Nature, Raw Materials, and Political Economy: Volume 10

In this introductory chapter, we briefly outline the history of the political economy of raw materials, focusing particularly on the relationship between raw materials and economic development. We then introduce the chapters of this volume, and we conclude by discussing future directions for research in this area.

Incorporating local space, matter, and society into our concepts of the global in analytically compatible ways poses a major challenge for contemporary scholars of both world systems and globalization. Many analysts ignore both materiality and locality of production. They assume the global as their point of departure, and attempt to incorporate the local into it. In this chapter, we aim to reverse that logic. We will take into account and theorize the interaction of natural and social processes. In other words, we will integrate ecologic or materio-spatial logic with sociologic within the economic logic of global markets.

In this chapter, I want to take some stock of the subdiscipline of environmental sociology. I believe that a productive approach to restoring some of the coherence of environmental sociology is to conceive of mainstream environmental sociology as reflecting several paradoxes. The bulk of this chapter will be devoted to a brief explication of environmental sociology's theoretical and empirical paradoxes. I will begin with three paradoxes that have played a major role in environmental sociology since the 1970s. However, many of the theoretical and empirical paradoxes of the subfield are relatively new ones – and some have not even been thought of as paradoxes. The thrust of the present chapter consists of something of a research agenda for environmental sociology for the next decade or so.

The works of Stephen Bunker represent early, sometimes unacknowledged, contributions to a sociological imagination regarding the role of nature and raw material extraction in processes of social change. By engaging debates defined within a world-systems frame of national state power and cycles of capital accumulation, Bunker's work maintains the hierarchy of core, semi-peripheral, and peripheral states. While bridging the local and the global in unusual ways, his emphasis is predominantly on the external limits posed by nature and global markets on peripheries and the converse advantages offered to cores, thus allowing less room in the analysis for questioning which particular totality(ies) of social structure and relations are open to sociological inquiry. Gleaning the contributions from a socionatural approach and relating them back to Bunker's commodity-based approach may expand the purview for analyses of the intersection of the natural and the social. In this chapter, I argue that attention to ‘nature’ in its multiple socionatural occurrences contributes to an understanding of the structuring of power in time and place. I rely on geographer Eric Swyngedouw's deployment of the concept of ‘socionature’ and the framework of actor-network theory to explore the benefits as well as challenges of a more relational, nondualistic sociological analysis of society and nature.

The ability to identify the root causes of leading environmental crises, and the capacity to design effective intervention strategies, rely on a proper conceptualization of the linkages that join the social and natural worlds. An indispensable feature of an integrated model concerns the temporal frequencies intrinsic to the spatial and organizational hierarchies that comprise the socio-ecological system. The purpose of this chapter is to assemble ideas from a wide range of disciplines to promote a greater sensitivity to the relevance of time, and to alert us to the conceptual challenges of introducing temporal considerations into interdisciplinary environmental studies.

In this chapter I outline different theories of ascent to and decline from hegemony. In particular, I discuss Arrighi's finance-based theory of cycles of accumulation and Stephen Bunker's materio-spatial theory of hegemonic ascent and decline. Then, I ask whether the different explanations of ascent and decline can be reconciled and/or how we can begin to adjudicate between them in terms of their relative explanatory powers throughout the history of the world-system or at different times in history. Finally, I discuss the implications of theories of hegemonic change for our understanding of local economic change, and particularly the relationship between path dependencies and points of exit from them.

This chapter relates Bunker's innovative view of nature, raw materials and political economy to the “global commodity chains” (GCCs) approach. The chapter contends that his view of the importance of primary material extraction, shipping, and energy used in various “transformations” of these crucial products can be fruitfully married to a GCCs perspective.

Sunk costs are a key feature of extractive industries that profoundly shape regional economic development outcomes. In this chapter, we argue that sunk costs do so by influencing both the investment behavior of firms and the organization, as well as the performance, of extractive industries in ways that often deviate substantially from traditional neoclassical models of competitive markets with resource mobility. Sunk costs are defined, and the features that give rise to such costs are identified, followed by an analysis of the impacts of sunk costs on firms, regions, and economies. Sunk costs are shown to underlie two important phenomena associated with the economic experience of resource extraction – “Dutch Disease” and the “resource curse”. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the need for development policy to incorporate often overlooked sunk cost considerations into efforts to promote economic development in extractive economies.

How did Japan rise to challenge the U.S. economic supremacy? We argue that the foundation of Japan's rise from a defeated nation in 1945 to an economic powerhouse is the raw materials that Japanese firms have turned into cars, ships, consumer electronics, and of other industrial products. A small island nation that lacked adequate domestic supplies of virtually all the raw materials essential to industrial production became a world leader in the production of steel and of products which required millions of tons per year of raw materials. Japanese firms and the Japanese state turned an apparent material and economic disadvantage, the need to import large volumes of raw materials, into a competitive advantage over the U.S., Europe, and the rest of the world economy by driving down the cost of importing raw materials over long distances. We argue that the strategies of Japanese firms and the Japanese state to resolve the problems of procuring bulk cheaply and reliably from multiple distant locales drove the technical and organizational innovations that underlay Japan's rapid industrial development and restructured the world economy in support of Japan's development. Contrary to claims that globalization supercedes the national state, we find that the actions of the Japanese state, in coordination with firms and industry sectors, were crucial in developing and applying these strategies. The linchpin of these strategies were the MIDAs (Maritime Industrial Development Areas) built on land reclaimed by the Japanese state. This economic success in Japan was also critically dependent on the extraction of billions of dollars of wealth from its raw materials peripheries, most notably Australia, Brazil, and Canada.

For the first time since the “limits to growth” debate of the 1970s, we hear serious talk about the prospect of the world running out of oil. In the United States, concerns about reducing dependence on foreign oil have incited debate over the viability of alternative energy sources versus the oil industry's search for new oil “frontiers.” The rancorous dispute over drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWAR) has captured the spotlight in this debate. Less controversial, but more significant for the future of U.S. oil production, are the bountiful “deepwater” reserves of the Gulf of Mexico (GOM). Offshore is central to the history of the petroleum industry over the last 50 years, and the GOM is the most explored, drilled, and developed offshore petroleum province in the world. In recent decades, revenue from offshore leasing has been second only to federal income taxes in value to the U.S. treasury. During the last 30 years, the search for oil and gas has continually moved into deeper waters and into new offshore environments. Still, the GOM remains the primary laboratory for technological innovation and regulatory practices. The recent and spectacular revival in production there thanks to deepwater discoveries has strongly reinforced this demonstration effect. As offshore oil assumes a high profile in national development strategies around the world, any effort to analyze the political, social, and economic aspects of offshore exploration and development must use the GOM as a historical precedent or basis of comparison.

This chapter examines the fur trade commodity frontier in northeastern North America as a contested periphery, involving an evolving process of conflict and cooperation between North American indigenous groups and European powers. Native people used European powers for help in their battles with other native groups, and European colonial authorities attempted to use native people as proxies in their attempts to make up for often low European populations in the various North American colonies. Within the colonies there were also splits between commercial/trading interests and more purely geostrategic concerns. This chapter will explore these various conflicts involving the Iroquois, English and French, and will consider how the trade's fundamental material, environmental and geographical structure shaped the evolution of this peripheral extractive political economy and the efforts of those in the core seeking to exploit the area's resources.

This chapter explores the work of Stephen Bunker through a review of the role of women in Amazonian extractive economies and how shifting ideas of development affected them in the Western Amazon. While the initial development programs for Extractive Reserves focused on green marketing, consumer coops and value added through processing carried out in an urban factory in the village of Xapuri, as structural adjustment programs gained importance, the development emphasis shifted to decentralized processing and piecemeal contracts on the individual seringal (rubber tapping estate) or in mini factories in forests. While this was an appealing approach given the kinds of development concerns at the time; non-timber forest products, income generation for women in the forest itself, and neoliberal ideologies of economic and labor decentralization, it failed to appreciate the demands and the opportunity costs on women's time in rural areas and underestimated the importance of formal employment in urban areas. The logics on which the shift was justified, enhanced production, efficiency and lower costs, did not materialize.

While scholars have commonly inquired into how capital structures the material world, far less attention has been paid to how the material world has structured the historical relations of the capitalist world economy. This chapter is concerned with the expansion of Caribbean sugar industry in the world economic conjuncture of the first half of the nineteenth century. It examines the relation of the material requirements of sugar production, regional geography, and productive space. The ability of planters in particular locations to respond to world economic conditions was subject to material and spatial constraints. Increased output and technological innovation were dependent on the creation of new productive spaces – including both the formation of new commodity frontiers and the reconstitution the sugar plantation – that conformed to the changing requirements of sugar manufacture. Thus, the spatial and material conditions of staple production shaped the pattern of accumulation and political economic development.

This chapter investigates the “pulsations” of regional interaction networks (world-systems) in Afroeurasia over the past 3,000 years. The purpose is to determine the causes of a fascinating synchrony that emerged between East Asia and the distant West Asian/Mediterranean region, but did not involve the intermediate South Asian region. The hypothesized causes of this synchrony are climate change, epidemics, trade cycles, and the incursions of Central Asian steppe nomads. This chapter formulates a strategy of data gathering, system modeling, and hypothesis testing that can allow us to discover which of these causes were the most important in producing synchrony as the Afroeurasian world-system came into being.

The chapter draws on historical evidence from Central America to test two of the most influential theories of the development of democracy: (1) structural theories derived from the work of Barrington Moore and (2) theories of the “political economy of democratic transitions.” The Central American evidence confirms Moore's theory in regard to the anti-democratic role of landed elites, but not the democratic role of the bourgeoisie. Contrary to some structural theories, the industrial working class was also not important in the development of democracy in Central America. Nor does the Central American evidence fit the political economy of democratic transitions model of negotiated or imposed “transitions from above.” A new model, termed the route to democracy through socialist revolution from below is proposed to account for the Central American evidence and the implications of the model are explored for the development of democracy generally.

What are the social and ecological roots of export diversification in the developing world? On the one hand, I attribute the growth of nontraditional, manufactured exports from the Dominican Republic to the traditional agro-export elite's use of free trade zones to offset the consequences of urban biased, import-substituting industrialization in the 1970s, and thereby portray diversification as an incremental response to government predation rather than a coherent product of government planning. On the other hand, I hold that the nature, timing, and location of the nontraditional export supply response have necessarily been circumscribed by preexisting social and ecological circumstances, and thereby underscore the structural impediments to similar diversification efforts elsewhere in the developing world. My findings are of both theoretical relevance and policy import, for they serve to underscore the limitations to the regnant neoliberal development orthodoxy as well as the available sociological alternatives.

As the small Southern African country of Lesotho grapples with implementing one of the five largest dam-development projects in the world today, the local people impacted confront the challenges of resettlement, loss of means of production, and changed access to natural resources. This chapter reveals the ways in which the Lesotho Highlands Water Project (LHWP) serves to reorganize and commodify rural resources for the benefit of the nation-state in gendered ways. Based on interviews of rural households conducted during 13 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Lesotho, this chapter analyzes impacted people's experiences of the gendered implications of the extraction and sale of water from the rural highlands of Lesotho to South Africa. This case study documents the gendered environmental and social impacts of the LHWP on local communities, and illuminates the everyday lived experiences of the affected people as they effectively subsidize this international project with their environmental resources, labor, money, and, in some cases, their nutritional status.