Environmental Critique

The essential dispute in global management of the Earth system is not whether planetary boundaries are being broached but whether it is appropriate to address these with managerialist strategies combining technical fixes and market mechanisms controlled by banks and corporations—as opposed to firm state regulatory mandates backed by tough civil society activism. Most of the attempts to “internalize market externalities” follow a trajectory of ecological modernization in analysis and policy, which abstracts from the dynamics of capital accumulation and the operation of power relations within multilateral governance. A theoretical framing (as developed by Marx, Luxemburg, and Harvey) assists in locating the wellsprings of ecological destruction, given the limits to strategies based on spatial, temporal, and capitalist/non-capitalist displacement of the underlying crisis tendencies. Many alternative discourses have emerged as a result of these obvious limitations in mainstream analysis and global governance strategies, to which global studies will increasingly contribute.