Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
But countervailing forces are set in motion by globalization, too. Advances in telecom-
munications can shrink social distances, increasing the scope for internalization through
sympathy by giving faces and voices to the people who bear environmental costs, and at
the same time giving the latter greater access to information and the power that comes with
it. Alliances across national boundaries, among local communities, non-governmental
organizations (NGOs), workers, shareholders and consumers, can alter balances of power.
And as discussed in the next section, the phenomenon of global environmental change -
where there is little or no scope for cost shifting - may not only give impetus to global envi-
ronmental governance, but also create new opportunities for globally egalitarian politics.
To illustrate these opposing forces, consider the rapid growth of industrial shrimp
farming in the coastal areas of tropical countries. This has been accompanied by the wide-
spread and often violent appropriation of land and aquatic resources from local residents,
and by adverse environmental impacts on local communities, spurring polarization
(Stonich and Vandergeest, 2001). At the same time, however, the spread of shrimp farms
has sparked international alliances of environmental and peasant-based NGOs that
defend and reassert community rights to natural assets (Stonich and Bailey, 2000).
Similarly, export markets for beef, timber and minerals have been a major stimulus to
Amazonian deforestation. Again, international alliances have emerged to support local
people who traditionally have relied on the forest for their livelihoods. These were instru-
mental in the creation of extractive reserves in Brazil, where local communities have
secured their right to harvest latex and other forest products while preventing forest clear-
ing (Hall, 1997). As these examples suggest, globalization not only poses risks of envi-
ronmental polarization and increased environmental degradation, but also creates
opportunities for countervailing forces.
Concluding remarks
This chapter has viewed globalization as a process of economic integration that embraces
governance as well as markets. In principle, the globalization of governance can counter
adverse environmental impacts arising from the globalization of market failure that
accompanies the integration of world markets. But there is nothing automatic about this
outcome - it rests on human agency, and on balances of power between those who stand
to gain and lose from environmental governance.
In assessing the e
ects of globalization, my main focus has been its impacts on envi-
ronmental quality in the global North and global South. Closely related to this, however,
is a concern with impacts on human well-being. Environmentalists tend to con
ff
ate the
two, seeing current and future human well-being as dependent on environmental
quality. Economists tend to emphasize the tradeo
fl
s that can and do arise between envi-
ronmental quality and the satisfaction of other human needs and wants. Such tradeo
ff
s
pose the positive question of how they are made in practice, as well as the normative
question of how they ought to be made. I have suggested above that both questions are
intimately bound up with the issue of interpersonal tradeo
ff
ff
s in the well-being of
di
ff
erent people.
With respect to the positive question of how societies choose to make tradeo
s, I have
suggested that these are guided by a power-weighted social decision rule, in which bene
ff
ts
and costs are weighed by the power of those to whom they accrue. This leads to the
hypotheses that power disparities a
fi
ff
ect the distributional incidence of environmental
