Political Economy of the Global Environment

* Book: Jennifer Clapp and Peter Dauvergne in their book Paths to a Green World: The Political Economy of the Global Environment (MIT Press, 2005)

Discussion

Christian Arnsperger:

"In terms of the very enlightening taxonomy offered by Jennifer Clapp and Peter Dauvergne in their book Paths to a Green World: The Political Economy of the Global Environment (MIT Press, 2005), I would locate my work in a zone at roughly equal distance from the Institutionalists, the Social Greens, and the Bioenvironmentalists -- probably with a somewhat stronger weight put on the two former ones than on the latter. Like many institutionalists, I strongly believe that institutional reform at both a global and a local level is crucial, but that such reform can't possibly boil down to making markets work more "efficiently." Like most if not all social greens, I am convinced that ecological and human questions are deeply intertwined (so that purely technological fixes are, if anything, rare) and that we will probably not save the planet if we don't do something about the inequality-generating, structurally unfair features of the current economic system. While I obviously also share many bioenvironmentalists' concern for reducing global growth and for dealing with the pathologies of overconsumption, as well as for relocalization, I have become rather wary of too strident calls for across-the-board de-globalization as a panacea. Rather, I'd like us economists, along with our colleagues from international economic law, to be able to work out regulatory schemes that maintain some degree of international trade and international capital flows, but harness these powerful mechanisms in favor of selective relocalization and reasonable (as well as democratically sound) footprint and growth reduction -- a concern that is surely shared by most institutionalists, though not by the overwhelming majority of what Clapp and Dauvergne call market liberals." (http://eco-transitions.blogspot.com/2011/06/what-transition-part-4-renewing.html)