Christine Polzin

Carbon and Materials Embodied in the International Trade of Emerging Economies

Production in emerging economies, such as Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, and Argentina (BRICSA), increased substantially over the past two decades. This is, on the one hand, due to growing domestic demand within these countries, and, on the other hand, due to a deepened international division of work. Global trade linkages have become denser and production chains are no longer restricted to only one or two countries. The volume of international trade in intermediate inputs as well as final consumption goods has tripled in the past two decades. With this, carbon dioxide (CO) emissions and materials embodied in traded goods have increased, making it increasingly difficult to identify the actual causes of emissions and material extractions, as producing and extracting countries are not necessarily consuming the resulting goods. Using the multiregional input‐output Global Resource Accounting Model (GRAM), this article shows how global carbon emissions and materials requirements are allocated from producing/extracting countries to consuming countries. It thereby contributes to the rapidly growing body of literature on environmental factors embodied in international trade by bringing two key environmental categories — CO emissions and materials — into one consistent and global framework of analysis for the first time. The results show that part of the increase in carbon emissions and materials extraction in BRICSA is caused by increasing amounts of trade with countries in the Organisation for Economic Co‐operation and Development as well as a growing demand for goods and services produced within BRICSA.

Sustainability of Technology-intensive Social Innovation in India: The Role of Absorptive Capacity and Complementary Assets

Over the past 30 years, technology-intensive social innovations have gained an ever-growing role in the development of many low-income countries and can be expected to remain prominent drivers of social and economic change. Information and communication technologies (ICTs), such as internet and mobile phone tools, may help to create links to commercial and social networks, cut transaction costs and foster innovative ways of delivering social services such as education and healthcare to remote areas. One of the most innovative countries in terms of using ICTs for development projects (known as ICT4D) is India.

Institutional Change in Informal Credit: Through the Urban–Rural Lens

The years of mediocre agricultural growth and growing agrarian crisis in the twenty-first century have been accompanied by dramatic changes in rural financial markets in which locally dominant institutions have disappeared (the money-lending dynasty; chit funds, grain mundi credit), entirely new ones have appeared (self-help groups; instalment credit from mobile traders from Arni) and rather few have persisted (pawn-broking, informal lending, formal banking) in just over a decade. Detailed semi-structured interviews with stakeholders and observational evidence from 1993–94 and 2006 were assembled from one agricultural village near Arni (one of the three ‘survey’ villages studied since 1973). Its dynamic financial sector was then evaluated to test theories about change derived from old and new institutional economics. The many dimensions of institutional change observed in the village appear to be the result of complex interactions of social, historical and economic factors which are excluded from the mainstream of both approaches to theory. Both old and new institutional economics were thus found to be quite severely wanting and suggestions for a richer theory of institutional change are offered.

Examining Collective Action Through the Capability Approach: The Example of Community Currencies

Abstract Collective action—the involvement of a group of people carrying out common and voluntary actions to pursue shared interests—has a high potential to contribute to agency and wellbeing freedom. It is a current and recurrent phenomenon in society, but it is still poorly explained by the Capability Approach (CA). This paper’s main aim is to look more closely at how the CA can be used to better frame, understand and evaluate the impacts of collective action. Based on a discussion of the literature on collective capabilities and agency we suggest extending the perspective of the original approach, mainly through a more explicit distinction between three layers: individual processes, collective action, and social institutions. We argue that such an extension is useful in order to evaluate how collective action can alter wellbeing and agency freedoms. By way of example, we look at community currency (CC) initiatives—trading schemes that are designed and implemented as a supplement to the legal tender money—and employ the three-layered CA to describe and evaluate the effects of acting collectively in such a setting. We also point out what distinguishes such an assessment from other approaches that we have found in the literature on CC. We conclude that a more systematic analysis of collective action through the CA may enable the latter to provide for useful assessments of collective action.

Social representations of governance for change towards sustainability: perspectives of sustainability advocates

ABSTRACT There is a substantial body of literature on public understandings of large-scale ‘environmental’ phenomena such as climate change and resource degradation. At the same time, political science and economics analyse the governance arrangements to deal with such issues. These realms of research rarely meet: there has been little research into people’s understandings of the governance of environmental change. This study adds a psychological perspective to governance research by investigating social representations of governance that promotes societal change towards sustainability, and related practices. It examines data from qualitative interviews with sustainability-interested people in seven European countries (n = 105). The analysis identified building blocks of representations suitable as an analytical framework for future research on governance representations. The diversity of their content reflected a range of pathways to societal change. Representations often seemed to have a creative function as a guiding vision for individuals’ own practices, but their wider transformative potential was constrained.