Inequality, Democracy, and the Environment

Abstract

This article sets forth a new theoretical model that holds that local, regional, and global environmental crises are to a significant degree the product of organizational, institutional, and network-based inequality, which provide economic, political, military, and ideological elites with the means to create and control organizational and network-based mechanisms through which they (a) monopolize decision-making power; (b) shift environmental and nonenvironmental costs onto others; (c) shape individuals’ knowledge, attitudes, values, beliefs, and behavior; and (d) frame what is and is not considered to be good for the environment. These undemocratic mechanisms produce severe environmental harm because they provide elites with the means to achieve goals that are often environmentally destructive and because they are sometimes environmentally destructive in and of themselves, as is the case with military power. After situating their study in the broader literature, the authors describe their theoretical model in detail and present three case studies that identify some of the most important mechanisms through which elites exert power and harm the environment.

Splintering South: Ecologically Unequal Exchange Theory in a Fragmented Global Climate

“…Importantly, it is argued that these processes of inequality related to the environmental issues such as agriculture, mining and energy are sustained by global systems of governance and elite controlled networks, institutions, and organizations (Downey 2015).…”

The Political Economy of the Water Footprint: A Cross-National Analysis of Ecologically Unequal Exchange

“…Instead of just highlighting winners and losers, ecologically unequal exchange highlights disproportionate and uneven environmental outcomes of trade relationships within the world economy. Previous research finds ecologically unequal relationships between high-income and lower-income countries when examining indicators such as deforestation, carbon dioxide emissions and the ecological footprint [16,46,51]. Here, we further examine the empirical validity of the theory through the examination of the water footprint of production.…”

“…Developing countries often relax their environmental and labor regulations in order to attract transnational corporations [14,43,50]. Furthermore, international finance institutions, such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), through mechanisms like structural adjustment loans and trade liberalization, facilitate the reorganization of economies in lower-income countries towards the intensification of production for export, leading to a growth in environmental problems [51,52]. In all, these processes tend to result in the vertical flow of ecological value from lower-income countries to high-income countries and reinforce unequal power relationships between them [41].…”

Group Inequality and Environmental Sustainability: Insights from Bangladesh and Kenyan Forest Commons

“…; (b) maintaining ecosystem function, e.g., preventing chemical contamination to food chains and ecosystem, protecting ecologically sensitive areas and rare or endangered species, minimise erosion and other forms of soil degradation; and (c) conserving genetic variation, e.g., genetic diversity, genotypic frequencies, gene flow/migration, mating system [55] (pp. [19][20][21][22][23][24]. In this paper, due to data scarcity we are unable to apply all of the above criteria, but available information from remote sensing techniques allows us to compare temporal changes in the case study forests on a number of vital indicators.…”

“…Downey and Strife [19] use three case studies from the USA, i.e., commodity chain networks, free trade agreements in agriculture, and, policy planning networks in energy sector to demonstrate how undemocratic and elite-controlled organizations, networks, and institutions play a critical role in degrading the environment and ensuring capital accumulation. They have developed an Inequality, Democracy and Environment (IDE) model that set out to explicitly link environmental degradation to the organizational, institutional, and network-based mechanisms through which the elites are able to monopolize decision making power, shift environmental and non-environmental costs onto others, shape individuals' knowledge, attitudes, values, beliefs, and behaviour, and frame what is and is not considered to be good for the environment.…”