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1. Collective Goods and Collective Fates
Globalization features a variety of issues for which cooperation promises benefits for all but for which individual actors have strong incentives to contribute less than their fair share. This is the dilemma of collective goods.
2. Population and the environment
Traditionally, a large population was viewed as an asset, particularly in waging war. However, unchecked population growth could pose a serious problem, especially when an imbalance occurred between a population and its food supply or other natural resources.
a) Population trends
- The world’s population is increasing rapidly, but this growth is not evenly distributed across countries or regions. Most population growth is occurring the developing world.
- Population growth in LDCs is undermining economic development and producing economic, social, political, and environmental strains.
- As growth rates increase within populations that live in crowded conditions with inadequate sanitary and medical facilities, diseases like AIDS and cholera are more likely to spread.
- And as economic development invites more people to move from rural to urban areas, existing facilities and infrastructures are overtaxed. The result is dense concentrations of poverty in large cities.
b) Increasing conflict
- Rapid population growth breeds violence in crowded cities and as various groups demand access to more resources, conflicts may erupt within and between countries.
- Some analysts believe that crowding itself produces violence.
- Other analysts believe that population growth produces environmental degradation that harms agricultural production, reduces population movements, and disrupts social, economic, and political institutions.
c) Defusing the population bomb
- Economic and social development is associated with lower levels of population growth. Many observers believe that changes in customs and values are needed to control population growth. Empowering women is probably the most effective way of slowing population growth in the developing world.
- Some countries, notably China, have attempted to regulate population growth through coercive family-planning policies.
- If birth rates fall too low, countries have an insufficient number of young people in the labor force to support an aging population.
- Continuing population growth in poor countries remains a major source of environmental stress and ecological deterioration.
3. Deteriorating global ecology
The tradeoff between economic and environmental interests poses a serious dilemma for global and domestic politics as rapid economic development brings with it waste and pollution.
a) Global energy politics
- The collision between economic and environmental needs is apparent in the issue of global energy politics.
- Fossil fuels and economic development
- Economic development comes at a hefty price: health problems and deaths caused by air and water pollution produce, the depletion of natural resources, and global warming.
- The global community is sensitive to the relationship between economic development and the environment. It is perhaps most sensitive to this relationship in the issue area of oil.
- Fossil fuels and the environment
- Various fossil fuels also pose a more direct threat to the environment. Oil spills devastate fragile marine and coastal ecologies; gasses released in burning fossil fuels are blamed for warming the earth’s climate, which melts glaciers and changes rainfall patterns.
- There is greater interest today in energy conservation and in clean renewable energy sources like solar, wind, and nuclear power.
- Nuclear power has been viewed as an unattractive alternative energy source owing to fears of nuclear accidents and the problem of storing nuclear wastes.
b) Too little food
- Malnutrition is a chronic problem for hundreds of millions of people in the developing world.
- Sufficient food is available, but distributing it to those most in need is often difficult. Warfare and inadequate investment in agriculture pose two serious obstacles to food distribution.
- Foreign food aid is prone to its own problems: often, it fails to reach those in need and when it does it can produce a dependency that prevents local governments from making the agricultural reforms necessary to become self-sufficient in food.
- Food is also used as a weapon in global politics, particularly in the context of civil wars.
c) Vanishing forests and encroaching deserts
- Intensive farming to satisfy the growing need for food has its own environmental consequences. It contributes to soil erosion, salinization, deforestation, and desertification. These problems, in turn, contribute to global warming and a loss of biodiversity.
- In addition to international treaties, more creative approaches to these problems include debt-for-nature swaps in which a government or another group pays off part of a country’s debt at reduced interest. In return, the debtor country uses the funds that would have gone to interest for environmental ends.
- Some rich countries purchase carbon bonds from poor countries. The bonds allow the rich country to emit current levels of carbon and provide funds to the poor countries to save forests and jungles.
d) Water: dying seas and drying wells
- The world’s oceans, seas, lakes, and rivers are facing mounting environmental pressure. Coral reefs have begun to die and pollution kills all sorts of avian and marine life. These pressures will only increase as new technologies allow greater exploitation of the seas.
- Fishing
- As fisheries are being depleted, competition increases over the resources that remain.
- The depletion of fisheries poses a major food threat to millions of people worldwide and it has become a source of conflict between countries engaged in commercial fishing and whaling.
- Fresh water
- Supplies of fresh water are also diminishing. Arid countries facing rapid population growth are especially strained as they attempt to divert water to grow food for their populations.
- The demand for water is producing a classic tragedy of the commons
e) Greenpeace
- Greenpeace is a global environmental NGO dedicated to exposing a wide range of global problems and forcing countries to implement solutions.
- Greenpeace uses highly visible publicity stunts to bring attention to its causes. These stunts sometimes bring it into conflict with governments.
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Q1 What are collective goods, and how are they relevant to global politics?
A1 Environmental challenges are among the most important collective-goods issues in global politics. Such issues place actors in situations in which they either cooperate and win jointly or fail to cooperate and lose jointly. A healthy environment benefits everyone, and an unhealthy environment harms everyone. However, the good or benefit must be shared and made available to everyone if it is made available to anyone. It is, for instance, virtually impossible to deprive any country of cleaner air. Since no one can be deprived of the benefit, there is a strong incentive to avoid paying for it in the hope that others will do so, and it can be had for free. This is known as "free riding." The two ways to make everyone pay is coercion, as in laws that prosecute individuals who fail to pay taxes, or the provision of private benefits or goods, for example, paying bribes to persuade an actor to cooperate.
Q2 How do population trends affect global politics, and how can population growth be managed?
A2 The issue of population reflects the collective-goods dilemma. It is in the interest of poor societies to limit population growth to reduce environmental stress and develop economically, but it is in the interest of many individuals to have large numbers of children to provide additional income to a family and as social insurance for old age. Thomas Malthus believed that overpopulation would cause famines because population growth exceeded the growth in the food supply. Although this has been largely avoided by the "green revolution," rapidly growing populations in the less-developed countries has strained the environment. Thus, large numbers of people seeking land may burn away oxygen-producing jungles, deforest regions and cause the spread of deserts, over fish coastal waters, deplete water sources, and use fossil fuels for energy, thereby contributing to global warming. Fast growing populations negate economic gains, place stress on social services, create crowded conditions for the spread of disease, and, when they migrate to cities, create enormous slums. Large numbers of unemployed young men also contribute to crime and violence. Population growth produces environmental deterioration, population movements, and disrupted institutions that combine to cause war. Historically, countries such as Japan and Germany have sought to expand to find space and resources for burgeoning populations. A combination of coercive birth control and economic development has allowed China to slow population growth dramatically. Economic growth and urbanization change cultural norms and foster smaller families. The education and employment of women are especially effective in this regard. The migration of population from poor to rich countries may relieve population pressures in the former and provide needed labor and tax revenue in the latter which are experiencing a contraction in population.
Q3 What role do trends global energy trends affect global politics?
A3 Energy is vital for sustained economic development and industrialization. The world still depends heavily on fossil fuels like coal, gas and oil for energy even though the oil supplies are not growing as fast as demand for them, especially in rapidly modernizing countries like China and India. Oil spills in oceans with fragile ecosystems have publicized the environmental risks of fossil fuels. More importantly, fossil fuels are the major source of "greenhouse gases" that are producing global warming, a phenomenon that may lead to higher sea levels and inundation of coastal areas as well as small island nations. Global warming will also create droughts, intense storms, the spread of diseases formerly limited to the tropics, and the melting of the polar icepacks. However, less-developed countries do not want to sacrifice economic growth by conserving energy, and rich countries argue that the LDCs are becoming the major sources of carbon gases, even though rich countries, especially the United States, still use far more energy than do poor ones. The US has refused to sign to Kyoto Protocol, an agreement to limit the emission of greenhouse gases. Energy has become a major political issue in another way as well, especially since the formation of the oil cartel, OPEC, in the 1960s. The members of OPEC control most of the world's oil supplies and have sought to use "oil power" for political and economic ends. To some extent, OPEC's power has been reduced by production in non-OPEC countries such as Russia, Norway, and Great Britain. However, oil prices in recent years have soared owing to growing demand in China and India as well as growing difficulty in finding new sources of oil. Alternative sources of energy are very expensive or, in the case of nuclear energy, believed to be dangerous.
Q4 In addition to climate change, what are the main threats to global ecology?
A4 A variety of other ecological problems threaten human survival and well-being, and such problems are interdependent. Although sufficient food is still grown to feed most of the earth's population, the spread of deserts, spreading urbanization, soil exhaustion, water scarcity, and water pollution are reducing the area available for agriculture, especially in Africa and China. Vanishing jungles and forests in countries such as Brazil and Cambodia, exploited for additional farmland and timber resources, also contribute to global warming, a loss in biodiversity, and the spread of deserts. Growing deserts further reduce land for agriculture. The availability of fresh water is another critical issue. Coral reefs have begun to die, and vast stretches of the oceans are being denuded of fish. Demands for fresh water are drying up lakes and seas like the Aral and rivers such as the Colorado and Nile.
Q5 How does the environmental nongovernmental organization Greenpeace have an impact on environmental policies?
A5 Greenpeace is an international environmental nongovernmental organization that has pioneered the use of unorthodox ways of publicizing and protesting threats to the environment. It was born in 1971, first protesting American underground nuclear testing. Later protests against French nuclear testing by sailing ships into the area where tests were to take place resulted in the sinking of the Greenpeace ship Rainbow Warrior by French frogmen. Greenpeace vessels have also disrupted whale hunts, and Greenpeace activists were brought to court by the US government for allegedly violating an obsolete statute in protesting imports of illegal lumber. The case was dismissed. Its highly visible publicity stunts have embarrassed and enraged governments and corporations alike. |
