Ronnie D. Lipschutz

Power, Politics and Global Civil Society

Although there remains considerable dispute about Global Civil Society (GCS) — whom or what it includes, whether it is international or truly global, and how it is constituted — there is no doubt that the agents, actors, organisations, and institutions of transnational social and economic exchange and action exist. But what is GCS? Is it a space or locus of sovereign agents, or merely a structural effect? Does it wield compulsory power or it is a mere epiphenomenon, a reflection of the state system? Is GCS an institutional phenomenon, the result of the exercise of power by other actors, or is it a productive phenomenon, constituted by the social roles and relations growing out of contemporary states and markets? In this article, I adopt a neo-Hegelian approach, and propose a dialectical relationship between developing modes of global political rule and the markets that it shapes and governs. I problematise GCS as a central and vital element in an expanding global neo-liberal regime of governmentality, which is constituted out of the social relations within that regime and which, to a large degree, serves to legitimise that regime.

“Regulation for the rest of us?” Global civil society and the privatization of transnational regulation

Introduction The protests that took place in Seattle during the November 1999 meeting of the World Trade Organization (WTO), and which have occurred periodically since then, illustrate a growing public demand for greater transparency, representation, and regulation under conditions of globalization. While much rhetoric was expended condemning the WTO for its intrusions on national sovereignty, the alternatives proposed by the groups marching in the streets were less clear. Inasmuch as a return to the prosperity and political conditions of the 1960s is not on the cards, and a return to the anarchic and “beggar-thy-neighbor” circumstances of the 1930s is manifestly undesirable, what constitutes a politically viable response to the negative impacts of globalization? Or, to put the question another way, how can “regulation for the rest of us” be achieved? We argue here that, in the interests of economic competitiveness and growth, nation-states have yielded a substantial amount of their domestic regulatory authority to transnational regimes and organizations, such as the WTO, the International Monetary Fund, and various other international regimes and institutions. While globalization is much discussed in terms of the mobility of capital and production, and much feared and opposed for its disruptive impacts on labor and social organization more generally, the question of regulation, per se, has not been much considered. Nonetheless, a critical set of problems arising from contemporary globalization are the social, economic and environmental externalities that are not being addressed within the existing international system of regulatory conventions and regimes.

The creation of an integrated sustainability curriculum and student praxis projects

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to share the content and early results from an interdisciplinary sustainability curriculum that integrates theory and practice (praxis). The curriculum links new topical courses concerning renewable energy, food, water, engineering and social change with specialized labs that enhance technological and social‐institutional sustainability literacy and build team‐based project collaboration skills.Design/methodology/approach – In responses to dynamic interest emerging from university students and society, scholars from Environmental Studies, Engineering, Sociology, Education and Politics Departments united to create this curriculum. New courses and labs were designed and pre‐existing courses were “radically retrofitted” and more tightly integrated through co‐instruction and content. The co‐authors discuss the background and collaborative processes that led to the emergence of this curriculum and describe the pedagogy and results associated with the student projects.Find...

Crossing Borders: Resource Flows, the Global Environment, and International Security

* Ronnie D. Lipschutz is President of the Pacific Institute for Studies in Development. Environmcnt and Security, Berkeley, California. John P. Holdren is Professor of Energy and Resources and Chair of Graduate Advisors in the Energy and Resources Group, University of California, Berkeley. This paper is a revised version of one prepared for the Symposium on ’The New Transnationalism: Nation-States and the Global Environment’ at the 1989 Annual Meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of

Sweating it out: NGO campaigns and trade union empowerment

In the context of globalisation, transnational social regulation is increasingly the product of NGOs intervening in the sphere of global trade. Drawing on empirical research in SE Asia, the author contends that what matters as much as codes of conduct are spillover effects whose force extends beyond building walls into the broader society of the host country. The basis for effective labour law lies within states, and activism must focus on improving legal, political, and social conditions for workers in the host countries, rather than on trying to affect corporate behaviour through consumer pressure.

Environmental Conflict and Environmental Determinism: The Relative Importance of Social and Natural Factors

Many contemporary discussions of the role of environment in the causation and escalation of violent conflict treat it in a fairly deterministic fashion. Natural resources are axiomatically taken to be scarce and therefore the object of struggle between individuals, societies, and states. The invocation of ‘environmental determinism’ as a means of predicting resource-centered conflicts, and formulating strategies in response, is hardly a new phenomenon. The great geopoliticians of the 19th and the early 20th century engaged in similar exercises. In their work, they took little cognizance of the importance of social factors in driving conflict and thereby contributed to the emergence of competitive foreign policies that, in many ways, became self-fulfilling prophecy. In this chapter, I examine and critique this approach to ‘environmental conflict and security’, providing two examples of deterministic discourses of environment and conflict, one based on ‘water wars’, the other on population. Finally, I argue that most discussions of ‘environment and security’ are rooted in these types of ‘naturalized’ discourses and that we need to ‘denaturalize’ such notions and pay greater attention to social factors.

Because People Matter: Studying Global Political Economy

The 1990s were hard on our traditional theories of International Relations and International Political Economy, and the Millennium has brought the End of Meta‐Narrative as We Know It. In this article, I discuss and dissect three of the past decade’s meta‐narratives, and show how they were no more than failed efforts to shore up the decomposing corpus of mainstream theories. In their stead, I offer a preliminary description of a contextual and contingent approach to thinking about and analyzing global political economy. I place people at the center of my framework, and use the tools of historical materialism, feminist theory, and agency‐structure analysis to generate an understanding of the relationship between what I call the “social individual” and global politics and political economy.

The United Nations and Civil Society: Creative Partnerships for Sustainable Development

As people from around the world gathered in San Francisco in the summer of 1995 to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the United Nations organization, celebration and euphoria were greatly tempered with frustration and sober reassessment about the future of global governance. Creating the capacity to deal effectively with poverty, malnutrition, environmental degradation, resource depletion, and other problems associated with the dual processes of under- and overdevelopment, coupled with the endless striving of humans for identity and fulfillment of basic needs and values, stands as a major challenge for governance in the twentyfirst century. Yet the peoples of the world and their governments at all levels have gained little ground in building effective multilateral responses. Moreover, the United Nations and the system of associated, autonomous specialized agencies seem ill-equipped at best to meet that challenge. Individuals acting in the name of states have generally found the policy mechanisms under their control to be insufficient for the work at hand. Similarly, civic-based actors seldom possess sufficient resources, authority, or the requisite capacity for launching successful, large-scale independent policy initiatives. Yet, building and sustaining cooperation between public and civic-based entities has remained an elusive objective. On the other hand, it is vitally necessary to place the present limitations of the UN system in the perspective of history. Those who

The Sustainability Debate: Déjà Vu All Over Again?

What can we discover about sustainability that we did not already know? Since the term arst appeared during the 1970s—in a book edited by Dennis Pirages,1 and later in the IUCN’s 1980 World Conservation Strategy2—it has been used and abused in many different ways and with many different meanings. For many years, the deanition offered by the World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED, also known as the Brundtland Commission) in the 1987 book Our Common Future was canonical:

The Historical and Structural Origins of Global Civil Society

Like so many other concepts in contemporary political language, ‘global civil society’ (GCS) has become a trope, a term that means whatever the speaker wishes. As David Chandler makes clear in his article, the notion of GCS is often wielded by those who claim to be theorizing a social phenomenon, but who fail to acknowledge the normative content of either their arguments or hopes. This problem arises in much of the global civil society literature as a failure to properly historicize GCS. Instead, a sort of idealism runs rampant—and I admit as much guilt as anyone else in this respect (Lipschutz, 1992)—in which an imagined ‘self-regulating society’ comes to displace an overweening state and its contentious politics, establishing a kind of global harmony instead (see, for example, Kaldor, 2003). This is reminiscent of Karl Polanyi’s (2001[1944]) description of the ‘stark utopia’ that would result from a self-regulating market which, had it ever come to complete fruition, would have destroyed both humanity and nature. Still, GCS does exist. It hardly meets the normative ideals of Kaldor, John Keane (2003), or a host of others (e.g., Korten, 1999; Florini, 2000; Scholte, 2002), and the members of GCS certainly do not engage in the idealized communicative practices of Jurgen Habermas (1984). But it is there! Yet very few writing on the topic ask the important questions. Why does GCS exist? How it has come into being? What social role(s) does it fulfill? This commentary offers not a response to or critique of Chandler’s perceptive analysis but, rather, something of a long view of GCS in relation to states and markets (see Lipschutz, 2005, ch. 3). I argue here that civil society is both constitutive of and constituted by states and markets, all of which are embedded in a single social formation, and that civil society is central to the ‘double movement’ described by Polanyi (2001[1944]). In contemporary terms, GCS should be understood as something of a protective mechanism directed against the depredations of the self-regulating markets of global neo-liberalism as well as the states that organize the political economy in which these markets function (Lipschutz, 2005, ch. 7). This does not imply, however, that the movements, groups and organizations found in GCS are necessarily or automatically ‘progressive’. They may be conservative, reactionary or nihilistically