Seeing environmental injustices: the mechanics, devices and assumptions of environmental sustainability indices and indicators

At the heart of any colonization project, and therefore any move to de-colonize, are ways of seeing nature and society, that then allow particular ways of governing each. This is plainly visible in a number of tools that exist to measure progress towards (or regress from) environmental sustainability. The tools use indices and indicators constructed mostly by environmental scientists and ecologists. As such, they are not neutral scientific instruments: they reflect the worldviews of their creators. These worldviews depend on three dimensions: the values they prioritize, the explanatory theories they use and the futures they envision. Through these means different tools produce conflicting notions of the sustainability of our economies and societies. In this article, we shed light onto the theoretical and epistemological assumptions that lie behind key international sustainability indices and indicators: the Environmental Performance Index,Domestic Material Consumption, Material Intensity, the Material Footprint, the Carbon Footprint, the Ecological Footprint and CO2 emissions (territorial). The variables included in these indices, the way they are measured, aggregated and weighted all imply a particular way of understanding the relationships between economy, society and environment. This divergence is most clearly visible in the fact that some indices are negatively correlated with each other. Where one index might plot growing environmental sustainability, another shows its decline. Our results highlight that those devices and the theories informing them are particularly interesting for way how colonialism is materialized. Some of these measurements hide the material roots of prosperity and the ecological (and economic) distributional conflicts exported to the poorer countries by the global North, and others show how its production and consumption levels are reliant upon a socio-ecological 'subsidy' imposed on Southern countries. These subsidies represent injustices that present a primafacie case for decolonizing indices and indicators of environmental governance.

Crisis Politics in Surplus Countries

This chapter investigates how distributional conflicts between economic interest groups interacted with the preferences and priorities of voters and political elites in shaping crisis outcomes in surplus countries. Leveraging public opinion data, qualitative evidence, and information gathered in thirty interviews with policymakers and group representatives for a comparative case study, the chapter analyzes why surplus-country governments remained hesitant toward bailouts and alternative financing and why—even though interest group conflicts about internal adjustment policies looked very similar—Germany, Austria and the Netherlands varied in the extent to which they engaged in domestic expansion during the crisis. It shows that gridlock amongst interest groups about how to adjust internally is especially likely to result in non-adjustment in contexts in which voters give little priority to boosting domestic demand and domestic political elites are able to design crisis responses in concordance with their own ideological convictions. However, in contexts in which the domestic economic climate makes economic reforms become a politically salient issue, policymakers have large incentives to overrule the gridlock amongst interest groups. As a result, even highly export-oriented countries implement measures that boost domestic demand and lead to a meaningful rebalancing of the current account.

Pathological Adjustment, Structural Change, and the Welfare State

Once the period of high growth had passed, the welfare state maintained wage coordination by providing labor and capital with the resources to alleviate their deepening distributional conflicts—with an increasingly negative impact on the overall functioning of the German variety of capitalism. The fact that the welfare state provided social actors with the possibility of externalizing the growing costs of adjusting to the period of “diminished expectations” led to a pathological pattern of ever higher non-wage labor costs, poor job growth, and high structural unemployment. This contributed to Germany’s “welfare-without-work”—and “budgets-without-balance”—malaise in the 1970s and 1980s.

Theory

This chapter theorizes differentiated integration based on the major schools of thought in the study of European integration: liberal intergovernmentalism, neofunctionalism, and postfunctionalism. The chapter distinguishes differentiation from uniform integration and non-integration. It explains demand for differentiation on the basis of cross-national heterogeneity in member state preferences and capacities. It then explores the effects of externalities, decision rules, supranational actors, and integration norms on the supply of differentiated integration. Finally, the chapter distinguishes two logics of differentiation. Constitutional differentiation arises in the context of EU treaty reforms and is driven by resistance to the supranational integration of core state powers among the Union’s Eurosceptic and wealthy member states. Instrumental differentiation is predominantly a feature of enlargement negotiations and results from distributional conflicts and differences in governance capacity and wealth between existing and prospective member states.

Rethinking the economics of water: an assessment

Water is rising on the policy agenda as population growth and climate change intensify scarcity, shocks, and access inequalities. The conventional economic policy recommendations—privatization, pricing, and property rights—have struggled due to a failure to account adequately for the politics of water and the associated distributional conflicts. We identify distinctive social and physical characteristics of water supply and demand, and explore their implications for three central areas of water policy: financing infrastructure, pricing, and property rights reform. Growing dependence on groundwater and non-networked water supplies exacerbates these challenges and reinforces the need to rethink the economics of water and tackle the political challenges head on. Meeting the water sustainable development goals would require institutional and technological innovations to supply, allocate, and manage water, as well as a sustained political and financial commitment to address those who might be left behind.

Heterogeneous Effects of Development Aid on Violent Unrest in Postwar Countries: Village-Level Evidence from Nepal

Many countries experience massive aid surges when civil wars end. However, operational contexts tend to remain particularly sensitive due to a combination of persisting local-level cleavages and low-quality state institutions. Consequently, aid provision risks inciting distributional conflicts and violent unrest—most notably when resources are injected into areas of high social heterogeneity or particularly weak state administration. I investigate this argument in the case of postwar Nepal. I combine geo-coded aid data with village-level information on various forms of violent unrest, as well as on social demographics and institutional quality. The panel analyses indicate positive short-term effects of aid on social unrest. More fine-grained estimations reveal that this effect is driven by a short-term escalation of violence against nonstate actors—in particular in ethnically fractionalized villages under the administration of weakly performing local-level state institutions. Descriptive cross-country analyses indicate that aid may have similar violence-inducing effects in other postwar contexts.

Does Ethnic Inequality Increase State Repression?

We argue that economic inequality between ethnic groups increases state repression. We contend that a high level of ethnic inequality fuels distributional conflicts between poor and rich ethnic groups. It also increases the salience of ethnic identity and promotes ethnic mobilization to challenge the status quo. This between-group tension creates collective grievances for ethnic groups, mounts challenges to incumbent governments and increases perceived threats to governments. The greater the perceived threats, the more likely that governments will employ coercive measures. We further argue that the impact of ethnic inequality on state repression is moderated by the level of democracy. Various institutional mechanisms in democracies increase the costs of repression, reducing leaders’ incentives to employ coercive measures, even when facing high levels of ethnic inequality. Evidence from 152 countries between 1992 and 2011 supports our arguments.

The ‘state’ of degrowth: Economic growth and the making of state hegemony in Turkey

Critical perspectives on economic growth have laid bare the fragility of the assumed link between material growth and socio-ecological wellbeing. The appeal of economic growth, however, goes beyond the economic sphere. As a societal goal, growth is often mobilized to pre-empt and/or co-opt opposition around issues of social justice and redistribution. Not only does the constitution of growth as a collective goal serve to unite the internally fragmented sphere of the social and brush aside (class-based) distributional conflicts, but it also enables the distribution of material concessions to subordinate classes for eliciting their consent. The degrowth proposal should thus more broadly tackle the material and discoursive ways in which growth enables the reproduction of contemporary political-economic systems. This paper argues that the notion of growth functions as a powerful ideal that shapes state–society relationships and social-collective imaginations. It demonstrates this by discussing the making of state in Turkey through a Gramscian perspective, where the notion of economic growth is deeply imprinted in the broader practices of the state to legitimize its existence and dominates the social imaginary in a way that cannot be easily dismissed. Against this backdrop, the possibility of not only effectuating, but also imagining and desiring degrowth would call for a radical reconfiguration of state–society relationships. Within this context, the Kurdish Freedom Movement’s project of Democratic Economy emerges as an alternative, both to the nation-state paradigm and to the imperative of economic growth.

A SECOND-GENERATION STRUCTURALIST TRANSFORMATION PROBLEM: THE RISE OF THE INERTIAL INFLATION HYPOTHESIS

The paper analyzes the rise of the Latin American-based inertial inflation theory. Starting in the 1950s, various traditions in economics purported to explain the concept of “inflation inertia.” Contributions ranging from Celso Furtado and Mário Henrique Simonsen to James Tobin anticipated key aspects of what later became the inertial inflation hypothesis, building it into either mathematical or conceptual frameworks compatible with the then contemporaneous macroeconomic theory. In doing so, they bridged the analytical gap with the North American developments while maintaining the key features of the CEPAL (United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean) approach, such as distributional conflicts and local institutional details. These contributions eventually influenced the second moment of the monetarist–structuralist controversy that unraveled in the 1980s. The paper also highlights how later works by structuralist economists gradually stripped the inertial inflation approach of its previous substance and form, thereby unearthing tensions among Latin American structuralists that led to the eventual decline of this research program.

Journal of the History of Economic Thought Preprints – A SECOND-GENERATION STRUCTURALIST TRANSFORMATION PROBLEM: THE RISE OF THE INERTIAL INFLATION HYPOTHESIS

The paper analyzes the rise of the Latin American-based inertial inflation theory. Starting in the 1950s, various traditions in economics purported to explain the concept of “inflation inertia”. Contributions ranging from Celso Furtado and M.H. Simonsen to James Tobin anticipated key aspects of what later became the inertial inflation hypothesis, building it into either mathematical or conceptual frameworks compatible with the then contemporaneous macroeconomic theory. In doing so, they bridged the analytical gap with the North-American developments whilst maintaining the key features of the CEPAL approach, such as distributional conflicts and local institutional details. These contributions eventually influenced the second moment of the monetarist-structuralist controversy that unraveled in the 1980s. The paper also highlights how later works by structuralist economists gradually stripped the inertial inflation approach of its previous substance and form, thereby unearthing tensions among Latin-American structuralists that led to the eventual decline of this research program.