in opposition to it, but possess unique capacities that we suggest are now necessary to address climate change. This ontology supplies the starting point from which to establish sociologically a scientifically, socially, and politically adequate posthuman climate change policy. We offer suggestions for the constituent elements of such a policy.
... TP criticizes EM claims that the exploitation of natural resources diminishes when resource-efficient technologies decouple production from resources (Mol, 2002(Mol, , 2006. TP proponents contend that this approach fails to recognize the Jevons paradox built into the capitalist production system; the capitalist growth imperative forces producers to increase production, thus, compounding environmental harms (Clark & York, 2005;Prudham, 2009). ...
The agricultural sector offers a unique opportunity to examine the topic of climate change because agriculture is more susceptible to climate disruptions than many other industrial sectors. Based on the analysis of the survey data and in-depth interviews with specialty-crop producers in California, New York, Pennsylvania, and New York, we test the capacity of ecological modernization and treadmill of production perspectives to explain how resource-intensive producers recognize water availability and climate change as threats to their operation’s economic viability. We find that producers in capitalist markets recognize natural resource problems; however, they fail to respond to climate change beyond natural resource problems. We also find that local markets play a positive role in raising environmental awareness of producers. Finally, our finding on the association between the perceptions of water availability and climate change goes beyond the treadmill of production dualism that only theorizes the impacts of economic factors on the environment.
... Municipalities also deploy new financial instruments and toolsfrom green bonds to property-assessed clean energy programmes -in order to finance urban greening (Knuth, 2016). Such projects also embody green capitalism trends (Prudham, 2009;Wallis, 2010), whereby attempts to resolve economic and ecological crisis are integrated into new circuits of capital accumulation and supposedly sustainable growth trajectories. Many of these green projects are flagship symbols of a global smart, sustainable and resilient city planning orthodoxy (Connolly, 2018a(Connolly, , 2018b. ...
Increasingly, greening in cities across the Global North is enmeshed in strategies for attracting capital investment, raising the question: for whom is the future green city? Through exploring the relationship between cities’ green boosterist rhetoric, affordability and social equity considerations within greening programmes, this paper examines the extent to which, and why, the degree of green branding – that is, urban green boosterism – predicts the variation in city affordability. We present the results of a mixed methods, macroscale analysis of the greening trajectories of 99 cities in Western Europe, the USA and Canada. Our regression analysis of green rhetoric shows a trend toward higher cost of living among cities with the longest duration and highest intensity green rhetoric. We then use qualitative findings from Nantes, France, and Austin, USA, as two cases to unpack why green boosterism correlates with lower affordability. Key factors determining the relation between urban greening and affordability include the extent of active municipal intervention, redistributional considerations and the historic importance of inclusion and equity in urban development. We conclude by considering what our results mean for the urban greening agenda in the context of an ongoing green growth imperative going forward.
... In the city's public framing of the project, the benefits of the Green Loop will diffuse to vulnerable residents in neighborhoods that have been traditionally and historically marginalized in a process we call "trickle-out." Scholarship on the "sustainability fix" document the ways in which development-and growth-oriented urban actors "fix" the stalling of capitalist investment in the built environment by integrating the language of sustainability (Long, 2016;While, Jonas, & Gibbs, 2004) without adherence to sustainability goals (McCarthy & Prudham, 2004;Prudham, 2009). We use sustainability fixas a form of the spatial fixto highlight the double-meaning of the word fix. ...
We explore how the language of “just sustainability” may become subsumed into a sustainability fix strategy, depoliticizing the utility of concepts such as justice and/or equity. Building from critical GIS insights, we combine digitized spatial data from participatory mapping exercises and community-organization-based focus group in Portland, Oregon, regarding a proposed six-mile biking and walking path around downtown. We find that 80 percent of participants’ typical travel destinations are outside of downtown Portland and that participants experience planning and sustainability in a highly localized manner, challenging the equity rationale of downtown investment. We argue the top-down planning model, which presumes that the spatial diffusion of benefits is equitable, is inherently ahistorical and fails to benefit those in historically marginalized neighborhoods. Finally, we argue for the value of community-oriented research, which, in this case, inspired a coalition of community organizations to formally oppose a city-led project based on the inequitable distribution of infrastructure benefits.
... Political ecologists have examined this trend, exploring celebrity, wealth, and philanthropy as they relate to environmental politics (e.g. Boykoff and Goodman, 2009;Boykoff and Olson, 2013;Brockington, 2009;Fletcher, 2015;Hawkins and Silver, 2017;Holmes, 2012;Prudham, 2009;Silver and Hawkins, 2014). Much of the literature on these powerful, celebrity environmentalisms focuses on its consequences. ...
In 2015 Cecil the lion's death sparked international furore over the practice of lion trophy hunting. Celebrities and everyday citizens, traditional news and social media alike were aflame around the globe, most notably after American celebrity Jimmy Kimmel expressed disgust in Cecil's death during a monologue on his late-night talk show. This paper explores the Cecil Moment as a case study of the cultural politics of the environment at the intersection of celebrity environmentalism and ‘Nature 2.0’ applications like Facebook and Twitter. The research asks: what can the Cecil Moment can tell us about how celebrity and Nature 2.0 environmentalisms work and to what kind of conservation politics do they lead? Drawing on the celebrity environmentalism and Nature 2.0 literatures, I develop an analytic framework for analyzing the Cecil Moment which considers and evaluates the network of actors enrolled, the representations foregrounded and backgrounded, as well as the outcomes. Empirical insights are drawn from document and media review, and key informant interviews. I argue that the Cecil Moment operated through a more-than-human network which served to channel agency unleashed by Cecil’s death to the already-empowered lion conservation actors, as well as mutable meanings that shifted Cecil Moment focus away from trophy hunting and toward lion conservation in general. Ultimately, the Cecil Moment operated to dismiss the anti-trophy hunting politics that sparked and fuelled it in the first place; yet, the momentum of the Cecil Moment was grasped and re-directed toward other lion conservation priorities. Critically, this re-direction was not neutral; rather, it shifted the politics of the Cecil Moment in a way that reproduced longstanding patterns of conservation injustice wherein blame for biodiversity loss is directed away from powerful forces onto the racialized, rural poor from the Global South.
This article examines the nexus of the emergence of the agri-tech ecosystem in Singapore and concerns over climate change. In anticipation of supply chain issues due to unstable weather patterns, the Singaporean government plans to intensify its agriculture sector over the next decade. The Singapore Food Agency (SFA) has set a target – a ‘30 by 30’ initiative – to create a robust, innovative, and sustainable agri-tech industry that will produce 30% of the nation’s nutritional needs locally by 2030. Over the past few years, the state has not only shuttered local farms that hew to conventional farming methods but have also ploughed S$30 million into agri-tech startups that have embraced soilless vertical farming. Investors, too, have been lured by the promise of modern cultivation that purports to grow food in a climate resilient and sustainable way. Drawing on debates centred around ‘green’ capitalism, this article finds that vertical farms often fail to live up to the promise that agri-tech will combat climate change and food insecurity. I suggest that these failures are built into the solutionism of sustainability discourse, as start-ups that are supported by venture capital and state investment funds only need to demonstrate the promise to potentially succeed by articulating aspirational narratives that counter the pitfalls of conventional agriculture. In theorizing why there remains a steady proliferation of agri-tech firms amidst failure, this essay illuminates that what is then being sustained is a form of sustainability capitalism that ultimately does not politically disrupt existing systems of environmental governance.
According to the United Nations Environment Programme World Conservation Monitoring Centre, Mauritius is among the top fifteen countries with the largest marine-to-land area ratio. Though Mauritius can exercise full sovereignty over this large ocean area (at least in theory), it is felt that higher education actors have yet to fully grasp the oceanic potential to transform the future of the country. This chapter argues that there should be a paradigm shift to a post-humanist higher education curriculum that would provide the philosophical underpinning for Mauritians to appreciate their ocean territory. Indeed, just adding study programmes at the university level addressing marine sciences would not necessarily bring the desired change. A rethink of higher education curricula appears necessary to promote a shift from conceptualisations of the human as a separate entity from nature, the ocean in this case. Moreover, in the context of climatic crises, it is crucial to understand that we are inextricably linked to our environment. For Mauritius, the ocean poses many threats to livelihoods in terms of sea level rise, more violent cyclones and depletion of marine resources. However, the ocean is also a source of energy, food and host to protective barriers such as coral reefs. To be able to live with and probably one day live within the ocean, we have to move away from understanding the environment only in terms of the use-value to humans. Higher education must promote new ontologies that see humans and the environment as mutually entangled. The chapter proposes the theoretical lens of ecological posthumanism that could underpin our higher education future. The authors have produced data from desk research on higher education offerings in Mauritius to gauge Mauritius’ conceptualisation of an Ocean State.
This article intends to compare the political narratives on the Canadian Artic produced by the governments of Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper (2006–2015) and Liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau (2015–2023), with a specific focus on the identity dimension of these two sets of political narratives. Harper’s Arctic narrative, served by a unique personal commitment of the PM, promoted a radical shift from the historic Canada centred on the Laurentian region to a new Arctic Canada and in so doing, created a new political geography of Canada. In Justin Trudeau’s Arctic narrative, priority was given to reconciliation through the development of state-to-state relations with Indigenous communities. Embodied by the person of Governor General Mary Simon and concretized by the cooperative approach of Trudeau’s Arctic and Northern Framework, this new agentivity of Northern Indigenous peoples has ushered in a new decolonial geography of the Arctic. Unexpectedly, these successive official narratives of Arctic Canada have proven complementary in striving to move the center of gravity of the country north, thus creating new perspectives on Canadian identity and political geography.
Spatail Planning and the Commons. Action Research.
The outsize influence of asset managers raises important questions about the relationship between fund managers and the companies in which they are invested, with recent theorists of asset manager capitalism suggesting an emergent disinterest in the performance of individual firms among large asset managers. Investors’ growing focus on environmental, social, and governance (ESG) data in financial decisions offers one window into this relationship. Drawing on interviews with the ESG team and a group of portfolio managers at a large European bank, I argue that ESG analysis is seen as valuable not because of some unique social, environmental, or even financial benefits, but because it helps asset managers more effectively govern the companies in which they are invested by objectifying and depoliticizing their interventions in the governance of invested companies. This contributes to emerging theories of asset manager capitalism by calling attention to the strategies asset managers develop to exercise control over invested companies.
The European mining revival strategy correlates with the agenda of transition to a “green” and “climate-friendly” economy. In this article, we focus on the climatization of extractive discourses and practices in Europe, France, and Andalusia in order to show the changes in discourses while noting the continuity of practices. While discourse justifying the mining revival is circulating within Europe, the operationalization of extractive reindustrialization is materializing in different ways across the Member States, revealing specific constraints and dynamics at a regional level. In Spain, for example, more than a dozen mining projects have been launched since the late 2000s, particularly in Andalusia, where reindustrialization has been associated with greening and climatization. In France, where ecologization and reindustrialization have been integrated into a discourse on securing sovereignty, none of the projects submitted over the last decade have been successful, which highlights the difficulty of reconciling greening, climatization, and extractive reindustrialization. We show that the climatization of the extractive industries in Europe largely remains a discursive process that does little to transform mining practices and activities—other than by contributing to legitimizing their redevelopment, under certain conditions which we highlight.
En los últimos años, más de 7.5 millones de personas se han visto obligadas a desplazarse dentro de su territorio y más de 3.5 millones han tenido que migrar hacia otros países. El fenómeno migratorio ha sido estudiado desde distintos enfoques y perspectivas, desde las relaciones internacionales y la política internacional, hasta la sociología y los estudios multiculturales. Se ha vuelto también un tema candente en el debate público y una preocupación latente en el ámbito de las políticas públicas. Detrás de todos estos planteamientos subyace una inquietud ética que muchas veces se pierde vista. Suele entenderse que la discusión en torno a la migración puede reducirse a un asunto económico. Varias potencias mundiales sostienen su economía en la fuerza laboral de los migrantes y, en algunos países en vías de desarrollo, un ingreso esencial es el que proviene de las remesas. Se reconoce que la presencia o ausencia de migrantes repercute en el crecimiento o decrecimiento económico de muchos países. En varios lugares la población local está constituida principalmente por inmigrantes; incluso hay países de baja población que alientan la llegada de nuevos residentes. Sin embargo, sobre todo en los últimos años, en muchos otros países los controles migratorios se han endurecido y se intenta moderar el flujo de personas.
This paper critically interrogates Elon Musk’s celebrity image through an analysis of Musk’s appearance in the podcast The Joe Rogan’s Experience. It shows that the billionaire’s public persona is a constitutive part of his corporate strategy, and introduces the concept of ‘celebrity management’ to theorise how the affordances of celebrity can be mobilised to create conditions for a company to operate. Combining celebrity studies with critical political economy, Musk’s stardom is situated in the context of financialised capitalism, addressing the systemic contradictions contained (and artificially solved) in his image, while also demonstrating that it is tactically deployed to further financialised logics of his companies.
The role of philanthropic capital in biodiversity conservation is rapidly changing. Philanthropists increasingly seek to bankroll solutions to the biodiversity crisis, scaling up the size of their ambitions and gifts to help close what scientists and policymakers call the “biodiversity financing gap.” This paper interrogates the rising prominence of philanthropic capital in conservation governance, focusing on a class of actors I call “philanthro-environmentalists.” Unlike big, international NGOs and philanthrocapitalists, philanthro-environmentalists do not engage market-based, for-profit approaches to finance conservation. Rather, they engage a “dollars for policy” approach that leverages the power of their philanthropy to improve public conservation outcomes. Taking Chile as a case, I trace how a transnational network of philanthro-environmentalists is using a novel mechanism known as Project Finance for Permanence to exact substantial political and fiscal commitments from the state in exchange for substantive philanthropic support for a mega conservation initiative in Chilean Patagonia. I argue that Project Finance for Permanence targets policymaking as the primary site of philanthropic intervention, affording philanthro-environmentalists greater control over state conservation governance. Yet, I also argue that this case raises serious questions about the limits and implications of leveraging philanthropic capital to solve public environmental problems. Bridging literatures on conservation governance and conservation finance, the paper contributes new conceptual insights into the evolving dynamics of philanthropy-state relations in an age of biodiversity crisis.
Στο παρόν κείμενο στοχεύουμε να αναγνωρίσουμε το ρόλο της αρχιτεκτονικής στην επίτευξη και ενδυνάμωση της Βιώσιμης Ανάπτυξης έτσι όπως προβάλλεται απο τον Οργανισμό Ηνωμένων Εθνών. Αρχικά γίνεται μια αναφορά στις απαρχές του περιβαλλοντικού κινήματος και την εξέλιξή του μέχρι τη σημερινή εποχή των βιώσιμων πόλεων. Έπειτα, με βάση τη Νέα Αστική Ατζέντα (Habitat III) των Ηνωμένων Εθνών προκείπτουν προβληματισμοί, ασυνέχεις και αντιθέσεις στο όραμα για τη βιωσιμότητα. Τέλος, χρησιμοποιώντας τη βάση της μεθοδολογίας των δυναμικών συστημάτων του J.W. Forrester, η ανάλυση ολοκληρώνεται με μία σειρά διαγραμμάτων που στοχεύουν να αποδείξουν ότι τα παραπάνω σημεία ασυνεχειών μπορούν να επανενωθούν αν η αρχιτεκτονική και ο σχεδιασμός των πόλεων ενταχθεί ως ένας από τους κύριους μηχανισμούς εφαρμογής της ένοιας της αστικής βιωσιμότητας.
Hardin’s legacy in planning is highly relevant to current concerns, as planners shape the management of resources in the face of climate change and urbanization. Through a broad literature review of planning articles citing Hardin’s ‘Tragedy of the Commons’ we find out that Hardin’s suggestions are rejected by planning theory, yet have been implemented in planning practice. However, the rejection of Hardin’s suggestions, has evolved in an ongoing and growing ‘commons trend’ in social science. We review the presence of this trend in contemporary planning literature. Our results call for a turn towards the commons in planning, that is, for a dialogue between planning and the heterogeneous ideas embedded within the commons trend – a necessary endeavour if we are to address several critical planning questions of today.
In this chapter we interrogate relations between masculinities and climate politics by focusing on global elites. The positionality of elite actors as white, wealthy, cis-gendered men is usually ignored, even by critical scholars of climate politics. We characterise their strategies as expressing “imperial masculinity”: that is, they assume they can use their extreme wealth to insulate themselves from climate insecurities. However, these strategies to make themselves invulnerable to climate disasters are ultimately hubristic. While climate impacts are indeed highly unequal, many of the places elite men use to display their wealth are highly climate fragile. We use the example of Richard Branson and his Caribbean island to illustrate how hyper-elite men are indeed subject to climate impacts in ways that exceed their attempts to make themselves impregnable to the consequences of climate change.
Depuis la fin des années 2000, une trentaine de projets de mines métalliques ont vu le jour en Europe, à rebours de la tendance à délocaliser les investissements miniers vers le Sud global. L’Andalousie est à l’avant-garde de ce processus de réactivation minière avec sept nouvelles mines métalliques et d’autres projets sur le point d’aboutir. De tels projets adviennent avec le soutien des pouvoirs publics à l’échelle régionale, nationale, mais aussi européenne, depuis que la Commission européenne a présenté, en 2008, l’Initiative matières premières. Comment l’extraction minière apparaît-elle comme une solution en contexte de crise économique, sociale et environnementale ? Cet article développe un premier niveau de réponse à partir de l’analyse des discours institutionnels de la relance minière. De l’Union européenne à l’Andalousie, il montre d’abord comment le travail de conviction décelable dans ces discours publics produit un énoncé consensuel, par lequel la « solution » de la relance minière intègre un éventail hétéroclite de motifs et repose sur des formules qui visent à neutraliser les contradictions. La stabilisation de l’énoncé de la relance minière favorise ensuite l’alliance d’acteurs publics et privés autour de deux objectifs d’action publique. D’une part, l’énoncé promeut une politique de la connaissance qui soutient l’exploitation des sous-sols. D’autre part, le ciblage des États comme responsables de la sous-exploitation des matières premières européennes conduit à un second objectif, celui de repenser la politique des sous-sols pour y incorporer l’impératif minier.
Green capitalism offers a salvific counterpoint to business-as-usual capitalism while underscoring the perils of environmental degradation and unsustainable development. Focusing on Latin America and drawing on the work of James Ferguson, this article examines how green capitalism is established, legitimized, and negotiated among marginalized rural populations through what we call “green distributive politics.” Green distribution refers to value transfers that link state, capital, and civil-society actors in ways that promote environmental protection and green development. Different forms of distribution—such as markets, reciprocity, redistribution, and sharing—are mobilized by state and capital actors as they transfer value to marginalized populations and seek to legitimize new socioeconomic arrangements. Green distributive politics refers to efforts to build consent through distributive programs that both cultivate citizen-subjects with environmental responsibilities and open up longer-term fields of contested sociopolitical interactions with rural populations. The argument is developed comparatively across case studies from Chile (Aysén), Brazil (Acre), and Mexico (Michoacán) focused respectively on sustainable fishing, forest emissions reductions, and pine resin plantations. The article contributes to scholarship on capitalist environmentalisms by critiquing “green marketization” approaches as insufficiently attentive to the sociopolitical dynamics and varied distributive forms employed by state and capital actors to generate consent for green capitalist initiatives. It also elaborates a conceptual framework for green distributive politics that can be applied to other domains within and beyond Latin America.
This paper grapples with scholarly debates at the intersection of environmental degradation and capitalist accumulation. We review recent literature engaging with nature and value theory to show how a narrow conception of nature perpetuates a capitalist “production bias” that inadequately accounts for the more-than-capitalist relations involved in reconfiguring natures for capitalist value production. We argue for a return to the foundations of green Marxism that cast environmental degradation as a crisis of reproduction and draw connections with critical scholarship on wasting and a corpus of radical Indigenous, Black, and feminist scholarship which understand the value of nature to originate in life-making. We do so in order to consider environmental degradation from the politics and uneven experiences of life-making – a term we use to signal the material reproductive relations capital appropriates; the persistence of these relations in degraded environments; and the existence of these relations independent of capitalism and capitalist value. Bringing these literatures in conversation, we recast environmental degradation as a crisis of life-making, a conceptual move we argue is necessary to properly account for the more-than-capitalist relations that give historical and geographic form to environmental degradation in late capitalism.
Corporate Social Responsibility in Developing and Emerging Markets - edited by Onyeka Osuji December 2019
The May 2007 issue of Vanity Fair features Leonardo DiCaprio, a movie star and features a melting ice and a sad-looking polar bear. The issue is the second "Green Issue" of the magazine and attempts once more to provide readers reports about climate change, sustainability and greenhouse gases. The green issue generated many positive response such as quoting that the issue helped signal a tipping point in America's grasp of global warming and that going green is now a young elite, and very sexy affair. However, there are also skeptics, saying that featuring a celebrity on environment issues is euphemism and that they had more to do with corporate desires for profit than environmentalism. Nevertheless, celebrities in the environment wagon can only do so far and has helped make environmental issues more popular and a more urgent topic.
Scale has emerged as a major issue in both ecology and geography in recent decades. Little effort has been made to compare these parallel debates, however, or to seek an integrated conception of scale across the two disciplines. This paper argues that such an integration is possible, even between ecology and human geography—the subfield of geography seemingly most removed from ecological concerns and methods. In both disciplines, globalization has lent practical urgency to problems of scale, revealing deeper theoretical issues. Geographers have helped impel ecologists to take space and scale seriously, and the epistemological insight that scale is produced (rather than given a priori) should be applied to ecological as well as social phenomena. Ecologists' conceptual distinctions and methodological guidelines regarding scale, meanwhile, can help resolve `the scale question' in critical human geography. Scale is both a methodological issue inherent to observation (its epistemological moment) and an objective characteristic of complex interactions within and among social and natural processes (its ontological moment). These processes and interactions—rather than scale per se—should be the object of research, with particular attention to nonlinearities or thresholds of change.
Spain is arguably the European country where the water crisis has become most acute in recent years. The political and ecological importance of water is not, however, only a recent development in Spain. Throughout this century, water politics, economics, culture, and engineering have infused and embodied the myriad tensions and conflicts that drove and still drive Spanish society. And although the significance of water on the Iberian peninsula has attracted considerable scholarly and other attention, the central role of water politics, water culture, and water engineering in shaping Spanish society on the one hand, and the contemporary water geography and ecology of Spain as the product of centuries of socioecological interaction on the other, have remained largely unexplored. The hybrid character of the water landscape, or “waterscape,” comes to the fore in Spain in a clear and unambiguous manner. The socionatural production of Spanish society can be illustrated by excavating the central role of water politics and engineering in Spain's modernization process. In the first part of the paper, I develop a theoretical and methodological perspective that is explicitly critical of traditional approaches in water-resources studies, which tend to separate various aspects of the hydrological cycle into discrete and independent objects of study. My perspective, broadly situated within the political ecology tradition, draws critically from recent work by ecological historians, cultural critics, sociologists of science, critical social theorists, and political economists. My main objective is to bring together what has been severed for too long by insisting that nature and society are deeply intertwined. In the second part of the paper, I excavate the origins of Spain's early-twentieth-century modernization process (1890–1930) as expressed in debates and actions around the hydrological condition. The conceptual framework presented in the first part helps structure a narrative that weaves water through the network of socionatural relations in ways that permit the recasting of modernity as a deeply geographical, although by no means coherent, homogeneous, total, or uncontested project. In sum, I seek to document how the socionatural is historically produced to generate a particular, but inherently dynamic, geographical configuration.
Existing literature suggests that food, fiber, and raw material sectors differ from manufacturing in significant ways. However, there is no analytical basis for engaging the particular challenges of nature-centered production, and thus the distinct ways that industrialization proceeds in extractive and cultivation-based industries. This article presents a framework for analyzing the difference that nature makes in these industries. Nature is seen as a set of obstacles, opportunities, and surprises that firms confront in their attempts to subordinate biophysical properties and processes to industrial production. Drawing an analogy from Marxian labor theory, we contrast the formal and real subsumption of nature to highlight the distinct ways in which biological systems - in marked contrast to extractive sectors - are industrialized and may be made to operate as productive forces in and of themselves. These concepts differentiate analytically between biologically based and nonbiologically based industries, building on theoretical and historical distinctions between extraction and cultivation.
New supranational environmental institutions, including the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) and the 'green' World Bank, reflect attempts to regulate international flows of 'natural capital' by means of an approach I call 'green developmentalism: These institutions are sources of eco-development dollars and of a new 'global' discourse, a postneoliberal environmental-economic paradigm. By the logic of this paradigm, nature is constructed as a world currency and ecosystems are recoded as warehouses of genetic resources for biotechnology industries. Nature would earn its own right to survive through international trade in ecosystem services and permits to pollute, access to tourism and research sites, and exports of timber, minerals, and intellectual property rights to traditional crop varieties and shamans' recipes. I contend that green developmentalism, with its promise of market solutions to environmental problems, is blunting the North-South disputes that have embroiled international environmental institutions. But by valuing local nature in relation to international markets-denominating diversity in dollars, euros, or yen-green developmentalism abstracts nature from its spatial and social contexts and reinforces the claims of global elites to the greatest share of the earth's biomass and all it contains. Meanwhile, the CBD has become a gathering ground for transnational coalitions of indigenous, peasant, and NGO opponents of 'biopiracy' and the patenting of living things, and advocates of international environmental justice. They have begun to put forward counterdiscourses and alternative practices to those of green developmentalism.
The purpose of this paper is to recast the politics of obesity in the United States in light of the unsatisfactory nature of the current, popular debates on this problem. The paper begins by taking stock of contemporary discussions about obesity through a review and analysis of the popular and academic literature on the topic. We show how discussions of obesity that rely on unidimensional structural, biological, and political causes are not only simplistic but also do not adequately historicize the present so-called epidemic of US obesity. To answer the questions 'why now?' and 'why here?', we argue, requires an ontological rapprochement between the more dialectical approaches to political economy, cultural studies, and political ecology. After laying out this more integrated approach, we apply it by showing how today's twin phenomena of the discursive war on obesity and the so-called epidemic itself are better understood through the historical lens of neoliberalism, both as a political-cultural economic project and as a form of governmentality. Our argument is that some of the central contradictions of global capitalism are literally embodied. The problem of obesity in its multiple material and discursive senses can then be seen as a partial fix-in some respects, even as a spatial fix-to some of the contradictions of neoliberalism. At the same time, we contend that the neoliberal shift in personhood from citizen to consumer encourages (over)eating at the same time that neoliberal notions of discipline vilify it. Those who can achieve thinness amidst this plenty are imbued with the rationality and self-discipline of perfect subjects, who in some sense contribute to the more generalized sense of deservingness that characterizes US culture today.
Working Feminism looks at key concepts and debates within feminist theory and puts them to work concretely in relation to the real problems faced by Filipina domestic workers and Asian youth in Canada. Written by a geographer, it draws to the fore the metaphorical and concrete geographies that lie implicit and underdeveloped within much feminist theory and suggests that a geographical imagination offers a means of reframing debates beyond polarised theoretical and political positions. Alternating between theoretical and empirical chapters, substantial and wide-ranging discussions of human rights, multiculturalism, transnationalism and feminist politics are brought to earth and – by putting them into the context of individual predicaments – to life. The empirical chapters build from a long collaboration with an activist group – the Philippine Women Centre – in Vancouver, Canada and demonstrate the fruits of a close and innovative engagement between feminist theory and participatory action research. The book demonstrates the immediate practicality of abstract debates; it has been widely and successfully used in upper level undergraduate and graduate seminars.
First the Seed spotlights the history of plant breeding and shows how efforts to control the seed have shaped the emergence of the agricultural biotechnology industry. This second edition of a classic work in the political economy of science includes an extensive, new chapter updating the analysis to include the most recent developments in the struggle over the direction of crop genetic engineering. 1988 Cloth, 1990 Paperback, Cambridge University Press. Winner of the Theodore Saloutos Award of the Agricultural History Society. Winner of the Robert K. Merton Award of the American Sociological Association. © 2004 by The Board of Regents of the University Wisconsin System. All rights reserved.
Neoliberalism--the doctrine that market exchange is an ethic in itself, capable of acting as a guide for all human action--has become dominant in both thought and practice throughout much of the world since 1970 or so. Writing for a wide audience, David Harvey, author of The New Imperialism and The Condition of Postmodernity, here tells the political-economic story of where neoliberalization came from and how it proliferated on the world stage. Through critical engagement with this history, he constructs a framework, not only for analyzing the political and economic dangers that now surround us, but also for assessing the prospects for the more socially just alternatives being advocated by many oppositional movements.
In the post logging era, Sarawak is being restructured to make way for large-scale oil palm plantations. In thin. restructuring. the vulnerabilities of particular areas are being used in a wider battle to control production. particularly for export, Native customary lands. considered 'unproductive' or 'idle' by officials. are the target of oil palm plantation development under a new land development programme called Konsep Baru (New Concept). This article looks at the contradictions generated by the complex process of laying claims to 'idle' native customary land and focuses on Dayak organizing initiatives in northern Sarawak, Malaysia.
Why is the World Bank so successful? How has it gained power even at moments in history when it seemed likely to fall? This pathbreaking book is the first close examination of the inner workings of the Bank, the foundations of its achievements, its propensity for intensifying the problems it intends to cure, and its remarkable ability to tame criticism and extend its own reach. Michael Goldman takes us inside World Bank headquarters in Washington, D.C., and then to Bank project sites around the globe. He explains how projects funded by the Bank really work and why community activists struggle against the World Bank and its brand of development. Goldman looks at recent ventures in areas such as the environment, human rights, and good governance and reveals how-despite its poor track record-the World Bank has acquired greater authority and global power than ever before. The book sheds new light on the World Bank's role in increasing global inequalities and considers why it has become the central target for anti-globalization movements worldwide. For anyone concerned about globalization and social justice, Imperial Nature is essential reading.
This paper discusses the significance of gender-based conflicts for the failure of Gambian irrigated rice projects. In particular, it illustrates how resource control of a gendered crop, rice, shifts from females to males with the development of pump-irrigated rice projects. Irrigation imposes a radically different labor regime on household producers, demanding that they intensify labor for year-round cultivation. Yet, the Gambian farming system evolved for a five month agricultural calendar, in which women were accorded specific land and labor rights. The need to restructure family labor, specifically skilled female labor, to meet the cultivation demands of pump irrigation is crucial for understanding the pattern of gender-based conflicts in Gambian rice schemes. The case study illustrates that irrigation involves more than technology transfer. Appropriate irrigation demands sensitivity to the social structure of household production systems. The paper concludes by emphasizing the centrality of gender issues for improving food security in sub-Saharan Africa.
In Uneven Development, a classic in its field, Neil Smith offers the first full theory of uneven geographical development, entwining theories of space and nature with a critique of capitalist development. Featuring pathbreaking analyses of the production of nature and the politics of scale, Smith's work anticipated many of the uneven contours that now mark neoliberal globalization. This third edition features an afterword updating the analysis for the present day. © 2008 by The University of Georgia Press. All rights reserved.
Scott Prudham investigates a region that has in recent years seen more environmental conflict than perhaps anywhere else in the country--the old-growth forests of the Pacific Northwest. Prudham employs a political economic approach to explain the social and economic conflicts arising from the timber industry's presence in the region. As well, he provides a thorough accounting of the timber industry itself, tracing its motivations, practices, and labor relations.
On Hybrids and Socionature: Flow, Process, and DialecticsThe Production of Nature: Water and Modernization in SpainModernization as a Geographical Project: The Production of Space/NatureWater as the Linchpin to Spain's Modernization DriveThe State as Master Socioenvironmental EngineerPurification and the Transformation of Nature: Hydraulic Engineers as Producers of SocionatureConclusions
It would be convenient indeed if such a contentious issue as the relationship between population and resources could be discussed in some ethically neutral manner. In recent years scientific investigations into this relationship have multiplied greatly in number and sophistication. But the plethora of scientific investigation has not reduced contentiousness; rather, it has increased it. We can venture three possible explanations for this state of affairs: (1) science is not ethically neutral; (2) there are serious defects in the scientific methods used to consider the population-resources problem; or (3) some people are irrational and fail to understand and accept scientifically established results. All of these explanations may turn out to be true, but we can afford to proffer none of them without substantial qualification. The last explanation would require, for example, a careful analysis of the concept of rationality before it could be sustained (Godelier, 1972). The second explanation would require a careful investigation of the capacities and limitations of a whole battery of scientific methods, techniques, and tools, together with careful evaluation of available data, before it could be judged correct or incorrect. In this paper, however, I shall focus on the first explanation and seek to show that the lack of ethical neutrality in science affects each and every attempt at ‘rational’ scientific discussion of the population-resources relationship. I shall further endeavor to show how the adoption of certain kinds of scientific methods inevitably leads to certain kinds of substantive conclusions which, in turn, can have profound political implications.
There has been little experimental work in West Africa that distinguishes grazing from climate effects on rangeland vegetation. The persistent reliance by environmental analysts on carrying-capacity models oversimplifies range ecology and excludes social processes from causal analyses. Both regional stocking rates and the seasonality of livestock distributions should be treated as proximate factors, each affected by biophysical and socioeconomic conditions. A case study examines the underlying causes of the cattle population boom in the Maasina during the 1960s. Growth in the Maasina cattle population resulted from the historical confluence of inoculation programs with greater local demand for covert accumulation brought about by the changing social relations between the Fulsse and the Rimaysse. -from Author
Over the past two years I have made an uncomfortable discovery. Like most environmentalists, I have been as blind to the constraints affecting our energy supply as my opponents have been to climate change. I now realise that I have entertained a belief in magic. In 2003, the biologist Jeffrey Dukes calculated that the fossil fuels we burn in one year were made from organic matter "containing 44 x 10 to the 18 grams of carbon, which is more than 400 times the net primary productivity of the planet's current biota."(1) In plain English, this means that every year we use four centuries' worth of plants and animals. The idea that we can simply replace this fossil legacy -and the extraordinary power densities it gives us -with ambient energy is the stuff of science fiction. There is simply no substitute for cutting back. But substitutes are being sought everywhere. They are being promoted today at the climate talks in Montreal, by states -such as ours -which seek to avoid the hard decisions climate change demands. And at least one of them is worse than the fossil fuel burning it replaces. The last time I drew attention to the hazards of making diesel fuel from vegetable oils, I received as much abuse as I have ever been sent by the supporters of the Iraq war. The biodiesel missionaries, I discovered, are as vociferous in their denial as the executives of Exxon. I am now prepared to admit that my previous column was wrong. But they're not going to like it. I was wrong because I underestimated the fuel's destructive impact.
With high quality petroleum running out in the next 50 years, the world governments and petrochemical industry alike are looking at biomass as a substitute refinery feedstock for liquid fuels and other bulk chemicals. New large plantations are being established in many countries, mostly in the tropics, but also in China, North America, Northern Europe, and in Russia. These industrial plantations will impact the global carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus, and water cycles in complex ways. The purpose of this paper is to use thermodynamics to quantify a few of the many global problems created by industrial forestry and agriculture. It is assumed that a typical tree biomass-for-energy plantation is combined with an efficient local pelleting facility to produce wood pellets for overseas export. The highest biomass-to-energy conversion efficiency is afforded by an efficient electrical power plant, followed by a combination of the FISCHER-TROPSCH diesel fuel burned in a 35%-efficient car, plus electricity. Wood pellet conversion to ethanol fuel is always the worst option. It is then shown that neither a prolific acacia stand in Indonesia nor an adjacent eucalypt stand is “sustainable.” The acacia stand can be made “sustainable” in a limited sense if the cumulative free energy consumption in wood drying and chipping is cut by a factor of two by increased reliance on sun-drying of raw wood. The average industrial sugarcane-for-ethanol plantation in Brazil could be “sustainable” if the cane ethanol powered a 60%-efficient fuel cell that, we show, does not exist. With some differences (ethanol distillation vs. pellet production), this sugarcane plantation performs very similarly to the acacia plantation, and is unsustainable in conjunction with efficient internal combustion engines.
Concepts of `materiality' are increasingly invoked in human geography. This paper discusses several recent and influential workings of materiality, and examines their implications for resource geographies. First, we identify a set of analytical questions at the heart of resource geography and characterize the dominant approaches to these questions - the `production of nature' and the `social construction of nature' - as yielding diminishing returns. Second, we survey recent work on materiality relating to commodities, corporeality and hybridity and advance the claim that this work provides a number of fresh perspectives with which to revive resource geography. Third, we highlight three specific themes within this research: a radical redistribution and decentering of agency; a revitalization of the concept of `construction'; and an acknowledgement of the political-economic implications that flow from a world that is biophysically heterogeneous. Finally, we draw on this analysis to explore how progress might be made in the conceptualization and empirical study of resources.
Neoliberalism and neoconservatism are two distinct political rationalities in the contemporary United States. They have few overlapping formal characteristics, and even appear contradictory in many respects. Yet they converge not only in the current presidential administration but also in their de-democratizing effects. Their respective devaluation of political liberty, equality, substantive citizenship, and the rule of law in favor of governance according to market criteria on the one side, and valorization of state power for putatively moral ends on the other, undermines both the culture and institutions of constitutional democracy. Above all, the two rationalities work symbiotically to produce a subject relatively indifferent to veracity and accountability in government and to political freedom and equality among the citizenry.
Global warming is all about inequality, both in who will suffer most its effects and in who created the problem in the first place. This article describes the inequality empirically in broad strokes and then describes how it has led to the current deadlock in dealing with the problem of global climate change. Regarding bargaining positions in the Kyoto round of negotiations, two factions among rich nations and at least five distinct bargaining positions among poor nations are described and explained. The factional divisions are attributable to the differential influence of "polluting elites" across nations. The article concludes that the only way out of the conundrum of inequity and warming is by both addressing inequality and delinking carbon and development.
"The wealth of those societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails, presents itself as an 'immense accumulation of commodities, its unit being a single commodity. Our investigation must therefore begin with the analysis of a commodity" [Marx, 1967 Capital, Volume I first paragraph (International Publishers, New York)]. As Marx moves beyond the first paragraph of Capital, he famously argues that value makes the commodity a 'hieroglyphic'. But his own opening is also a sort of hieroglyphic: it rings true for bourgeois economy as it does for his critique of that economy, but for entirely different reasons. The purpose of Capital is to obliterate this apparent corroboration, yet a hieroglyphic quality is maintained throughout, as Marx subjects his own successive claims to iterative, immanent critique. This chain cannot be said to be indefinite for Marx, but neither is it complete. Here, I hark back to Marx's opening gambit to ask: in capitalist society, what else accumulates besides commodities proper? The paper proceeds iteratively, offering a series of revised opening claims that mimic yet spiral away from Marx's original. I argue specifically that, although devaluation (decommodification) inheres in the production and circulation of value, it has its own accumulation logic. The example is of food banking. I explore this activity as simultaneously material, representational, and political, and examine the constitutive force of each of these modalities. I treat food banking, therefore, as a form of commodity afterlife, through which devaluation becomes (imperfectly) a positivity.
Not only is the workplace a significant site of the social construction of feminine and masculine identities but in an increasing range of service sector occupations, a gendered bodily performance is a significant part of selling a product. In this paper, we draw on Butler's notion of gender identity as a regulatory fiction to investigate the consequences of the specificity of embodiment and gendered performances. Drawing on three case studies in the City of London, we explore the differential fictions constructed by men and women engaged in interactive service work in a professional capacity in merchant banks. We examine the ways in which women are embodied and/or represented as "women' in the workplace, comparing women's sense of themselves and their everyday workplace experience with those of men doing the same job. Our aim is to establish whether the necessity of selling oneself as part of the product in such service sector employment challenges the idealisation of male workers as disembodied rational subjects, while not necessarily disrupting the inferior position of embodied women. -Authors
This paper is summary in several senses. First, in the course of the argument it summarizes a number of positions in the recent debate on ideology, without attempting to elaborate arguments or detail objections. Second, it represents a summary of my own, current provisional take, or position, on a number of those debates. Its structure is simple. We have been passing through a veritable deluge, in recent years, with respect to theorizing the domain of ideology. Much of this has taken the form of elaborate deconstructions of the classical marxist theory of ideology. The paper takes off from and reflects on this heightened period of theoretical contestation. However, this period of intense theorization has also engendered its opposite—a rigorous critique of the hyperabstraction and over-theoreticism that has characterized theoretical speculation since, roughly, the impact of structuralism in the early 1970s; and the charge that, in the pursuit of theory for its own sake, we have abandoned the problems of concrete historical analysis.
In recent years, urban governance has become increasingly preoccupied with the exploration of new ways in which to foster and encourage local development and employment growth. Such an entrepreneurial stance contrasts with the managerial practices of earlier decades which primarily focussed on the local provision of services, facilities and benefits to urban populations. This paper explores the context of this shift from managerialism to entrepreneurialism in urban governance and seeks to show how mechanisms of inter-urban competition shape outcomes and generate macroeconomic consequences. The relations between urban change and economic development are thereby brought into focus in a period characterised by considerable economic and political instability.
1. Neoliberalism and the environmentNeoliberalism is the most powerful ideological andpolitical project in global governance to arise in thewake of Keynesianism, a status conveyed by trium-phalist phrases such as ‘‘the Washington consensus’’ andthe ‘‘end of history’’ (Laclau and Mouffe, 1985; Jessop,1994; Harvey, 2000; Peck, 2001). Yet the neoliberalproject is not hegemonic: it has been roundly criticizedand attacked, and it has faltered in a number of respects.In fact, the most nakedly extreme forms of neoliberalstate rollbacks and market triumphalism may well bepast, beaten back in places by virulent resistance (asurprise to those who believed history was at an end);undermined by the spectacular failures of neoliberalreforms judged even by the standards of neoliberalchampions (as in Argentina, for example); and replacedby ‘‘kinder, gentler,’’ Third Way variants (Peck andTickell, 2002).Neoliberalism’s adventures and misadventures areincreasingly well-chronicled,
This article expounds the traditional Marxist theory of the contradiction between forces and relations of production, over production of capital and economic crisis, and the process of crisis-induced restructuring of productive forces and production relations into more transparently social, hence potentially socialist, forms. This exposition provides a point of departure for an “ecological Marxist” theory of the contradiction between capitalist production relations and forces and the conditions of production, underproduction of capital and economic crisis, and the process of crisis-induced restructuring of production conditions and the social relations thereof also into more transparently social, hence potentially socialist, forms. In short, there may be not one but two paths to socialism in late capitalist society. While the two processes of capital overproduction and underproduction are by no means mutually exclusive, they may offset or compensate for one another in ways which create the appearance of relatively stable processes of capitalist development. Study of the combination of the two processes in the contemporary world may throw light on the decline of traditional labor and socialist movements and the rise of “new social movements” as agencies of social transformation. In similar ways that traditional Marxism illuminates the practises of traditional labor movements, it may be that “ecological Marxism” throws light on the practices of new social movements. Although ecology and nature; the politics of the body, feminism, and the family; and urban movements and related topics are usually discussed in post-Marxist terms, the rhetoric deployed in this article is self-consciously Marxist and designed to appeal to Marxist theorists and fellow travelers whose work remains within a “scientific” discourse hence those who are least likely to be convinced by post-Marxist discussions of the problem of capital’s use and abuse of nature (including human nature) in the modem world. However, the emphasis in this article on a political economic “scientific” discourse is tactical, not strategic. In reality, more or less autonomous social relationships, often non-capitalist or anti-capitalist, constitute “civil society,” which needs to be addressed on its own practical and theoretical terms. In other words, social and collective action is not meant to be construed merely as derivative of systemic forces, as the last section of the article hopefully will make clear.