Political ecology has recently seen a long-overdue movement toward studies of environmental conflicts in advanced capitalist societies, far from the rural African, Latin American, and Asian societies ...that constitute the great majority of studies in the field. This shift has raised questions about the commonalities and differences between ‘first-world’ and ‘third-world’ political ecologies - questions that present broader challenges and opportunities for the field. The question of commonalities and difference in ‘first-world’ and ‘third-world’ political ecologies is hemispheric, recent research in political ecology consists primarily of local-scale studies, leaving the field poorly positioned to address such broad-scale comparative questions. Appropriately, local political ecology studies challenge the stability of the ‘first world’ and ‘third world’ as meaningful geographic frames posed in these questions; but in dismantling these frames without suggesting alternatives for broader-scale analysis there is danger of moving political ecology toward even greater emphasis on specificity and difference and pushing consideration of broader-scale processes farther into the background. This is a serious challenge in a field already criticized for sprawling incoherence. This article argues that one response to these challenges is to reconsider the concept of ‘regional’ political ecologies. Regional approaches can retain the greatest strengths of recent political ecology in revealing the importance of local-scale social dynamics while situating these dynamics within broader scales of regional (and global) processes - providing greater coherence while avoiding such problematic frames as the ‘first’ and ‘third’ world. To illustrate, a brief case study and discussion are presented that consider a regional political ecology of the rural American West.
Liberal capitalist polities are being held up as the ultimate civilizational achievement precisely at a point in time when the energy-demanding built environments and growth imperatives of these ...societies are threatened by global climate change and the coming end of cheap and abundant carbon energy. Throughout the twentieth century, this pattern of energy-intensive social reproduction was largely shaped by the oil and gas sector creating what I call a petro-market civilization. However, given the challenges presented by peak oil and global warming, transitioning to a low-carbon or green energy future has gathered increasing attention and investment. In this paper, I use a power theory of value approach to offer a preliminary assessment of whether this transition is likely given the entrenched power of the oil and gas sector in the economy. Although the twenty-first century may bear witness to a renewable and sustainable energy paradigm, current evidence suggests that investors are continuing to capitalize an unsustainable future premised upon non-renewable fossil fuels.
Within the period of modern economic growth, there have been distinct and important phases of development. Such phases have characteristics which put constraints on the performance of individual ...countries, whether they be fast or slow growing. The present paper deals with developments since 1870 in 16 of the more advanced capitalist countries, and divides the past century’s experience into four phases. The author looks at long-term performance records, interruptions to growth, phases of growth and finally explanations of differences in momentum between phases. JEL: O11, P10
This article identifies the successful global anticolonial struggle against racist European rule as 'the most significant event of the twentieth century.' Yet the article also sees the economic ...strength of capitalist countries and corporations as having significantly qualified any such victory -- with 'neocolonialism' (under American hegemony) and, more recently, 'recolonization' (by an increasingly globalized and multicentered capitalism) having reinforced capital's rule in Africa while also further promoting the privileged self-aggrandizement of local elites. John S. Saul draws on the insights of Frantz Fanon and Amilcar Cabral, in particular, to anatomize the 'failed liberation' of most African territories, including those in southern Africa, with their marked inability to better the lot of 'the wretched of the earth' within their borders being readily apparent. Moreover, this has been as true of South Africa and of the vast mass of that country's black population as it has been elsewhere. The article also registers, however, the widespread popular resistance to such an outcome that has now surfaced there and the demands for a more meaningful 'liberation' that this has brought into focus. In sum, while acknowledging the very real accomplishment of southern Africans in liberating themselves from the most heinous forms of Western tyranny, Saul underscores -- against the claims of the Nelson Mandelas and the Thabo Mbekis -- the relatively shallow nature of the 'success' achieved by the antiapartheid and related regional struggles. He then concludes by affirming that a 'next liberation struggle' for a more meaningful and inclusive freedom does indeed continue, not least in South Africa itself. Reprinted by permission of Cambridge University Press. An electronic version of this article can be accessed via the internet at http://journals.cambridge.org
We apply
Leeson and Dean’s (2009) method for studying democratic dominoes to capitalist spillovers to compare the rates at which capitalism and democracy spread between countries. We find that ...capitalism and democracy spread at approximately the same modest rate.
► We compare the rates at which capitalism and democracy spread between countries. ► We find that capitalism and democracy spread at approximately the same modest rate. ► Similar forces may underlie capitalist and democratic spillovers between countries.
The recent financial crisis has severely shaken confidence in the conventional wisdom of economic liberalism, giving rise to debate about the appropriate direction of theory and policy. In this ...context, the sharply divergent experiences of the four main Anglo-Saxon banking systems suggest that the crisis may not so much be one of liberal capitalism per se as it is of the neoclassical variety that characterises the British and American systems. Whereas these banking systems were very badly affected by the crisis, the Canadian and Australian systems were not. Our analysis suggests that this can be explained by differences in the way that economic liberalism was interpreted and translated into policy in the four countries during the period preceding the crisis. It also suggests that broad classifications of national business systems into 'liberal market' and other varieties of capitalism do not capture their inherent diversity, and that financial market liberalisation does not necessarily lead to instability, particularly when it is accompanied by appropriate supervision and prudential regulation.
Distributing political resources more equally is the greatest challenge facing modern democracies, if democracy is defined as political equality among all citizens, the definition of democratic ...theorist Robert Dahl. Unfortunately, this goal is difficult to achieve in capitalist market economies, which, ironically, constitute both a necessary condition for and a constant threat to modern democracy. In this, contemporary Indonesia is no different than any other democracy, past or present. Here, Liddle proposes rudiments of a theory of action that would improve the quality of democracy in Indonesia. Reprinted by permission of Cornell University, South East Asia Program Publications
What is today touted as the 'Beijing consensus' or the 'China model' is nothing more than a resized version of the 'Singapore model' or an attempt to revive the developmental state. In particular, ...the 'Beijing consensus' assumes a greater role for the state in the economy under authoritarian rule. Since Deng Xiaoping's Southern Tour in 1992, Chinese academics, politicians, and administrators have flocked to the soft-authoritarian city-state and the result has not only been a sprawling discourse but also a number of political reforms aimed at increasing the effectiveness of the state and strengthening one-party rule. An analysis of this discourse shows that while providing Chinese policy-makers with many important ideas, these studies reveal serious weaknesses in China's attempt to follow the 'Singapore model'. Instead of having found an alternative authoritarian state-capitalist model, the 'Beijing consensus' is only a transitory phase.
A key policy response to the downward pressure on wages of the lowest-paid workers in the developed economies of the capitalist world has been the introduction of meanstested cash transfer schemes by ...which to top up low wages. Findings from a study of the experiences of the beneficiaries of a particular scheme (the United Kingdom's Working Tax Credit) suggest that, although schemes may serve to relieve the poverty of low-paid workers and their families, the extent to which they promote the accessibility of 'decent work' is ambiguous.
This study argues that the jargon of inauthenticity in religious studies, which is characterised by references to 'fake', 'hyperreal' and 'invented' religions, is symptomatic of a crisis of method in ...the study of religion. In the historiography of the state, the term 'invented' signalled the emergence of practices and institutions that harnessed and limited modes of assembly through the development of technologies of government that marked a radical break with the past. In religious studies, although the term is taken to signal the emergence of new sites of religiosity, the idealist methods characteristic of phenomenology and Weberian sociology, which are typically used to study both them and the postmodern or late capitalist societies in which they have emerged, have generated an impoverished understanding of their significance. I argue that fake, hyperreal and invented religions can be situated as part of a shift in the sites of religion in the context of rapid postmodern transformation. Drawing from recent studies of such shifts in East Asian urban contexts, I argue that the real meaning of the new sites of religion lies not in allusions to simulations, hyperrealities or consumption, but as agentive nodes for generating new forms of public association and assembly.
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