Environment and Modernity in Transitional China: Frontiers of Ecological Modernization

The process of institutionalizing environmental interests and considerations in Western (especially, but not only, European) industrialized societies has been reflected and theorized upon by social scientists, many of whom have adopted the ‘ecological modernization’ framework. One of the key questions on the research agenda of ecological modernization is its appropriateness for developing or industrializing countries in other parts of the world. This contribution analyses to what extent environmental reforms in contemporary China can be interpreted as ecological modernization. It focuses on the similarities and differences between Chinese and European modes or styles of ecological modernization with respect to the role of state institutions, market dynamics, civil society pressure and international integration.     

Trans-Pacific Wood Chip Exports: the Rise of Chile

This study analyses the background to the rise of Chile as a major wood chip exporter, and assesses the environmental impact and relative economic importance of the Chilean wood chip industry. Chile is acting as a ‘surrogate’ for lost Australian hardwood chip exports to Japan. Compared to other countries, the wood chip industry in Chile has had a disproportionate impact on its remnant native forests and is essentially predicated on unsustainable forest management practices. Despite this, the relative economic importance of Chile's export wood chip industry is low when compared to value-added forest product export industries such as chemical pulp.     

From China's Urban Social Space to Social and Environmental Justice

A senior American specialist on China and noted geographer argues that the preoccupation of China geographers' with empirical analyses of that country's dramatic economic, social, and urban transformation over the last two decades—usually explained in terms of the now familiar quadruple forces of globalization, marketization, deregulation, and decentralization—should be broadened to reflect a concern for the problems of disadvantaged groups impacted negatively in dynamic urban and environmental settings. The methodology of reflexive activism is proposed as affording a framework for a more relevant geography focused on the study of China, with the potential to bring about positive and constructive change on behalf of China's disadvantaged population and its natural environment, and (as a possible side benefit) generate local epistemologies enriching the study of geography more broadly. Journal of Economic Literature, Classification Numbers: P30. 68 references.     

Modernization of Costa Rica's Beef Cattle Economy: 1950-1985

Measured in strictly economic terms of profits, diversified exports, hard currency earnings and a more favorable trade balance, Costa Rica's beef cattle economy took a giant step toward modernization between 1950-1985. Unfortunately, this modernization had a minimum of socially desirable and environmentally adaptive components. Costa Rica, like other developing Latin American countries, is learning that economic development frequently entails painful social and ecological costs.     

Environmental Regulations and Multinational Corporations' Foreign Market Entry Investments

In this study, we examine how differences in environmental regulation characteristics are linked to multinational corporations' (MNCs) foreign market entry (FME) investments decisions around the world. We rely on a data set with 29,303 observations from 94 European Fortune Global 500 companies operating across 77 countries during the period 2001–2007. We found that MNCs are more likely to enter countries with more certain—i.e., clearer and more stable—environmental regulations than those of their home countries. Results also suggest that there is a higher level of MNC entry into foreign countries with environmental regulations that are more stringent than those of their home countries. This finding challenges the controversial but commonly held view that more stringent environmental regulations deter MNCs' FME investments. Notably, the magnitude of the regulatory certainty relationship with MNCs' FME investments is larger than that of regulatory stringency. Findings also indicate that the increased tendency of MNCs to enter countries with more stringent environmental regulations is higher in more democratic countries and for cleaner industry firms.     

The modemization paradigm based on monistic multi-linear theory: a response to some comments

Long before 1979, Chinese historical research had been dominated by the theory of “the Five Modes of Production”, according to which the whole Chinese history as well as the other parts of the world had been developed from the first MOD to the last one by one. The modernization theories prevailed during the 1950s and the 1960s, bringing about another uni-linear model of historical changes. For example, W. W. Rostow designed a five-stage process as a universal frame work of economic development, based on which each society could find its position in this uni-line. The task of the less developed societies is just to introduce modemity from the modernized societies so that they can make some developments. Thus modernization is a uni-direction movement as well as a uni-linear process. After 1979, modernization as a new paradigm has been accepted by an increasing number of Chinese historians. The increasing depth and breadth of the academic researches have encouraged such an acceptance, but, admittedly, as a new conceptual system that corresponded to the historic breakthrough and the new direction towards modernization in China. This acceptance also showed the “crisis of paradigm”, that is, the contradiction between the new themes and the old ones that had dominated Chinese humanities and social sciences. The modernization paradigm based on monistic multi-linear theory considers modernization as a unique breakthrough in history, a great transformation around the whole world, and a historical process that does not have a given ultimate aim and value but different models and routes. The monistic multi-linear theory on historical development is open and all-embracing in historical studies. A variety of historical paradigms is favorable to prosperity of Chinese history. __________ Translated from: Shixue Yuekan 史学月刊 (Journal of Historical Science), No.5, 2004, by Wang Fan; Revised by Chong Hua     

Agricultural Modernization and Climate Change in Vietnam's Post‐Socialist Transition

This article presents a critique of Vietnam's agricultural modernization in the context of its post‐socialist transition and the emerging climate crisis. Agricultural modernization has led to impressive rates of wealth creation that have pulled many Vietnamese out of poverty and food insecurity over the past two decades. However, the model's own logic of accumulation has also made the country increasingly reliant on complex processes and has locked in various technological path dependencies. These include energy‐ and input‐intensive production, engineered landscapes, reduced agro‐biodiversity, and weakened social networks, knowledge and skills. As a result, Vietnam is becoming more sensitive and less able to adapt to structural shocks, notably that of climate change. Furthermore, and crucially, the post‐socialist transition since the launch of ??i m?i (market reform) has given rise to a political economy with dominant interests increasingly vested in the continuity of this modernization model. The article argues that it is this new dynamics of class and state–society relations that now represents the main obstacle to the development of credible solutions to the climate crisis.     

Multiple environments: South Indian children’s environmental subjectivities in formation

This article explores the formation of South Indian children’s (11–15 years old) environmental subjectivities based on five months of qualitative fieldwork with children in their school and non-school lives. By doing so, this paper aims to widen the scope of the existing literature on children’s environmental subjectivities, which so far focused on separate aspects of children’s lives such as environmental education, social relations or children’s life courses. To do so, I use [Bourdieu, P. 1990. The Logic of Practice. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press] concepts of field, habitus and cultural capital along with a non-teleological notion of environmental subjectivity and insights from wider geographical literature on the formation of subjectivities. The paper shows how children’s environmental subjectivities are constituted by and partially constitute the material environments and fields in which children live, their cultural capital and habitus, their movements through their life course and their environments and a wide range of practices through which children experience their environments.     

A history of failed innovation: continuous cooking and the Soviet pulp industry, 1940s–1960s

Abstract

In the years before and after the Second World War, chemical and related industries in a variety of countries experienced a surge in innovation and development. As a result, the pulp industry became a space for considerable innovation. In Sweden, Johan Richter developed the Kamyr digester, a pulp cooker that could run continuously and was adopted by industry within a decade. Prior to Richter, Soviet engineer Leonid Zherebov designed a similar cooker. But after 25 years of experiments, Zherebov’s design failed, and Soviet factories began to produce pulp using imported Kamyr digesters. This article examines the history of continuous pulp cooking in the Soviet Union as a means to understand the nature of Russian technological innovation and its failures. The paper contends that his effort failed because of the technological system developed by Soviet forestry – a system characterized by a lack of open communication among its main institutional actors and a scarcity of resources to facilitate innovation.     

民国时期华北农民的离村与社会变动

农民纷纷离开久居的村庄外出谋生,是民国时期华北农村一个突出的社会现象。其时的农民离村,虽大多为连年的灾荒和不堪重负的捐税等因素所致,但农民离村过程中所发生的人口由农业向城市工商业的转移、高密度区域向低密度区域的自然调配,以及通过迁徙所带来的人的思想观念上的变化等,无疑有利于中国社会由传统向现代的变革。诚然,由于民国时期华北农民的离村多为生计所迫,迁徙的无序性,加之政府缺乏有效的管理,大量的农民离村也给社会的稳定带来了负面影响。     

Authors and Authoritarianism in Central Asia: Failed Agency and Nationalising Authoritarianism in Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan

Abstract

This paper aims to reconstruct widely accepted concepts of the top-down authoritarian nature of Central Asian politics in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan through a comparative study of the pro-democratic movements that emerged in the late 1980s. By analysing data from interviews with the cultural elites of the late Soviet perestroika period and data on the indigenous nationalist movements such as Erk, Zheltoksan, Birlik and others, we question why such nationalist movements did not “survive” or emerge as a significant political platform as promised in post-independence Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, and why they failed to change the political outlook of one party rule or the dominance of one nationalising regime. Furthermore, we analyse how such nationalist movements had an opportunity to turn into semi-democratic movements but failed to transform after their agenda (arguably, independence) was achieved, leaving “communists-turned-nationalists” to continue their policies in newly formed countries. Thus, the paper also looks at how these cultural elites eventually contributed to the local “authoritarianism” and lack of plurality in views and identifications.     

Gramsci's activists: How local civil society is shaped by the anti-corruption industry,political society and translocal encounters

The rise of the international anti-corruption industry over the past two decades has led to questions about how this industry impacts local civil society organizations in developing countries. For some academics the rise of the anti-corruption industry has led to more meaningful local responses, for others it has helped reinforce apolitical and neoliberal-inspired solutions. This article suggests that these debates would benefit from more nuanced and multi-scalar analysis. Drawing on in depth interviews, media analysis, grey materials and academic and practitioner literature, this article focuses on a group of anti-corruption activists in Papua New Guinea (PNG). The article compares a group of activists called the Coalition to its more radical predecessors, a local non-governmental organization by the name of Melanesian Solidarity. It uses a Gramscian framework to argue that responses to corruption in PNG have not simply been shaped by the anti-corruption industry. Rather they have been shaped by: the incentives and capacity of political society, international discourse on corruption and the nature of ‘translocal encounters’. These findings show that much of the academic literature on the anti-corruption industry has fallen into a ‘transnational trap’, by overemphasizing transnational linkages between organizations working to address corruption. Approaching the study of local anti-corruption movements with a focus on the complexity of scale, as this paper does, has important implications for theorizing responses to corruption in developing countries.     

中国现代化进程中的生态困境

中国在建设社会主义现代化的进程中,对环境保护做了很多有益的尝试,但依然而临着严峻的生态困境。各种类型的自然灾害、重大环境污染和生态破坏事件频发;随着城市化进程的不断加快,城市所面临的环境危机也日益凸显;环境保护的政策与治理虽有改进,但进展缓慢,中国生态恢复和环境保护的前景不容乐观。为此,必须转变经济发展方式,实现经济、社会和环境的协调发展。     

Reassessing Human Geography in the Wake of China's Rise

A prominent human geographer, introducing a series of papers in a Eurasian Geography and Economics mini-symposium devoted to China's emergence, surveys the myriad global impacts of that country's rapid recent rise. The topics covered include the economic (i.e., rapid growth in the size of China's economy, preeminence as an exporter of manufactured goods, and role as a major natural resource consumer, overseas investor, and purchaser of U.S. debt obligations), the geopolitical (increasing involvement in international organizations, rising assertiveness in defense of territorial claims), and the environmental (e.g., carbon footprint, accelerated urbanization, dam building), as well as the implications of China's rise for the study of geography and development. He argues that assessment of the consequences of the country's emergence should not be based on simple extrapolation of present trends, but must take into account a number of looming questions relating to the competitiveness of China's manufacturing labor force (vis-à-vis other developing countries), capacity to innovate (as well as imitate), and transformative societal impacts of modernization and development.     

The Spatial Evolution of the Polish Biotech Industry: A Path-Dependent Process?

In Poland, similarly to other Central and Eastern European countries, the development of the biotech industry dates back to the late 1980s, when the first private companies were established. The political and economic transformation of 1989 enabled mass development of private enterprises, but over the course of 20 years of development, only a couple of dozens biotech firms have emerged in Poland. The spatial evolution of the industry shows a strong concentration in Poland's six largest urban centres, which are characterized by the best scientific base, access to financial capital, and a well-developed local entrepreneurial culture. Given that all biotech clusters are also important centres of the pharmaceutical industry, despite the fact that there are no strong direct relationships between Poland's biotech and pharmaceutical companies, the authors of this paper put forward the thesis that the institutional environment of the pharmaceutical sector also affects the development of the biotech industry.     

Resources,regulation and the state: Struggles over gas extraction and passive revolution in Evo Morales's Bolivia

The indigenous-influenced policies of Evo Morales's Bolivia represent arguably the most important attempt to improve the socioenvironmental implications of resource extraction in recent years, reasserting the role of the state and social movements against ‘corporate-led governance’. In this paper, through combining the regulation approach with neo-Gramscian state theory, I carry out a conceptually informed analysis of struggles over hydrocarbon governance in Bolivia, in order to shed light on the reasons why such an ambitious political project has largely failed to realise its transformative potential. I make two interrelated arguments. First, initial, important advances in the governance of resources in Bolivia were later partially reversed, due to shifting power relations between social movements, the hydrocarbon industry, and the state. This points to the need of understanding resource governance and its changes as reflecting or ‘condensing’ shifting power relationships among social forces. Second, the coming to power of Evo Morales resulted in a ‘passive-revolutionary’ process whereby an initial radical break with the neoliberal order was followed by a gradual adaptation to pre-existing political economic relations and arrangements. Most notably, plans to reduce the country's dependency on gas exports as well as to challenge the transnational domination of the hydrocarbon sector were abandoned, generating an increasingly explicit incompatibility with indigenous demands. I conclude that neo-Gramscian theory offers important insights that enable us to advance our conceptualisation of the state in resource governance research and in political ecology more generally.     

Québec et la géographie sociale en questions

Questioning Québec through social geography In the early 1960s, two revolutions were underway: the quiet revolution in Québec and the quantitative revolution in geography. Apparently unrelated, these episodes of change probably shared common underlying values associated with modernity. Since then, the transformations experienced in Québec have been interpreted in a multitude of ways, including geographical considerations. Research careers, mine included, have been shaped by this undertaking. All along, I have found that social geography, with the capacity it has to reinvent itself, has helped making sense of this turbulent environment. In the 1970s, exploring the structural dynamics of Canada's social space helped in figuring out the place occupied by Québec in this ensemble. Then, analyzing the historical relationships between cosmopolitan Montréal and provincial Québec City suggested that the oxymoron ‘quiet revolution’ stood for a central process in the cultural dynamics of Québec's social space, where new ideas arriving through Montréal are sifted and institutionalized by the state in Québec City. Nevertheless, Québec City is also capable of initiating progressive urban movements, as illustrated by the odyssey of the Rassemblement populaire de Québec, documented through participant observation. Such urban movements may affect the urban fabric but, as intense and creative social networks, they may affect even more their interacting members, as it seems to have been the case with regard to rapidly evolving gender relations during the last decades. All in all, after more than four decades, I keep the conviction that a practice of social geography that is open to various theories and methods is capable of producing liberating knowledge.     

Spatial imaginaries and collective identity in women’s human rights struggles in Honduras

In recent years, geographic analysis on social movements has emphasised the influence of actors’ concepts, lived experiences and perceptions of space on the emergence of collective action. Cultural approaches to social movements in Latin America as well as feminist scholarship have revealed that women’s collective action is shaped by their perceptions of institutional and societal challenges, which are rooted in authoritarian and patriarchal culture prevalent in their society. This article combines geographic and cultural approaches to social movements as well as transnational feminist theories to explore women’s human rights mobilisation in Honduras after the coup d’état in 2009. It investigates how a group of urban and rural activists that included feminists, rural women, students and community leaders, adopted human rights discourses and practices to respond to the coup. The article draws on interviews and focus group discussions to suggest firstly, that protests in response to the coup shaped the interviewees’ spatial imaginaries and particularly considers how urban feminists’ spatial imaginaries were merged with those of rural women under the collective framework of human rights. Secondly, the study demonstrates that a collective identity as women human rights defenders was crucial for the emergence of collective action and also prompted the establishment of a national network. This case study contributes to research on women’s collective action to negotiate women’s rights, human rights and social justice in changing political processes.     

The transformational festival as a subversive toolbox for a transformed tourism: lessons from Burning Man for a COVID-19 world

Abstract

Examining transformational festivals can offer conceptual resources for a transformation of tourism into a more responsible and sustainable practice. By thinking together two usually distinct scholarly treatments of “transformation”—those of transformational tourism and those of transformational festivals—the COVID-19 pandemic can itself also be treated as a spatiotemporal threshold for the transformation of the travel industry. This approach can also help deconstruct the mechanisms that sustain deleterious aspects of tourism’s guest-host divide. As borders reopen and mobility and recreation recommences, the capacity of transformational festivals—both within and beyond their highly porous time-spaces– to transform their participants offer lessons for the blurring, if not the outright obliteration of the demarcation between guests and hosts. The creative and pro-social responses of members of one such transformational festival culture—Burning Man– to this and past crises are presented as examples for how values such as participation and civic responsibility may help people overcome shared conditions of hardship, and support more sustainable tourism practices in the post-COVID-19 world. Such subversive inter-subjective inversions may bring the recognition, in-itself, and production, for-itself, of a shared humanity of co-creators and participants in not just ephemeral, but accretive transformational social and environmental projects.     

Environmental Standards and Industrial Restructuring: the Case of the Australian Paper Industry

Environmental standards imposed on the Australian paper industry have emerged in response to public concern over the logging of native forests and the ‘greening’ of consumer demand. Such standards play an integral part in the paper industry's restructuring. Neo-classical theorists hypothesised environmental standards as encouraging the relocation of polluting industries to countries with lax regulations. An alternative hypothesis is that environmental standards encourage in-situ restructuring that can positively affect a company's competitiveness. In considering this alternative hypothesis the implications for state and federal policy are briefly considered.