In this lecture, Dr. Andrew Jorgenson discusses comparative international work that looks at patterns and environmental change, development, and globalization. He overview several theories of social and economic development and globalization and then explains the use of longitudinal methods to characterize global change. He reviews several dependent variables that are often used to characterize macro level global change and uses the example of the relationships between greenhouse gas emissions and economic growth to demonstrate analyses of longitudinal trends. Finally, he applies several theories from environmental sociology to the example to highlight how to use theory to interpret empirical patterns. Hello everyone, again. It's great to be here, this has been terrific.
I'm Andrew Jorgenson, professor of sociology and environmental studies at Boston College and today what I'm going to do you is I'm going to do something a little different in a sense from what the earlier presenters did this morning which gave incredible talks and it's really hard to follow up both of them, but I'm going to do my best. Rather than going into great depth into one or two studies, I'm going to give you a bit of an overview of a few slices of sociological research on environment, development, globalization and they're going to be pretty narrow slices and what I'm going to specifically do is I'm going to focus on work that uses longitudinal statistical modeling techniques where we're doing comparative international research, so the unit of analysis in most of this work is a nation state and one of the things I'd like to emphasize to is we're not a huge community of sociologists that do this particular type of environmental sociology, but we're a growing community, but I do think that we have an important role to play in doing sociological work on environment, development, globalization, but also
I think we have some things that we contribute to broader multi-disciplinary work on these sorts of socio-environmental questions and so most of the work I'm going to focus on today is really sort of sociologically grounded and published in sociology journals, but I want to give you an idea of how we ask these sorts of questions and some of the ways we try to come up with some tentative answers to some of these questions, so I'll talk a little bit about development and globalization. Folks yesterday did excellent summaries of the theories that I'm going to gauge that I can skip over a lot of that which is terrific thank you for that yesterday, and now that, the title that was in the program is a little misleading; I'm not going to spend a lot of time talking about multi-level studies because I don't want to give it away, I'm going to talk about multi-level analysis in the context of this work at the very end, so I'm going to really focus on longitudinal work, that before I do that though I do want to focus on some relatively new work that's being done that sort of merges these different ideas together and it's sociologically sort of grounded, but it's work that
I and my colleagues are really trying to sort of engage in the broader sustainability science community with this new work that we're doing on sustainability that focuses on relationships between environmental impacts or environmental resource use relative to human well-being and how socio-economic processes might shape that kind of sustainability dynamic. Okay, so a lot of this research though is sort of interested in search of broad dynamics and this is, I'm embarrassed to put up this map up after we saw these incredible maps earlier today, but this was my one and only attempt at making a map about, well over 10 years ago and this is just looking at this idea, there's this sort of long standing argument out there about these ideas about environmental load displacement or these sorts of consumption environment degradation paradoxes when we look at these relationships between higher consuming, more affluent nations relative to environmental impacts within their borders and so this is just looking at, you know, sort of spatially this general pattern, a very simplified way of, in general as you probably know, if we look at something like the ecological footprint per capita of nations which are really highly correlated with their levels of economic development there tends to be a negative correlation between that and deforestation within the borders of those nations simultaneously and so this sort of is an example of these kind of inverse relationships that raised a series of questions. First though, what is development?
Now I could spend all day long talking about this; I'm part of also this sociology of development community which there's been kind of a revitalization within sociology of development in recent years which is pretty exciting and, you know, like other disciplines that study development and other things were involved in these, you know, big discussions about well, what we do we mean by development what is development conceptually how do we measure this and well it's controversial and there's a lot of different ways in which you can conceptualize what development is and how we can operationalize a development.
Take this concept and quantify it somehow and, you know, the typical way that most folks do it in research is by using measures of economic development and so a lot of the work that I'm going to present today, that's what we do, but it's important to recognize that development is a sort of multifaceted kind of construct and we can look at things like human well-being measures as a metric of development or some of these indices like the Human Development Index as well and some of you are probably familiar with some of these from different disciplinary perspectives some of the other sorts of definitions of what development is and I highly recommend this, it, this is in the new issue of the Annual Review of Sociology that Jocelyn Viterna, and one of her graduate students that has this excellent annual review piece on the sociology of development and they really get into sort of the history of this field, which I think overlaps quite a bit with environmental sociology.
Now structural globalization or globalization, specifically structural globalization we've talked about a bit yesterday, the work that I'm going to talk about, the empirical work is really trying to sort of link these ideas are structural globalization with environmental outcomes because like the development literature globalization is a very fuzzy concept, it drives some of us nuts like what in the heck do you mean by globalization in the first place and I really, truthfully, and I'm inspired by the work of Chris Chase-Dunn and Charles Tilly who's a brilliant sociologist or was a brilliant sociologist and others that try to think of it from a structural sense and to think about, it goes back to this,
I think you used interaction networks yesterday ecological interaction networks was brought up yesterday, but from a sociological perspective and we're talking about structural globalization, we're talking about kinds of social interaction networks and the way that we try to operationalize is whether we're talking about economic globalization or political globalization or some form of cultural globalization is if they're more social interactions between let's say nation states relative to within nation states and that means that globalization is increasing, but if interactions within a society are increasing at the same rate as interactions between societies the doesn't mean that there's an increase within globalization, this allows us to try to operationalize this using quantitative measures.
You saw this slide yesterday, I'm going to throw it up there again cause this is a very pathbreaking analysis in sociology employing this idea of structural globalization looking at trade globalization historically and we see that there appears to be a long-term trend surprise, surprise of the globalization of trade which overlaps quite a bit if we look at the same sort of process looking at the globalization of production using other kinds of economic indicators. So this has also been done to look at, let's say if using foreign investment flows as sort of a proxy for the globalization of production or just investment globalization and if you do that you see a very similar sort of process where there's somewhat of a cycle, but there's a long-term trend that really shoots up and this is also tied to,
I should mention this long standing debate within sociology about is some, is this globalization thing something new or like an ongoing historical process and this sort of research would suggest that, well it's both, there's something that's qualitatively and quantitatively new to it, but it is also at the same time part of the sort of long-term sort of unfolding processes as well. This is a study out of the world society tradition and I'm lumping this into a, as a global or globalization kind of theory, but looking at these sorts of through time the cumulative numbers in emergences of these different kinds of governmental or civil society groups and other sorts of related processes and, you know, the lines going up, all these lines are going up, so this suggests, well some would suggest that this is reflective of this sort of emerging world environmental regime that's consistent with this sort of emergent world society dynamic.
Environment, Development, and Globalization - Part 01
Environment, Development, and Globalization - Part 02
Environment, Development, and Globalization - Part 03
Environment, Development, and Globalization - Part 04
0 Comments