ASSOSA UNIVERSITY

COLLAGE OF SOCIAL SCIENCE AND HUMANITIES

DEPARTMENT OF SOCIOLOGY
GROUP ASSIGNMENT

COURSE TITLE: ENVIRONMENTAL SOCIOLOGY

COURSE CODE:SOCI3171
NAME ID NO
1.SAMUEL ABDISA…………………………….......................................................RU-2610/09
2.TADELE ABEBAW……………………………………………………………….RU-4128/09
3.MOSISA KEBA……………………………………………………………………RU-2561/09
4.TAJIE BITEWLIGN……………………………………………………………....RU-0440/09
5.TESFAMICHAEL YIMANE……………………………………………………..RU-2098/09
6.NYAK DENG TEM………………………………………………………………..RU-4103/09
7.MARGITU FIKADU……………………………………………………………....RU-3105/09

SUBMITTED BY; GROUP 8

SUBMITTED TO; Mr. GUDINA Y.
SUBMISSION DATE; 14/8/2011

April 2019
ASSOSA, ETHIOPIA

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TABLE OF CONTENTS
1. Introduction ................................................................................Error! Bookmark not defined.

2. Body discussion .......................................................................................................................... 2

2.1 Global political economy and the environment ........................................................................ 2

2.2 The Development of Global Political Economy and

the Environment as contemporary field…………………………………………………..………3

2.3 The political economic perspective on environmental issues ................................................... 4

2.4‘Environmental Problems’ from the State of Nature to the Nature of State .............................. 5

2.5 The determinants of the syntheses to these dialectical conflicts............................................... 6

Summary…………………………………………………………………………………………..7

Reference……………………………………………………………………………………….…8

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Global Political Economy and the Environment
1. Introduction
In this era of economic globalization, there has been remarkable growth in the volume and value
of global trade, investment, and finance. These international economic relationships have
important implications for the natural environment, as all have been identified as having some
linkage to environmental quality. The extent to which these international economic relationships
contribute to environmental problems or to solutions for environmental problems is the subject
of extensive debate (see, for example, Boyce, 2008; Gallagher, 2009; Clapp and Dauvergne,
2011; Newell, 2012; Clapp and Helleiner, 2012). Some see the relationship as largely positive,
with environmental benefits being attached to the economic growth that global economic
transactions seek to facilitate. For these thinkers, environmental policies should be able to
address any negative outcomes that may arise in ways that do not impede global economic
activity. Others, however, see mainly negative environmental implications arising from global
economic relationships and the economic growth that is associated with it. For them, it is
important that environmental policies do restrict global economic transactionsIn some cases,
some of the same actors (for example, transnational corporations or TNCs) are involved in both
economic activities that may contribute to environmental harm and in shaping the governance of
global economic institutions that seek to regulate those activities. This can lead to conflicts of
interest and also highlights the importance of power relationships in the study of the interface
between IPE and the environment. Tracing the roots of debate over IPE and the environment It
was in the early 1990s that debates over the global political economy and the environment
erupted in full force. This was in large part a product of concerns over trade policy and its
potential impact on the environment at that time, especially the negotiation of the North
American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade
(GATT) Tuna-Dolphin challenge (Williams, 2001; Esty, 1994). There was concern that trade and
investment interests would override environmental considerations and these cases brought the
question to the fore. The result was a large volume of literature on the topic, from a variety of
viewpoints. The debate over the relationship between the IPE and the environment overlaps to
some extent but is not entirely encompassed within traditional debates in the field of
International Relations (IR) (see Stevis, this book). In other words, the roots of various positions
in both policy and theory on the links between trade, investment, and finance, on the one hand,

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and environment, on the other, originate in a number of fields apart from IR. These include, most
importantly, ecology and economics.

2. Body discussion

2.1 Global political economy and the environment

Since the 1990s, the focus of scholarship on international political economy and the environment
(G/IPEE) has been heavily influenced by the policy agenda promoted by the 1987 Brundtland
Report and the 1992 Rio Earth Summit.

That agenda advocated the strengthening of the linkages between international economic and
environmental cooperation around a grand bargain of ‘sustainable development’. The new
political buzz around the sustainable development agenda resulted in a surge of IPEE research
focused on various kinds of cooperative environment– economy initiatives that emerged from
that time onwards, such as the economic dimensions of international environmental governance
initiatives, the environmental activities of international economic institutions and regimes, and
new kinds of private international regimes governing the environment–economy interface.

This work has advanced our understanding of the relationship between the global political
economy and the environment in significant ways. While acknowledging the importance of this
work, in this article we take a different approach. We argue that the somewhat narrow focus on
treaties, institutions and regimes within G/IPEE has resulted in a relative neglect of the
environmental implications of larger structural trends in the international political economy. We
focus on three such trends that we feel are particularly deserving of more attention from IPEE
scholars:

 the globalization of international financial markets;

 the rise of newly powerful states in the global economy; and
 The recent emergence of high and volatile commodity prices.

These new trends have been explored within the broader field of IPE, but their direct
consequences for the natural environment have not yet been analyzed in comparable depth. This
neglect may be linked to the fact that they often lack significant cooperative governance efforts

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that are explicitly tied to environmental outcomes. By focusing more on the direct environmental
implications of these broad structural trends as well as the relationships between the G/IPEE
scholars will gain a richer understanding of the relationship between the global political
economy and the environment. G/IPE’ to refer to the field of study, while we spell out
‘international political economy’ when referring to the ‘real world’ intersection of politics and
economics in the global system.

2.2 The Development of Global Political Economy and the Environment as contemporary
field

The contemporary field of G/IPE was born in the 1970s, largely in response to changes in the
‘real world’. These included:-

 Intensifying economic interdependence and the growth of transnational corporations, as

well as several dramatic developments in the early 1970s:-
 The breakdown of the Breton Woods monetary system,
 the 1973 oil shock,
 developing countries’ demands for a New International Economic Order, and
 Heightened trade conflicts between the major western powers.

As interest in environmental issues began to grow from the 1970s onwards, the intellectual
openness of IPE included a growing engagement with scholars studying this subject at that time.
For example, strange herself solicited a chapter G/IPEE account would also explore how
environmental change influences the international political economy. As she argued more
generally, ‘openness within the social sciences is the best defense against the natural academic
inclination to pretentiousness, pomposity and obfuscation’ Dennis Pirages advocating an
‘ecological approach’ to the field in her 1984 edited volume identifying Paths to international
political economy. Pirages’s chapter argued that an explanation of developments in the
international political economy would be ‘enhanced by a better understanding of the
evolutionary relationship among human beings, their societies and the life-sustaining global
ecosystem. He was particularly keen to highlight how resource scarcity and the limited carrying
capacity of the earth were affecting the dynamics of the international political economy. Other
IPE scholars reversed the causal arrow as we do in this article to focus on how the dynamics of

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the international political economy were affecting the environment. As broader debates about
economic globalization heated up, particular attention was devoted to the environmental
implications of liberalized and expanding international trade, and to the activities of industrial
and resource focused transnational corporations.

2.3 The political economic perspective on environmental issues poses these as dialectical
conflicts, with competing sets of social interests in natural resources.

Use-values involving: - Direct utilization of natural resources for subsistence, habitat, or

recreation by citizens, versus

Exchange-values: - which require transformation of natural resources into commodities that can
be marketed.

Dialectical struggles to maximize the "value" of ecosystems and their components thus
characterize modern societies, and especially modern states. The state in contemporary advanced
industrial societies is of necessity involved in this dialectical relationship to the natural
environment. It has accepted simultaneous responsibilities to enhance economic development on
one hand, and to meet the social needs of their constituents, on the other. In the first role, state
officials seek to increase capital accumulation and tax revenues, in part through fostering greater
industrial access to natural resources.

Conversely, in their latter role, state agencies are pressured to provide clean air, clean water, and
safe communities to their electorates. States thus oscillate under varying sets of social, economic
and political pressures between syntheses of this dialectic: the economic, in which use-values are
largely dismissed, the managed scarcity, in which considerable volatility in state responses to
exchange-value and use-value interests occur. A third synthesis, the ecological one, in which
exchange-values are dismissed, has been advocated by "deep ecologists", but has never been
attempted. Struggles around natural resources in the modern era are primarily variants of the
managed scarcity synthesis. These revolve around the limited capacities of most ecosystems to
meet both exchange- and use-value needs, on the one hand, and the political-economic power of
the competing interest groups, on the other.

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The complexity of modern struggles is enhanced because most use value interested citizen
groups also depend on wages, which are a by-product of the modern treadmill of production,
which uses profits from environmental extraction to develop more capital-intensive ways of
extracting still more resources. Capital owners and managers attempt to accelerate the treadmill
by skewing citizen consciousness in two directions: (1) that resource extraction is compatible
with citizen use-values, and (2) when this persuasion fails, that citizens' own exchange-value
needs must take precedence over their use-value interests. To this end, the social control of
environmental impact assessment, as Political Economy.

2.4. ‘Environmental Problems’ from the State of Nature to the Nature of State

To understand the origins of modern environmental problems, we need to appreciate how the
environmental interests of actors outlined above relate to the physical-biotic organization of
ecological systems. The history of expanding industrial production has provided the data to
outline a dialectical conflict between social and ecological organization in advanced industrial
societies. Dialectical conflicts emerge when social systems have two or more goals which cannot
simultaneously be met. Essentially, the dialectical tension in relationships between modern
societies and their environments emerges from two axioms:-

 Most elements of ecological systems cannot meet both exchange-value needs and use-value
needs; and
 The treadmill of production places a primacy on exchange-value uses of ecosystems, while
other ecological uses are a biological and social necessity for all classes. The following
propositions delineate the dialectical connections between social and environmental
structure.

The Societal-Environmental Dialectic: -

 Societal production in industrial societies involves withdrawals from and additions to

natural ecosystems, in the process turning ecosystem elements into social resources,
producing exchange values and profits in the markets of the treadmill of production;
 Such withdrawals and additions disorganize the physical-biotic structure of these
ecosystems, while producing these exchange values;

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  Ecosystem disorganization decreases the use values of ecosystems, restricting, among
others, social access to recreational habitats, health-sustaining biological supports (air,
water, food), and also future levels of social production (exchange values).

This skeletal dialectical model begins to lay the groundwork for a political economic analysis,
but is not itself political-economic. Three possible political economic syntheses are possible
resolutions of this dialectical system.

 The first is an economic synthesis, which has predominated in U.S. history and that of most
other industrial societies. In this arrangement, the state largely fosters capital accumulation,
and supports primarily the exchange values of ecological systems. Only severe ecosystem
disorganization is attended to, and only when it threatens productive systems state
"environmental" policies are localized and short-term.
 A second synthesis is one of managed scarcity, where the state attempts some minimal
regulation of access to ecosystems by various classes of users. State agencies and actors
seek to maintain some balancing of environmental exchange values and use values for
competing actors, class segments, and classes. To some extent, this characterizes the
modern era of "environmental protection" in the U.S. and elsewhere.
 A third synthesis is an ecological one. Here the state attaches a primacy to ecological
system protection, emphasizing use values (including the value of preservation of existing
species and habitats) over exchange values.

2.5 The determinants of the syntheses to these dialectical conflicts

1. Social, economic and political actors' interests in various elements of ecosystems, and

2. The power that each group of actors has in pushing its interests in various economic markets
and/or political arenas, and

3. Emergent institutional structures that reflect these interests and powers.

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Summary

The political economic perspective on environmental issues poses these as dialectical conflicts,
with competing sets of social interests in natural resources.

Use-values involving: - Direct utilization of natural resources for subsistence, habitat, or

recreation by citizens, versus

Exchange-values: - which require transformation of natural resources into commodities that can
be marketed. Dialectical struggles to maximize the "value" of ecosystems and their components
thus characterize modern societies, and especially modern states. The determinants of the
syntheses to these dialectical conflicts: 1.Social, economic and political actors' interests in
various elements of ecosystems, and 2. the power that each group of actors has in pushing its
interests in various economic markets and/or political arenas, and 3. Emergent institutional
structures that reflect these interests and powers. The Societal-Environmental Dialectic: -

 Societal production in industrial societies involves withdrawals from and additions to

natural ecosystems, in the process turning ecosystem elements into social resources,
producing exchange values and profits in the markets of the treadmill of production;
 Such withdrawals and additions disorganize the physical-biotic structure of these
ecosystems, while producing these exchange values;
 Ecosystem disorganization decreases the use values of ecosystems, restricting, among
others, social access to recreational habitats, health-sustaining biological supports (air,
water, food), and also future levels of social production (exchange values).

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References
Ayres, R. U. 1989. "Industrial Metabolism and Global Change: Reconciling the Socio sphere and
the Biosphere - Global Change, Industrial Metabolism, Sustainable development, Vulnerability."
International Social Science Journal 41 (3): 363-374. Barlett, D. L. & J.B.

Buttel, F. H. 1985. "Environmental Quality and the State: Some Political Sociological
Observations on Environmental Regulation." Pp. 167-188 in R.G. Braungart & M.M. Braungart
eds, Research in Political Sociology.

Greenwich, CT: JAI Press 1986. Economic Stagnation, Scarcity, and Changing Commitments to
Distributional Policies in Environmental Resource Issues.

Buttel, F. H. & P.J. Taylor 1992. "Environmental Sociology and Global Environmental Change:
A Critical Assessment." Society & Natural Resources.