I want to quickly, I ask that you sort of look at this trend and look at these time points and then let me just back up to this really fast and notice this time trend; I, we think that they're pretty interrelated. We think that this kind of global trade network, production network dynamic is also partly explains the increase in effective development on per capita carbon emissions in developing nations; we don't think that these are separate dynamics because we know that global production and trade sorts of dynamics contribute to economic development, they do, I mean there's a lot of empirical evidence, but this suggests that perhaps it contributes to environmentally, overall environmentally harmful forms of economic development; it doesn't have to, it looks like this at this level of aggregation, that's a little bit of a defense, in defense of ecological modernization, things could occur a little differently in particular sectors or particular facilities and I wanted to bring up this example cause I think it's very interesting, this is from a book co-authored by Timmons Roberts who's a sociologist and Bradley Parks, who I believe is an applied economist now working in the public sector; I can't believe it's already been almost 10 years since this book came out, this is,
I highly recommend this book because they focus on climate change, mitigation, adaptation, and responsibility like who's most vulnerable, who's most responsible, and who's most willing to do something about it from a, sort of a critical sociological perspective and also they do some stuff on risk too on climate-related risks too which I think is pretty interesting. But what they find too is they do a lot of things in their work on looking at sort of drivers of emissions and they look at a variety of emissions including cumulative emissions through time which a lot of folks think is really important, so lumping together cumulative emissions for nations like over a 50-year time period as well as those three other measures that I talked about and they find that a really interesting finding in terms of trade that applies to all four of these CO2 measures and this is something that I think is overlooked in their study;
I think it's because it's the bottom of their table in the book partly, and I've asked Timmons about this and he even is like oh I forgot we did that; I'm like, but it's so interesting because they find though that in general and how they did this, this is just looking at the amount of trade relative to the size of GDP of nations, but they use some interactions and they find that poor nations that participate more in international trade this is sort of correlated with more CO2 across these different ways of measuring CO2 while wealthier nations that trade more emit less than those who traded less. If we look at measures of foreign investment in different sectors, let's say the secondary sectors manufacturing foreign investment and this is something also that is sort of a, it might seem trivial to you, but it's kind of a big deal in the sociology of development literature more broadly looking at the impacts of foreign investment where there's a long tradition in sociology doing this,
It goes back to the dependency school that Tom Rudel talked about yesterday where there's a huge debate looking at whether or not foreign investment is good for economic development, is it good for enhancing human well-being, it's this big ongoing debate and it got really ugly and the results were well it depends, you know, it depends on a lot of stuff. Well one of the things though that I think is important in looking at relation, the environmental impacts of foreign investment though that also is a limitation of all that prior work is well, if we're going to look at different environmental impacts of foreign investment, we probably need to disaggregate foreign investment,
Investment in different things like different sectors of the economy eh, which is pretty difficult to obtain data on this to do this type of longitudinal large-scale analysis, but if we do that though we see that if we look at let's say foreign investment and manufacturing, it appears to have a non-trivial effect on growth in carbon emissions in developing nations and a non-trivial effect on growth in industrial organic water pollution as two examples that are things that are tied to manufacturing sector activities.
That doesn't mean it has to be that way, this is just sort of an overall observable empirical relationship that we see across different model estimation techniques. Now if we turn the page though and look at the primary sector and if we look at primary sector foreign investment, so this is investment in agriculture, mining, logging, forestry, etc. and then we also look at the same time the vertical flow of primary sector exports from developing nations to developed nations and this is from an analysis of deforestation from 1995 to 2005 we see that both of these things, these are standardized regression coefficients, so you can compare the relative magnitude effects that both foreign investment and the primary sector and also the vertical flow of primary sector exports appear to have non-trivial observable effects on deforestation using these data that Tom has a lot of concerns about as he should, but they're the best data we have to do this kind of analysis, but what's interesting though is this is while taking into account how much you're exporting the primary sector, also how large your primary sector is relative to the size of your economy, so this emphasizes though these sort of relational dynamics of trade and production and extraction we think. Okay, world society it's like I'm not trying to ignore them, but I'm running out of time, but this is, in recent years, a lot of world society, newer, younger generation of world society scholars like students of Frank and Schofer and Hironaka back from that fame in 2000 ASR piece.
I've sort of answered the call and said, okay, well let's try to figure out ways in which we can assess whether or not this emerging world environmental regime has any observable environmental benefits; this work drives some folks nuts. I and I want to throw that out there; I have a very good colleague in my department, hi Brian Gareau, who is very, who actually does environment and development from more of an anthropological perspective and so he does very in-depth ethnographic work looking at how in these sorts of world society dynamics on the ground, well it's a long story, but he's critical of this sort of stuff, but this sort of research though what they do is they either use these composite measures of world environmental regime, penetration where they lump together and I don't mean that in a flippant way, but they sort of add together these different measures of environmental INGO presence, environmental IGOs and these other sorts of things or they use just one component of that like how many environmental INGOs have members within a given society and some of you prob-, I can tell from the body language you're going huh, now the thing is is I want to give them credit for trying to figure this out and I think that there's still some work to be done to figure this out, but when you look at those sorts of measures arguably as a form of political or cultural or civil society globalization however you want to conceptualize this world society perspective, they do see actually Schofer and Hironaka found if they looked at carbon emissions and deforestation for large samples of nations, they found that this sort of emer-, if, the more penetrated or embedded a nation is penetrated, embedded in the world environmental regime, that appears to be negatively correlated with growth in carbon emissions and negatively correlated with deforestation and they suggest well this is suggestive of the notion that becoming more embedded in the world environmental regime can have observable environmental impacts and their explanation for this is incredibly complex, these different sorts of pathways, right.
Now another recent study done by one of their former students sort of spins this on its head and says, well let's look at whether or not world environmental regimes environmental impacts vary by whether a country is in the core, the semi periphery, or the periphery, which I think is a pretty interesting thing ironically mentioned yesterday that world society, father, the father of world society theory also trained a lot of world system scholars, and now they're sort of coming together which I like to see, but Kristen, this is a very interesting study, so she finds that the effects of world society immigration on synthetic fertilizer and pesticide use varies by whether or not a nation is in a core, semi periphery or periphery and that it's more beneficial in the core and less beneficial in the periphery which I think raises a lot of interesting implications.
So I wanted to leave on a sort of, I thought this was an area of emerging literature that you might find interesting, hopefully you found this other stuff interesting too, somewhat interesting. So and this is something that is sort of a new area of sociological work that is really multidisciplinary, but it's sociologists trying to contribute to these broader questions about sustainability, but one of the things that's neat about this though is this is sort of going back to full circle, some work that was done by sociologists, I'm really proud to say some sociologists got published in Science back in the year.
I was born and so Mazur and Rosa in this article in Science back in 1974 during this period of time said, this is really interesting, they were looking at levels of energy used versus measures of human well-being across nations and they made a really interesting point that was considered very controversial at that time that hey folks, nations don't have to overall consume a lot of energy to maintain a relatively high level of human well-being for their population, you don't need a lot of energy to live well folks. In 1974, that freaked a lot of people out and it was pretty controversial and there's a lot of debate about this back then and then this sort of fell off of the radar of sociologists and Mazur and Rosa didn't do much work on this for quite a while, but in recent years though, some of us have been sort of asking these questions again and trying to operationalize this a little bit differently and use some updated methods and this is really looking at these measures of the carbon intensity well-being or the ecological intensity well-being and this is really a ratio between some sort of environmental impact versus some sort of objective or subjective measure of human well-being and so you can sort of see here what this could look like and some initial questions we're asking is, well if reducing this ecological or carbon intensity well-being is a pathway towards enhancing sustainability broadly defined,
How can societies get there? Is development one way to do it? And one interesting study that was done a few years ago by Tom Dietz, who's an ecologist by training, but hangs out with all of us sociologists and is in a sociology department; they published an article in Applied Geography a few years ago and he was a longstanding friend and collaborator with Gene Rosa who passed a few years ago, but they asked this question though and they engaged the environmental Kuznets curve tradition; they said is there a Kuznets curve dynamic here, they found the opposite, that there is no Kuznets curve when you look at development and the ecological intensity well-being rather than seeing this frowny face that you would expect with the Kuznets curve, they saw a smiley face sort of dynamic which is they suggested the opposite, so this is your fancy statistical analysis and this is a really hard to figure out figured looking at the correlation between the two, but it does sort of look like a smiley face. And related to that though and sort of going back to some methods that.
I talked about earlier using longitudinal methods to assess whether or not the effects of development on outcomes change through time and a study that I did 2 years ago in Nature Climate Change, I asked this question well, what about the effect of development on the carbon intensity well-being? What is it? Does it vary by region, regional context? And does it change through time? And so this sort of graphs the findings and we see that yeah there's some big regional differences and these relationships also changed through time from a sustainability perspective in the wealthiest nations, well economic development does not appear to be a pathway to reducing the carbon intensity well-being. The effect isn't getting bigger, but it's not getting smaller and nations in Latin America and in Asia where these are among the most rapidly developing nations that from a sustainability perspective this trend is problematic, defining things this way and nations within Africa we see this sort of stable flat effect and then the trend starting to go up a little bit which I think again like other things that I put up here, I think that this raises a lot more questions than it provides answers about what might be explaining some of these sorts of regional level dynamics, but this is an emerging area of sociological research where we're really trying to contribute to broader sustainability science discussions, bringing in sociological theories and methods that we're using in our work;
The last thing I wanted to say is multi-level analysis cause I've been talking about longitudinal analysis because something that some, a lot of folks in our discipline advocate for is that if we're going to study environmental bads, arguably we should be doing this at the nation-state level, arguably our dependent variable should be at smaller scales and for studying something like pollution or carbon emissions, arguably we'd want to look at things at the city or state or province levels within nations or you'd want to look at facility level outcomes as a dependent variable where we're taking into account broader, contextual factors at these higher levels of aggregation.
You might be asking yourselves well Andrew, how come you folks haven't been doing this? Well the shorter answer is we haven't had the data to really do this kind of work this way across many nat-, facilities across many nations. The ni-, the take home point and this is sort of a primer for something I'll talk about tomorrow, some of us are now being able to obtain data to do this at least looking at facility level outcomes across thousands of facilities nested within over a hundred nations around the world, so I'll talk about some of this tentative work tomorrow in my lightning talk thing. Plug for the Sociology of Development Journal, it's been out for a year now that I am the co-editor of, I promised I'd plug this, it's a sociology journal, but highly multi-disciplinary, we're very interested in sustainability research, the kinds of work that a lot of you are doing and it's published by University of California Press. Please check it out and please consider submitting your work to us.
Thanks so much.
Environment, Development, and Globalization - Part 01
Environment, Development, and Globalization - Part 02
Environment, Development, and Globalization - Part 03
Environment, Development, and Globalization - Part 04
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