IPAT and Worldviews

The dire environmental situation we are currently in is evident from a number of articles and books within the Global Environmental Politics literature that we read for the first two weeks of class (Nicholson and Wapner 2014; Mann 2012; Millennium Ecosystem Assessment 2005).  As Nicholson and Wapner point out in Global Environmental Politics: From Person to Planet (2014), together with several other accomplished and esteemed scholars, we are challenging our planet’s capacity to support us.  We have polluted and degraded the very ecosystems and natural resources we rely on – irreparably impacting generations to come.  Clapp and Dauvergne take a different starting point in Paths to a Green World (2011) and look at the world through four “worldviews” people have on global environmental change, and in particular its intersection with the global political economy.  These, as they admit, do not encompass all possible perceptions, but rather are ideal-types to characterize the extreme idea social constructs.  While most of us lie in between two or more of these, they provide a helpful typology of the divergent underlying values and perceptions, which shape how people interpret and act upon environmental challenges.  One question that arises is how characteristic these worldviews are for all cultures.  Or would the worldviews in Bolivia, for example, where there is a large indigenous population, be quite a bit different than those in the US?

Clapp and Dauvergne’s worldviews can be very useful when looking at not just interpretations of environmental challenges, but solutions and the processes involved in trying to reach such solutions.  The complex, multi-layered stakeholder negotiations involved in governance occur between people or groups that have widely divergent worldviews.  Several strands of negotiation theories, such as the mutual gains approach, focus on moving beyond interest-based bargaining and seek to improve the situation for everyone involved.  Understanding actors’ orientations towards whether and how dire the environmental situation is, globalization and the market, and equity are useful as a starting point when looking for common ground between differing perspectives.  This holds true with multilateral negotiations, as well as for local issues, such as city planning, and all scales in between.

Within environmental governance, the power relations between actors impact whose worldview will shape how we respond to environmental issues.  For example, the way Clapp and Dauvergne brought together perceptions on the market and globalization with the environment is particularly important because the solutions to environmental issues that people advocate for are often linked to their economic values.  Actors that have power to influence the economic system, indirectly also influence climate change, natural resource use, pollution, and a host of other environmental issues.  Constructivist approaches to power, knowledge, and ideas could be useful to pair with worldviews to better understand what shapes peoples’ values and actions and how they influence other people and resultant outcomes.  In Power in Global Governance, Barnett and Duvall (2005) elaborate on how productive power can shape actors’ subjective understanding of concepts, ideas, and processes.  The term “green growth” has caught on in the international community like wildfire, paralleling a shift on the part of some countries to embracing addressing environmental issues in a way that will also support their economic growth.  While Tierney brings up the notion that economic growth and environmental sustainability are not incompatible when he discusses the Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC), there are several shortcomings of his piece.  He neglects to discuss the variance of consumption patterns, as well as across countries in terms of their resources.  Furthermore, while the EKC originally arose with response to air pollution, there have been many studies that have shown it not to be true with regards to other production and consumption patterns.  As Gallagher (2008) points out in the Handbook on Trade and the Environment, increased affluence is not enough to ‘green’ the economy – proper environmental policies are also needed to manage resources and reduce environmental degradation.