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1. A Critical Review of Global Political Economy from an Eco-Holistic Perspective
- State University of New York Press
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3 Chapter 1 A Critical Review of Global Political Economy from an Eco-Holistic Perspective The subject of international or global political economy (IPE or GPE) has established itself as a core International Relations (IR) element in the past fifteen years. However, the IPE/GPE discourse and the environmental discourse within IR have more or less existed side by side and have not crossfertilized despite obvious linkages. The aim of this chapter is to outline the environmental dimension of core IPE/GPE approaches or, in the absence of a clear environmental dimension, to analyze the potential for an environmental component of these approaches. Although the approach of this book is based on the concept of a global political economy, both the terms IPE and GPE shall be used for literature review purposes. As substantial parts of recent GPE writings have been subsumed under the umbrella of globalization , the topic of globalization will also be included in this analysis. This chapter provides an overview of the different approaches to, and theories of, globalization as the latest variant of GPE and assesses their usefulness in providing a holistic, including ecological, analysis of existing political economy trends under the new forms of economic organization that have come into being since the 1970s. Since this chapter serves as an introduction to both subject matters, it is kept necessarily basic so as to familiarize the IPE/GPE audience with environmental discourse and the environmental audience with IPE/GPE concerns. There are no direct environmental approaches to IPE/GPE, which is a clear gap in the literature and this book is one attempt to fill this vacuum. There are many empirical accounts of the impact of certain aspects of GPE on the environment or of certain actors. However, none of this translates into a theory or a conceptual framework of environmental GPE although many of the existing GPE approaches could easily incorporate an environmental dimension if amended accordingly. Empirical analyses of the environmental impact of GPE range from studies of the institutional frameworks set up to dealing with environmental problems 4 Globalization and the Environment to the analysis of particular problems and their direct origins. An example of the latter kind of study is Peter Dauvergne’s analysis of the environmental consequences of loggers and degradation in the Asia-Pacific (2000) while examples of the former kind of literature would be analyses of World Bank or World Trade Organization (WTO) policies and how they relate to environmental degradation (Williams, 2001). Most environmental political economy analysis, however, can still be found in the field of regime-type studies of particular institutional frameworks that deal with environmental problems (Young, 1997; Haas, Keohane, & Levy, 1995). This book will take a different angle and the critical review of GPE approaches in this chapter acts as an introduction to the conceptual framework that will be developed in chapters 2–4. First, reflecting on the growing importance of the process of globalization within GPE, is it possible to define the term globalization within global political economy? Given the widespread use of this term for the contemporary organization of the global political economy, its definition and a discussion of the validity of the concept is an obvious starting point for this review (and indeed for a book on environment and GPE). Then the chapter will address several schools of thought that have emerged as the predominant ones of the past decade, namely the historical approach, the liberal approach, and the globalization skeptics. In addition, environmental approaches to global political economy/globalization will be introduced and assessed in this context. It is generally agreed that the 1970s have seen fundamental changes in the way in which the international political economy is organized, leading to a more global approach both in IPE/GPE and environment (Strange, 1996; Scholte, 1993; Mittelman, 1997; Lipschutz, 1996). What is debatable, however , is if these changes are deserving of the term globalization that they have been allocated. Among IPE/GPE scholars the age of globalization is taken to be the post-Fordist era that has engendered economics of flexibility, increasing trade liberalization, financial deregulation, an increasingly global division of labor, and a transnational capitalist class (Sklair, 1998; Lipiètz, 1997, Strange, 1996). Although the phenomenon of globalization itself is contested, these changes in the international political economy are not. So in a way there are two parallel debates about globalization as a phenomenon: whether it exists or not and whether the 1970s changes in the global/international...