Grounding Globalization: The Prospects and Perils of Linking Economic Processes of Globalization to Environmental Outcomes

Abstract

This article advances the argument that economic geography has prioritized the understanding of processes over the evaluation of outcomes. Contemporary research on globalization-like earlier studies of industrial restructuring, deindustrialization, and "localities"-tends to address outcomes only in so far as they shed light on underlying processes. Yet the earlier generation of research also produced a number of instructive methodological and epistemological critiques that now frame current attempts to understand the socioenvironmental effects of globalization. Three of these challenges are outlined in the context of research on the environmental effects of foreign direct investment: linking processes with outcomes; bridging across scales; and demonstrating the "difference that difference makes." The article contrasts the limited engagement by economic geographers with globalization's environmental effects with a growing body of work outside geography. Preliminary links between this well-developed, external literature and proximate bodies of geographic scholarship are put forth to demonstrate how hybrid approaches may best be able to capture the ways in which processes of economic globalization drive environmental outcomes. The article concludes with a worked example of ongoing research into the environmental impacts of foreign direct investment to illustrate how such an approach may engage globalization "on the ground."

The Political Economy of Rare Earth Elements

“…Defined as 'a set of three or more entities (organizations or individuals) directly involved in the upstream and downstream flows of products, services, finances, and/or information from a source to a customer,' (Mentzer et al, 2001), this is a useful analytical tool for grounding the analyses of global issues in actual physical processes. However, Bridge (2002) has critiqued such an approach for overemphasizing 'process' at the expense of 'outcomes,' which leaves us groping for 'exogenous' factors when faced with sudden changes in supply chain dynamics (Mayer et al, 2014). In particular, local biophysical conditions at the point of extraction tend to be taken for granted or placed in a black box.…”

Environmental globalization and tropical forests

“…Gibbs, 2000;Bridge, 2002;Reed, 2002;Lejour, 2003) and of the rise in environmental governance (Johal and Ulph, 2002), both as a form of globalization and as a corrective to economic globalization.…”

Double exposure in Mozambique's Limpopo River Basin

“…However, most of these theories do not explicitly address the interactions between environmental risk and economic development. More recently, some empirical work has incorporated political ecological theories and applied the methodologies of economic geography to investigate the analytical significance of environmental phenomena for national and regional economies (Bridge 2002 2007; Gibbs 2006; Mansfield 2003).…”