Nature and Politics:
Notes for a framework of regional analysis
Presented at the 1999 Canadian Association for Latin American and
The
Venerable Buddhadãsa Bhikku, a famous Siamese Buddhist monk, once
remarked that the word ‘development’ in its Pali or Sanskrit equivalent means
‘disorderliness’ or ‘confusion’, and in Buddhism ‘development’ refers either to
progress or regress.
In a similar vein, Ivan
Illich once told me that the Latin word ‘progressio’, which is the root idea of
‘development’, can mean ‘madness’ also.
Sulak Sivaraksa[1]
A narrow strip in
the Andean region of southern
At the same time,
the expansion of transnational capitalism in this region, under the specific
circumstances of a highly centralized and financially entangled national state,
is simultaneously shaped by industrialist assumptions, with its predominant
practices of plundering resources,[2]
as by new forms of flexible accumulation and symbolic consumption (Harvey,
1989; Zukin, 1990). To maintain profit, the former branch has to accelerate the
pace and quantities of what is extracted. But also the “information-based,”
service, and cultural-symbolic side, of the economy has discovered the region.
The accelerated search for new market niches is connected to the (re)discovery
of “Nature” as a staple (Wallace and Shields, 1997:387) e.g. by eco-tourism and
the re-organization of modes of consumption (McLaren, 1998, Shaw &
Williams, 1994, Zukin, 1990, Harvey, 1989) and renovated arguments to carry out
centrally managed conservation and bio-diversity programs (Guha, 1997, Sachs,
1995; Shiva, 1993). Indeed, 12 of the 23 National Parks or
At a first
glance, any description of transnational corporations’ activities in
capitalism is
becoming ever more tightly organized through
dispersal, geographical mobility, and flexible responses in labour markets,
labour processes, and consumer markets, all accompanied by hefty doses of
institutional, product, and technological innovation (Harvey, 1989:159, emph.
in original)
The ongoing
process of privatization in Argentina has also been escorted by an intensified
involvement of the same transnational economic actors that operate in the
region (oil, logging, pulp, mining, commercial fishing, infrastructure
building) in the dynamic and converging field of telecommunication and
information-based activities (i.e. Internet services, banking services, credit
cards, flights and hotel reservations) and cultural production and distribution
(cable companies associated with printed media and radio stations).
Transnational conglomerates of the resource extraction, agribusiness and
service sectors are also increasingly occupying –directly or through
sponsorships- a particularly active role in the commodification of leisure
activities and tourism and in selected educational activities, sports,
performing arts, training and research agendas (Shaw and Williams, 1994). New
forms of creative services can be found in a variety of activities (Zukin,
1990) that locally range from “typical” and juxtaposed “Swiss alpine” [sic]
architecture in ski & mountain resorts (which may be combined with other
fast-food or hotel chain architecture, but centrally designed and assembled
constructions and styles) to advertisement and publishing through mergers,
joint undertakings, vertical or horizontal integration.[4]
As Harvey explains, it is only through growth that profits can be assured,
regardless of social, geopolitical, or ecological consequences, and this
implies growth in real values (Harvey, 1989:180), consummated in a scenario of
competition, forced innovation (or “creative destruction”) and accelerated
turnover time of capital (Harvey, 1989:299).
The above mentioned
oligopolistic amalgamations take place in a complex interplay of fast growing
and hyperactive economies of scale and scope with local cultural, political and
economical conditions. This process should not be separated into disconnected
parts because contradictions of transnational actors with local configurations,
as Mosco argues, may indicate the existence of a diversity of identities and
local resistance, “but they can also mark a more tightly organized capitalism
which uses its control over technologies and expertise to give it the
flexibility to tolerate, resist, absorb, commodify, or ignore these
resistances” (Mosco, 1997:33).
One contention to
the ways of presenting the so called information-based economy, as in many
aspects correctly characterized by David Harvey (1989), Manuel Castells (1989)
and others, is that the universal extension of flexible accumulation and speed
of capital flow has by no means decreased the pace and rates of the extractive
(plunder) activities but has on the contrary contributed to the price
devaluation of this kind of extracted goods (as it has done with labour), mystifying or concealing more than
ever the social and environmental consequences. In a deeper analysis, it has
intensified the disappearance or corralling of contending world views and
knowledge systems (Galtung, 1996;
Howard, 1994; Shiva, 1993), causing a loss of the historical perspective that
would allow to enable and integrate these other systems. One way to execute
such exclusions is to accelerate turn-over time of capital while reducing more
organic face to-face time horizons of embedded and contextual decision-making
(Harvey, 1989:229, Mires, 1990:41).
But time and
space compression, however powerful as a mode of supremacy, does not
necessarily mean a irreversible devaluation
(through objectification of nature and labour) nor the disappearance of local
autonomies. “Shaped by their commercial and geographical context, [the use of]
these technologies facilitate the ongoing production of centres and margins, that
is to say, spatially differentiated hierarchies of politico-economic power”
(Berland, 1996:2). And margins, as places of conflict, constitute at the same
time an axial element to understand the centres. In his early critique to
knowledge monopolies, the Canadian scholar H. Innis defined oral culture as “a
mode of resistance from the ‘margins’ to the expansionist monopolization of
knowledge at the centre, with its now dangerous lack of self-reflexivity,
cultural flexibility, or dialogue” (Berland, 1996:10).
Overcoming
theoretical deficiencies: frameworks for regional analysis
There are
several reasons to propose a frame of analysis that specifically addresses the
case of
1.
2. National states and institutions have been either under-theorized in the neo-classical literature (Brohman, 1995) or theoretically generalized, e.g. in the dependentista and in the world system approach (Hettne, 1984, Schuurman, 1995).
3. A tendency to theoretical centralism can also be traced in the Argentine social sciences, routinely framing regional situations from a “national” hierarchy of priorities. With a few exceptions, the study of diverse local characteristics is subordinated to centrally administered research funds and criteria. A deeper view of the articulation of national conditions; the interplay of economic forces, institutions and civil society; and more specifically the ways in which the highly centralized Argentine state and institutions extend –and have extended in the past- its influence and reproduction over the region, is needed.
4. The “local” has gained a renewed international attention, but for different reasons: as a “firm centered” communitarianism; as a response to situations of anomie and retirement of the state; as a rejection of modern imperatives and technologies and search for alternative life styles or for combined forms in intra-regional development models, such as workers cooperatives in Porto Alegre, Brazil and Mondragon in the Basque region of Spain, among others (Amin, 1996; Arocena, 1996; Ekins, 1986). A positive inventory of the search for autonomy and alternative practices will require focused attention to this particular context and its history.
5. Within the last decade, the provincial states and municipalities have been “hollowed out” [5] in many senses, but are kept however with selective powers to ensure juridical security for investments (or international loans) guarantee access to common resources, and privatizing health, education, irrigation systems, banking, and other –previously publicly owned- basic services while minimizing their role to populist interventions, pushed to “create” mostly alienated , unskilled and inadequately paid jobs, and to increase police forces.
6. The universal, unavoidable and “natural” character of a depoliticized economy is widely assumed. Accordingly, it appears that there are few options left. Crisis is perceived either as a failure to integrate into the globalist project or as a “natural hazard” that should be managed by experts. Consequently, stock market speculative games and breakdowns are labeled following the fashion of meteorologists baptizing hurricanes, i.e., the Tequila, Samba, Vodka, or Rice “effect”). The sacred cows of modernity, growth and progress, are assumed to be inescapable and driven by “imperatives” of the market system, which in itself is perceived as synonymous with society and nature. These assumption, consequently, cannot be challenged unless it is by the aggregation of new fuites en avant, that is: increasing velocity and quantity of extractive activities and international tourism (and the expansion of infrastructure to go faster from A to B, including reduction of regulatory constraints and trade barriers), expanding risk production schemes (e.g., contract farming), promoting training instead of education, encouraging labour flexibilization and pragmatic policies directed towards string-attached “lending,” and, in general, concentrating all public and private efforts and resources in favor of an export-oriented development.
7. Nature, like society, often appears as a compartmentalized aggregation of abstract categories, depending on –or reflecting- particular institutional arrangements of the state (dividing the universe into ministries and regulatory bodies); discipline centered views such as “scientific” forestry, separating forestry from agriculture, as explained by Guha, 1993, 1997, and V. Shiva, 1993; simplified market schemes and neo-liberal prescriptions, or a combination of all three factors. Geographical regions are not understood as integrated social-cultural-environmental totalities in which, for instance, ancient forests play a crucial role in a number of material and non-material dimensions such as a sustainable source of income and self-reliance, control or reduction of risks and soil erosion, self sufficiency, identity, and sacred places;
8.
Externalities, which imply
physical consequences as well as subjective and cultural dimensions (Babe,
1995, 1996; Brohman, 1995; Galtung, 1986, 1996) are not socially assessed nor
negotiated (to be compensated or simply stopped to prevent further destruction)
because there are parallel ideological and structural conditions which
disenfranchise other views, reduce spaces for political participation, or
centralize knowledge through scientific management (Howard, 1994);
9.
Micro-macro contradictions have
been routinely assumed in predominant theories and methods. Ethnographies and
small-scale analysis of local conditions and context have left out larger
configurations and power relations. Conversely, structural analysis has
overlooked human agency and how social movements struggle for autonomy and
meaning.
State,
Margins, and Social Spaces
The
physiognomy of a government can best be judged in its colonies, for there its
characteristic traits usually appear larger and more distinct. When I wish to
judge of the spirit and faults of the administration of Louis XIV, I must go to
Alexis de
Tocqueville, in Dorland (1996)
To address local
situations it is central to follow the history of a particular state formation
and how its political, cultural and ideological circumstances shaped its
institutions, social life and internal power relations. A first observation
that can be made is that there are no neutral generalizations about the state.
If the Western model of nation-state (since the Peace of Westphalia in 1648) as
the political organization that exercises sovereign power over a specified
geographical territory, is providing the terms of reference to which the
“political formations of other societies are required to conform or
approximate” (Lowe & Lloyd, 1997:8), then an interlocking of the state and
its policies with neo-liberal prescriptions and agendas for development, as followed
or promoted by industrialized countries, is an inevitable consequence. The
western State model has fallen to its lowest historical point regarding its
role as the vehicle for representative democracy, reducing Enlightenment ideals
of emancipation and citizen’s involvement to consumer choice and lately, closer
to pragmatism and exclusionary practices, to narrowed “stakeholder” and
“win-or-lose” choices. At the same time, the state has reached its highest peak
in representing “economic” (read corporate) interests in its “allocative” or
“productive” role and articulation in defense of investors rights and freedoms
through technocratic and sometimes secretive arrangements such as the postponed
Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI) and the World Trade Organization
(WTO), among others.
The
roles of
On one hand [the state] is typically characterized [by neo-classical theory] as almost completely omnipotent in its ability to set policy according to its macroeconomic objectives. On the other, it is also described as virtually totally impotent and incapable of acting in an economically rational and efficient manner (unless, of course, it effectively follows neo-classical policy prescriptions)” (Brohman, 1995a:301).
By way of
theoretical constructs, national states are confined, in accordance with
economist reductionism, to neo-liberal positions and competitive performance in
the global arena, in a ranking order that promotes warship by all known and
permanently innovative means instead of cooperation, self-reliance, social
justice, sustainability, reciprocity and accountability.
Internally, the
national state still represents a paradoxical space for political contention,
resistance, and action that has been prematurely discarded in favour of new
global configurations such as the IMF, the World Bank, and the WTO. The
More organic
perceptions of time and humanity’s non-instrumental connection with all forms
of life, or the search and creation of alternatives, and preservation of
non-market values, rules, or culturally and historically shaped notions of
collective ends and purposes are outside the range of such descriptions.
The progressive idea of one
indisputable development model admits “pluralistic” means and even local
creativity to reach this ideal, but leaves the existential question of purposes
(or even the revision of motion and change) out of the debate. As described by
Brohman, “By precluding attention to elements of human behaviour that do not
fit its narrow definition of economic rationality, neoclassical theory leaves
itself no mechanism for understanding and explaining the often messy empirical
world that so defies its models” (Brohman, 1995a:298). For instance, and
despite many appealing connotations, the terms “participation” and “popular
participation” have distracted close attention from the nature of the power
relations involved, i.e. participation in the world market by “isolated and
subsistence peasants,” participation of people as objects of national programs
of development, participation of the public in pre-selected options,
participation in populist policies, and so forth (Nelson and Wright, 1997:2).
Colonization
is not restricted to what has been described as the
In the analysis of the intersections of peripheral states with new arrangements of transnational capitalism, the representations of the national state suffered several mutilations. A minimal expression of state is desirable from the neo-liberal perspective (strong enough, nevertheless, to “correct” what is collected under the umbrella-concept of “market imperfections”), downgrading it to its now prevalent role of guarantor for transnational investments. Two concepts are applicable to understand the lineage of present institutional and economic practices in this respect. One is the idea of a state as a force beyond any disagreement, a state that inherited an autonomous rationality or Raison d’Etat to resolve the “highest priorities” or “vital interests” of a nation-city, swallowing every internal cultural variety or conflict into its homogenizing and overarching jurisdiction. Unity, in the nation-state, means subordinated unity from the margins to the centre. The second is the perception of development as a “transitional” vehicle or “detour on the way to cosmopolitanism or socialism”, a trajectory that would conduct nations and societies to the “proper’” and modernized end of history (Lloyd, 1996:175). However, an ultimate rejection of the state as a commonly organized place is difficult to sustain, despite its contradictions. The consulted bibliography, on the contrary, suggest the perpetuity of unstable conditions and open-ended definitions of state in it’s inter relations with social movements (or political society) and economic forces.
Another distinctive factor of
intra-regional development in Latin America is the varied reproduction and
actualization of colonial practices, a characteristic that has been studied by
R. Guha in India (1993, 1997), describing the continuation of colonial
institutions in contemporary wildlife conservation programs. The relevance of
his argument relies not only in the observation of institutional and
professional behaviour (the biologists, the local government officials, the
WWF, IUCN, Sierra Club and other international agencies and NGO’s) and the
extension of new protected areas (“protected” from their previously established
inhabitants), but also in the definitions of people’s role within those plans.
In the new techno-centric colonialism, mainstream assumptions are defining
local people in rural areas as an environmental “burden” and “part of the
problem” and rarely as subjects able to respond with solutions. Instead they
promote displacement and scientifically defended exclusions, while absorbing
“valuable indigenous knowledge”...if it has commercial potential.
Between
structure, agency and normativity
In this paper, I argue in favor of an integration of political economy with critical development theory. Both approaches, however, will only lead to alternative and autonomy if they transcend pure economistic and goal oriented frames that have been, as it has been vastly argued, the guiding force behind different development strategies.
While most authors dealing with critical development theory would agree that the micro level is inscribed within rules set by structure and “external” factors such as state policies and the international market system, the importance attributed to the subject’s role varies from what has correctly been characterized as “post-modern optimism” concerning identity formation and cultural consumption at the micro level (Garnham, 1997:56) to more developed articulations between the individual actor and macro and meso levels, as proposed by Long (1996). The subjects’ recognition of their own forces and creation of knowledge creation/dissemination, according to Long, is a process of multiple interconnected elements:
Actor strategies and capacities for drawing upon existing knowledge repertoires and absorbing new information, validation processes whereby newly introduced information and its sources are judged acceptable and useful or contested, and various transactions involving the exchange of specific material and symbolic benefits. Implicit in all this is the fact that the generation and utilization of knowledge is not merely a matter of instrumentalities, technical efficiencies, or hermeneutics (i.e. the mediation of the understanding of others through the theoretical interpretation of our own), but involves aspects of control, authority and power that are embedded in social relationships” (Long, 1996:146).
Booth, in a position similar to that of Mosco (1996) and Garnham (1996), recognizing Long’s position, proposes to be more cautious about the nature and scope of participatory research or case studies, demanding reconciliation of insights about local settings with the understanding of larger structures, without which these insight will lack realism. “It is legitimate to ask how we are to ensure that the findings of local-action studies reflect not only local realities and room-for-manoeuvre, but also the constraints upon action that may emerge at the regional or national level (or over longer periods of time)” (Booth, 1996:60).
Political economy, on the other hand, and despite its preferences for macro-analysis, has never been indifferent to the historical dimensions and complexities of symbolic representations and how individuals and social groups perceive their world and how this is reflected in their struggles. The question is how far political economy will separate itself from Marxist orthodoxy and from what has been described, by Handa, 1980; Hettne, 1984; Lutz, 1986 and Schuurman, 1996, among others, as unilinear and determinist progressism and does not lead to a “realistic” and at the same time paralyzing defeatism. For instance, the study of economy as a system of power (Babe, 1995:71) seeks to understand not only a specific material context, but also the political, ideological and cultural life which provides the text.
Ideas have an important place within political-economic accounts, but, unlike idealist approaches, which begin with values, beliefs, or attitudes and from these explain society’s workings, the materialist approach contends that the realm of ideas itself requires explanation. That is not to say that ideas stand ‘outside’ the material. On the contrary, the ideological and cultural are embedded in the economic base and are an integral part of the reproduction of society” (Clement, 1997:4).
Furthermore, political economy “wants to explain ‘the economy’ and market forces so that political and social interventions can direct economic processes,” seeking most of all “to prevent the political and social aspects of life from being marginalized by a strictly economic logic” (Clement, ibid., p.4)[7]. The bifurcation from economics and political sciences took place around the turn of the century, with Alfred Marshall as one of the first and main representatives of neo-classicism (Babe, 1995, 1996 a and b; Lutz, 1988; Hunt, 1979), a separation has also contributed to the creation of a myth around the scientific and predictable nature of economics:
One voice [economics] speaks the language of rationality, logic, and positivism; the other [political science], a normative language that is permitted to talk back but not with the other. One is permitted to go only so far as Max Weber (1946), who felt that it was acceptable to be motivated by moral concerns, but that the canons of science left no room for them in analysis” (Mosco, 1996:35).
Realistic accounts of political economy, however, may respond to the questions of gains and losses, of production and distribution, but this
does not suffice to lead us from our present darkness to a world of justice, peace and sustainability. Political economy as such knows nothing of altruism, mercy, forgiveness, redemption, self-restraint, understanding, peace. While it views the world as a struggle for power and aligns itself with the underprivileged, it is unable to transcend that struggle in the present” (Babe, 1995:82, emph. added).
But also theories of development in the 80’s have been described as positivist: “the world is regarded as it is and not as it should be”, says Schuurman, (1996:20), stressing the relevance of two major and emerging normative approaches: feminist, and the question of how to develop sustainability (Schuurman, 1996:20-21). Using a more elaborated framework, and in line with what was called “Another Development” in the 70’s (in Development Dialogue, Uppsala, SIDA/Dag Hammarskjold Foundation) and the European Green movement, Hettne (1996:144) proposes a search for alternative theory that also proposes to go beyond economism, recovering the normative trend development theory had in the 70’s which was interrupted by the pragmatism of the 80’s. Unlike traditional political economists, however, Hettne affirms that an inventory of normative contributions and theories is relevant because it deals not only with “development in terms of how it actually takes place but rather how it should take place.” Deriving ideas from Karl Polanyi and following previous arguments (Friberg and Hettne, 1984), Hettne challenges the idea of a “natural history”, of unilinear progress, state intervention and command economy in Marxist orthodoxy (the “red” model) to the “blue” (the neo-liberal model) mainstream model because development can be -and is- affected by political action, human will and value-laden reason (“Wertrationalitat”) that is not constrained by the boundaries of instrumental reason (“Zweckrationalitat”). Alternative development (the “green” pathway or model) includes a non articulated multitude of perspectives that originates from the excluded and the periphery, and “is a cry for visibility, participation, and justice” (Hettne, 1996:145).
Movements of opposition to the disruptions of home, community, territory, and nation by the restless flow of capital are legion. But then so too are movements against the tight constraints of a purely monetary expression of value and the systematized organization of space and time. What is more, such movements spread far beyond the realms of class struggle in any narrowly defined sense. The rigid discipline of time schedules, of tightly organized property rights and other forms of spatial determination, generate widespread resistances on the part of individuals who seek to put themselves outside these hegemonic constraints in exactly the same way that others refuse the discipline of money. And from time to time these individual resistances can coalesce into social movements with the aim of liberating space and time from their current materialization and constructing an alternative kind of society in which value, time, and money are understood in new and quite different ways. Movements of all sorts –religious, mystical, social, communitarian, humanitarian, etc- define themselves directly in terms of an antagonism to the power of money and of rationalized conceptions of space and time over daily life (Harvey, 1989:238)
But Harvey allows
little space for optimism: the need for material reproduction of social
movements that live in opposition to the market systems, he affirms, will
permanently have to open the gate for the “dissolving power of money” and a
restored command over space and time by capital (Harvey, ibid.). Thus,
On the other hand, the desperate search
for basic –rather than autonomous-
material reproduction, such as barter, local currencies, barter and exchange
systems (such as LETS, local exchange and trade system), and other expressions
of the so called “informal” economy, have found new impetuosity in the cities.
Such systems of production and exchange surpasses the formal or accounted part
of economic activity in terms of work (Ekins, 1986), are extremely unstable and
may act as a pacifier of social unrest and conform therefore a tolerated and
even promoted social space. Concurrently with a growing number of rural-based
movements (e.g. the “Sem Terra” or landless movement in
Using a more differentiated frame,
although focusing mostly in European roots and contexts, Hettne recognizes
other versions and historical backgrounds of what he calls the “various
manifestations of the Counterpoint” [to Mainstream models and assumptions]. One
is conservative romanticism, which
may also be seen as a reaction against industrialism in
The question about conflict or contending interaction between different Cosmo-visions, world-views, knowledge systems, and meanings concerning the real is central to the understanding of current debates. In the Western world, after the publication in 1962 of T. S. Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, the classic centrality of positivism and universal models of science has been strongly disputed, although for different reasons within quite different theoretical contexts. On one hand, the image of a multiplicity of rising “worlds” –equating in some cases “worlds” with new scientific revolutions and findings- emerged after Kuhn’s frame became a key reference in most of the subsequent debates. The epistemological “pendulum” that moved from “extreme logicism to extreme relativism” (Nudler, 1990:185) has meanwhile allowed a more differentiated image of interworlds’ dialogue. “World and frame conflicts are accessible to rational methods, provided that the notion of ‘rationality’ is extended beyond its narrow, Cartesian sense” (Nudler, 1990:197).
It is interesting to note that for Innis the concept of “bias” also referred to context and socially constructed meaning as one of the strongest modeling forces in the work of intellectuals, rather than epistemological strongholds. As Creighton observes:
No word appeared more frequently in his work –it was part of the title of one of his collections of essays- than the word ‘bias’. No man was ever more acutely aware of the fact that everybody, including the most supposedly detached economist, was a creature of his own generation and environment and deeply affected by its values, assumptions, and beliefs. Such arguments, carried to their logical extreme, could end only in complete relativism; they could mean only that an objective economic science was logically impossible. This absolute conclusion Innis refused to accept. Bias was the social scientist’s greatest danger, but paradoxically it also was the best hope of salvation. Bias, he seemed to say, is an historical phenomenon that is always with us and can be studied and analyzed just like any other historical phenomenon. And through such study the economist could discover the cumulative force of bias, and their effect on institutions (Creighton, 1981:21)
From another perspective, Shiva challenges the universality of western science as a “globalised version of a very local and parochial tradition” because it is a system of domination by which local knowledge systems are excluded, diminished or de-qualified based on the prevalence of specific material goals (productive, commercial, military, technological, physical) which constitute the preferred common places to define “power” as an unavoidable destiny in the western value system (Shiva, 1990:10). Power relations, on one hand, are measured in terms of distance (or access) to material and more recently to commodified symbolic goods or “cultural capital”.
But power relations could also imply the study of a specific sanctioning capacity, of how boundaries of action are defined, how the burdens of proof are distributed (Beck, 1995), documenting “inequality in the possession of ‘cultural capital’ across persons and groups, thereby raising questions as to how and by whom components of cultural capital get valorized, how and why some tastes and preferences and some modes of knowledge become highly valued while others are denigrated, and so on” (Babe, 1996).
The dominant frames of applied inspection, consequently, privilege micro approaches by which reality is constructed through aggregated and self-contained technical studies, in which the social, historical circumstances and meanings, as well as the ecological consequences are excluded or reduced to input data, in which people and nature are treated as objects, resources and commodities, “extracting”, hence, information and data, excluding the subjects from the central aspects of the research process and final uses and control of the results. The western mode of intellectual production also fails to be empathetic and to strive for reciprocity with other knowledge systems.
The ‘scientific’ label assigns a kind of sacredness or social immunity to the western system. By elevating itself above society and other knowledge systems and by simultaneously excluding other knowledge systems from the domain of reliable and systematic knowledge, the dominant system creates its exclusive monopoly. Paradoxically, it is the knowledge systems which are considered most open, that are, in reality closed to scrutiny and evaluation. Modern western science is not to be evaluated, it is merely to be accepted” (Shiva, 1993:12).
The claim of
universality has also successfully been extended by applying the cartographic notion
of the “globe” as a corporate brand name and synonym of “the” world, a single
unit of analysis and provided a useful symbol since the rise of Mercantilism
for the process of transnationalization of capitalism, also known as
“globalization.” The sphere, more an abstraction than a perceivable fact, has
become the target for “fantasies of large-scale planning. The image of the Blue
Planet –so small and easily comprehensible- suggests that what has hitherto
provided forms of human existence may now be planned and managed as a single
object” (Sachs, 1994:174).
Planning from a
distance and computer-modeled forestry, for example, are outcomes of this
centralization of solutions promoted by would-be commanding pilots of “space
ship” Earth. In 1994, the Mapuche community Aucapan rejected –in their subtle
way, with silences, boycotts, “non-understandings,” and so forth- a highly
subsidized project of pine plantation within their territory. Pines (Pinus ponderosa) are a real obsession
for international agencies such as the World Bank. The argued rationale is an
assumed provision of oxygen (to compensate global warming), commercial
benefits, and control of soil, among others (Dimitriu, 1995; Laclau, 1994)
But the people
from the communities of Aucapan, Malleo, and Chiquilihuin in Neuquen, just to
mention one the resulting conflicts, have other views and arguments. They need
the land for pastures and subsistence. They prefer other types of trees they
already use to create natural galleries to protect the creeks from drying in
summer, for instance, willows or fruit trees. They also know by experience that
a pine plantation, once a forest fire starts, burns as much as five times
faster than the nature forests, and that the chemicals in pine needles turn
soils of the Andean region acidic. They also have seen new insects (sirex noctilio, urucerus) spreading. The
long-term benefits of commercial plantations, even if done in eroded places, do
not cover immediate basic needs and require a labour force that is scarce and
might be useful to cover basic needs. These priorities, though, are not
considered significant by experts and professionals of the National Institute
of Rural Technology (Instituto Nacional de Tecnología Agropecuaria, INTA) and
provincial agencies, who approach the site with maps, satellite photographs and
previously designed action programs and deductive research methods.
“Participation” is then promoted and measured in terms of the degree of
willingness to accept the outside professionals’ programs. The professional’s
roles and practices are shaped by a number of interrelated factors: their own
beliefs, institutional values, and agendas. Only in the least instance, and at
the end of all conditions, if at all, are local views and expressed needs taken
into consideration (Dimitriu, 1995). As
described by Banuri, “the interest of the expert in acquiring, creating,
promoting or acting upon the basis of such knowledge is increasingly motivated
by internal considerations, rather than by normative social implications”
(Banuri, 1993:13).
Nature
and Economic Models
The economic function is but one of many vital
functions of land. It invests man’s life with stability; it is the site of his
habitation; it is a condition of his physical safety; it is the landscape and
the seasons. We might as well imagine his being born without hands and feet as
carrying on his life without land. And yet to separate land from man and
organize society in such a way as to satisfy the requirements of a real-estate
market was a vital part of the utopian concept of a market economy” (…) “To
detach man from the soil meant the dissolution of the body economic into its
elements so that each element could fit into that part of the system where it
was more useful…The aim was the elimination of all claims on the part of
neighborhood or kinship organizations.
Karl Polanyi, [1944] 1957, pp.178-9
The world can, in effect, get along without natural resources.
Robert M. Solow, Nobel laureate in economics, (1974) in “The economics of Resources or the resources of Economics”, American Economic Review, May, pp. 1-14, quoted by Babe (1995) and Hall (1994).
The positive connotations of “progress” and “growth” are still prevalent in the national discourse, in the provincial administrations, the municipalities, in many social movements, and continually stressed in the media and educational institutions. Nevertheless, the social, cultural and environmental consequences of the privileged means of pursuing these goals and their assumptions are still rarely or only marginally challenged. These impacts, at best, are considered to be the inevitable costs or “side effects” of any economic activity even though they involve not only ecosystems but also cultures and different production systems. Options are reduced to the selection from technology packages and prescriptions, to contracting of specialized services to reduce costs, to internalizing some of the more evident externalities, to identifying new market niches, to improving competitiveness, to currying -by all possible means- public favors such as sponsorships, subsidies and concessions, and to applying strict adjustment programs. At the same time, the prior promises of social distribution of wealth in a never realized “trickle-down” effect, have been revised and updated with new labels, such as the image of “conscious protagonists in the market” (i.e. stakeholders) or “those-who-could-survive,” farmers who are pushed to abandon the subsistence production to join the contract farming system. The discourses of growth are zealously continued in order to retain illusions of opportunities around the corner, which certainly are not for everyone. The race for adaptation requires competitive and innovative entrepreneurs and professionals, as well as governments willing to guarantee the narrowing spaces for economic reproduction.
Statistics of
national “growth” (as calculated by the World Bank and national statistical
agencies) and somehow improved in “human development” indicators (UNDP), even
if current production schemes were maintained (the “zero sum” option promoted
by some members of the Club of Rome such as Manfred Max-Neef) only reveal
insignificant proportions of the squandered energies, the social and cultural
destruction, and the environmental devastation, and rarely recognize any damage
within the described societies or done to third parties (other societies, other
generations, other species, etc.). And if recognized, these externalities are
used as arguments for new enterprises (setting eco-standards that only few companies
would be able to follow) and renewed involvement of the state and the World
Bank to “restore” ecological balance. A major problem, however, is how
–involving what social processes, knowledge systems and power relations-
damages and externalities are either discovered, perceived, assessed, valued
and compensated or, on the other hand, reduced or simply avoided. The
theoretical assumptions of the neo-classical school, it is true, have been
discussed and analyzed in depth and
no part has been left unscathed. The paradigm has been shown to be extremely unrealistic in its assumptions, especially its notions of a rational, self-centered individual, and of the existence of a self-regulating market. It has been shown to be tied to a particular ideology, that of laissez-faire conservatism. And it has been found to be highly deductive and rather a-empirical; a kind of mathematical form of scholasticism” (Etzioni, in Lutz, 1988:iii).
However, one of
the limitations of the intellectualist approaches to “scientific” discourse is
the assumption that a position can be “defeated” by another superior “paradigm”
using a Kuhnian logical framework in isolation from the social context, from
other meaning producing practices. But this confrontation extends well beyond
the academic world and its rules of argumentation. As Shiva argues, this “has
less to do with knowledge and more to do with power” (Shiva, 1990:10), and
power relations in which “positivism, verificationism and falsifictionism were
all based on the assumption that unlike traditional, local beliefs of the
world, which are socially constructed, modern
scientific knowledge was thought to be determined without social mediation”
(Shiva, 1990:11, emph. added). This last statement has at least two parallel
interpretations: on one hand, the social identification of problems and
practical means to resolve them do involve “logical” procedures. On the other
hand, the perception of objectives, consequences, implications and options are
sometimes empirically measurable (for example if externalities are identified
and reduced or avoided instead of being treated -or traded- as new
justifications for investment in technological innovation) and at the same time
dependent on culturally and politically shaped values and expectations
(reciprocity, self-reliance, social justice, respect for future generations,
egalitarian social life, sacredness of Nature). But because of the abstractive
nature of economics, especially in neo-classical theory [9],
the ways in which nature and society are integrated into analysis is
problematic and is leading towards exactly the opposite direction of what have
been the promises of “development” : irreversible ecological and cultural
destruction.
The weakest point of the economistic model is its reductionism. The multiple dimensions of the so-called “externalities” are reduced to the visible part of the economy and to market transactions (and even there with highly arguable limitations), a blind spot that has been generously shared by most social-scientific studies (Beck, 1995:41). However, not everyone has overlooked these “side effects.” Firstly, the far-reaching consequences -or “deep” externalities- of industrialist economic activity, regardless of the character of its imposition (colonial practices, military dictatorships, enclosures, or market hegemony) have always been denounced by its victims but rarely taken into consideration by theorists of growth in any of its manifestations (neo-liberal, socialist, nationalist, or social-democratic). In Gemeinschaft economies, in which the market place -not the market system- permitted a face-to-face interaction between producers and consumers, the scale of production had fewer consequences and admitted closer interaction among the actors and therefore direct negotiations, rules and accountability.
The rise of long-distance economy has helped to deny, conceal and objectify the consequences. The history of capitalism is a story of permanent and increasing creation and transfer of externalities, a characteristic that has reproduced “margins” as social or geographical places of a double nature, as dump sites or as reserves of resources, both in terms of land and labor. It might be reasonable to link the idea of “externalizing” certain kind of “disadvantages”, such as social conflict (for example pushing “undesired” people into exile or emigration, one of the most complex externalities both for the “providing” and for the “receiving” societies) and environmental damage to the notion of “internal moral” used by Max Weber when he describes the genealogy of religious or ideological justifications and administrative “rules” produced in order to apply interest to loans given to third parties, that is, to persons who do not belong to the same community, class, religion or group. But the transfer of any kind of undesired consequences, as the contrary to communitarian reciprocity, comprises a multiplicity of dimensions which exceed the material narrowness assumed in most of the economistic literature.
Galtung, in one of his earliest contributions to the understanding of the complexities involved, integrated knowledge (not only “practical” knowledge) into the elements to be considered. Trade, and moreover “free trade,” is more than a buzz word of unequal exchanges that might be surmounted using differentiated bargaining skills and technology. It is within this kind of relations that “comparative advantages” and unjust labor divisions have historically been extended (if not created) and reproduced. “The basic rule of self-reliance,” says Galtung, “is this:
produce what you need using your own resources, internalising the challenges this involves, growing with the challenges, neither giving the most challenging tasks (positive externalities) to somebody else on whom you become dependent, nor exporting negative externalities to somebody else to whom you do damage and who may become dependent on you” (Galtung, 1980).
In a more recent book, Galtung lists six spaces of externalities: Nature, Human, Social, World, Time and Culture linking them together in a more holistic and normative method of analysis. In order to avoid single-factor theorizing, “all six spaces have to be represented; no reductionism to less than six will work” (Galtung, 1996:155).
Mainstream
economics has indeed reacted to
externalities but for different reasons and in a way that may exacerbate the
consequences instead of providing meaningful solutions. The shallow version of
externalities can be traced back to from the beginning of its identification.
When Alfred Marshall’s disciple A. C. Pigou introduced the term in 1920, he
referred basically to visible “injury,” such as the smoke from a factory, to
“buildings and vegetables, expenses for washing clothes and cleaning rooms,
expenses for the provision of extra artificial light, and in many other ways”
(Pigou, in Babe, 1996:90). The ambition and end goal of this approach was -and
still is- to refine “scientific” methods
of calculations of these kinds of “unpriced” consequences, initially conceived to impose taxes or subsidies, by means of
state intervention, to “correct” the “inefficiency,” a position that was soon
abandoned (state intervention in market processes have never been willingly
accepted by the neo-liberal orthodoxy) in favor of cost/benefit studies. In the
words of William Leiss, “Public and private spokesmen reiterated the comforting
message designed to channel debate: the matter was, like everything else,
essentially one of economic cost.
According to this view, environmental quality is one desirable commodity among
many, its marginal utility to be determined by the same calculus that governs
the fate of all commodities in the marketplace” (Leiss, 1974: viii). The “right
to pollute” became soon a new marketable property right in the 60’s, especially
promoted by the policy of the Chicago School neoclassicists (Hunt, 1979:369),
and has extended to almost every conceivable domain in the 90’s. The process of
commodification has now reached the atmosphere, for instance in “Gas Emissions
certificates” that are currently traded in the context of Global Warming
Protocols according to administratively determined national pollution or oxygen
“quotas.” The World Bank estimated the trade of “CO2-bonuses” –already offered
in the
Ascribing price-value to externalities is an
multi-edged argument since value is a philosophical category that changes over
time. If there were no estimation at all, because of the incommensurability of
the burden on Nature of industrial activity or the non-market labor done by
women, just to mention two central aspects of current debates, then there would
be less space for public debate and participation, leaving consequently more
space to speculations about a “neutral” technology that enable experts to
perform “scientific” assessments and induce “corrective” measures via enhanced
innovation or substitutability (e.g. bio-technology). Some would argue that
life and Mother Earth are reducible to computer-based calculations and
assessments, or at least reduced to those “relevant” aspects that are presumed
to be essential for survival or even market expansion. This, assuming its
feasibility, would be a complicated
task, but it does not reflect complexities
because it reduces subjectivity and social life to data inputs and numbers. [10]
The weaknesses of
ascribing market value to social
processes or to nature appear when externalities are translated into money, as
done by analogy with Marx’s argument of labor as a commodity that is sold in
the market. Since money is a commodity, any analogy would imply a
commodification of nature, a theoretical tour
de force that would imply “paying nature a salary” for its “services,”
regardless of the yardstick that is used. The subjective historical character
of any pricing system, such as class, gender, race or inter-generational
differences of what is valuable and why, is assumed away. A neo-liberal
representative of the Ecological Economy, for instance, claims to have found a
reliable formula of how to squeeze Nature’s “services” into the market:
[W]e have
estimated the current economic value of 17 ecosystem services [sic] for 16 biomes, based on published studies and a few
original calculations. For the entire biosphere, the value (most of which is
outside the market) is estimated to be in the range of U$S 16 to 54 trillion
per year, with an average of 33 trillion per year. Because of the nature of the
uncertainties, this must be considered a minimum estimate. The global GNP total
is around 18 trillion per year (Constanza, 1997).
One of the limits of a pricing system is the standardization of value and needs, translating complex processes into the language and exchange rules of a specific currency, excluding non-market value and time-based (and therefore changing) perceptions of value.
Neoclassicism and
the price system […] as a system of information, knowledge, and communication,
utterly efface intimations of uniqueness, sacredness, and intrinsic value. The
uniqueness of species (let alone uniqueness of individual member of species),
and the sacredness of life, are precluded by neoclassicism and the price system
because, by neo-classicism’s internal logic and mode of naming, uniqueness and
sacredness are quite unthinkable and unimaginable. Uniqueness and sacredness
alike imply incapacity for, or inappropriateness of, substitutions, which is to
say they imply an absence or inappropriateness of price; but absence of price, by neo-classicism’s logic, means an absence of
value (Babe, 1995:99, my emph.)
On the other
hand, the idea of risk, failure, and damage has opened the debate for new forms
of accountability, especially since 1972, the year in which the “industrialist
consensus” started to break, but not so much due to the action and predictions
of isolated groups of scientists, the rejection by hippies of the industrial
society or by “early” (western) ecologists who criticized the consequences of
the dominant modes of production. The Meadows report (Club of Rome’s “Limits to
Growth”), in a context of panic (the so called Oil “crisis,” with its first
signals being some “dramatic” limits to speed in the Deutsche Autobahn), echoed
commonplaces and prejudices of “public opinion” regarding the exhaustion of
natural resources due to the increase of the world’s population and conveyed
mostly Neo-Malthusian undertones. However, the report had a deep impact because
it was produced from within the core of the industrialist milieu and
realistically described a number of problems (forests, water, soil erosion,
extinction of species) and enhanced a general view of susceptibility to
“natural disasters.” One of the first challenges came from the Bariloche
Foundation, in a document that has been known as the “Modelo Mundial
Latinoamericano”[11]. The
main thesis of this report was that the available resources on earth (soil,
metals, energy) were infinite or almost impossible to exhaust. It optimistically proposed to expand the use
of nuclear power in
For generations,
The Argentine
government used it military to enforce its jurisdiction over the continental
part of this region in 1879,
when Indian
resistance had been wiped out and close to nine million hectáreas of ‘liberated’ land passed into the hands of the less
than four hundred individuals who had financed [General] Roca’s Blitzkrieg-like
expedition, [and the] indigenous culture was left to be forgotten by the
general populace and studied by only the professional anthropologists (Foster,
1990:16).
It was one of
these anthropologists, Francisco Moreno (a close friend of General Roca), who
was hired as the official surveyor of the Chilean-Argentine border, and who
donated the territory he received as part of his remuneration, thereby enabling
creation of the Nahuel Huapi National Park in 1903, very much inspired by
Yellowstone National Park in the USA. More sympathetic to the Europeanized
urban context than to the windy southern lakes, and a strong defender of the
liberal ideals of the national elite,
The intellectual
activity of these years and the dominant direction of the institutional
strategies since then have to be understood as part of a project of major
proportions that affected most of the Latin American countries. “In less than a
generation, Argentina assimilated the constellation of ideologemes known as
positivism, a scientific codification of attitudes that supported the Liberal
economic program, aimed to reject every trace of whatever could be considered
pre-modern, indigenous, or ‘Hispanic’” (Foster, 1990:7). The model of the so
called Generation of 1880 was predominantly pro-European, favoured urban
life-styles, reinforced the dependence on foreign markets and institutions, and
relied (as harbour-cities middlemen) on a staple-based economy in which the
first nations were, and still are, viewed as inevitably (and “naturally”)
“dying cultures”, and the country was circumscribed in terms of centrally
administered wilderness and natural resources of “unlimited” abundance. The
production and representation of spaces, consequently, defined distances in
relation to a national centralism with it models of (European) civilization as opposed to barbarism (the local “criollo” population). But centralism is
a term with contradictory connotations. The “country-city” dichotomy of last
century’s centralism differentiated the rural-based cultural “purity” from the
urban “polluted”, and socially dissolving environment (the masses). The city,
being the “artificial” side, is the center of power, instrumental rationality
and industry. “Wilderness”, and moreover the “indigenous”, represents the
“natural”, creating a social distance to what has to be “civilized” or conquered
(Barbero, 1989:170 and 205). Centralism, and the metaphor of “empty spaces”
also consolidates the definition of progress “in terms of the triumph of ‘Man’
(an unequivocally gendered agent) and his technology over a wild ‘Nature’ (equally and oppositely
gendered, usually explicitly), which it was its mission to tame and render
‘productive’” (Wallace & Shields, 1997:390).
Embeddedness:
the local Identity
Changing
perceptions of identity and other-than-utilitarian views on Nature germinated
in Patagonia in a combination of local historical contradictions and the
emergence of an international ecological awareness, shaped first by traveler
ideals of “wilderness” and lately by consumer demands for “eco-safe” and
pristine places. On one hand, it stems from the involvement of the migrants to
the south. The first Europeans arrived during and after the military “conquest”
of 1871. The Welsh in 1865,[12]
later Germans, Swiss, Italians, Lebanese, among others, received fiscal land to
settle down by the turn of the century, when the Argentine state began to
extend its influence towards the “frontera”.
This concept of hinterland was inspired by the North American frontier, and was
actually the determining factor in the design of future cities and the railroad
system in
Within the last
three decades, however, this imagery of endless resources has encountered
significant limits. By the end of the 60’s, the national rural development
agency revealed the consequences of intensive land use, primarily extensive
cattle breeding in the estancias.
Active sand dunes, starting near the Chilean border in the West, are crossing
the continent and reaching the
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[1] In Mallmann, C. & Nudler, O. (1986).
[2] Plunder economy,
we are reminded by Martinez Alier, is a translation from the German “Raubwirtschft”, first introduced by
Ernst Friedrich last century, a concept that wasn’t very popular during the
colonialist era, which instead preferred
the more social-Darwinistic “Lebensraum” –or “life space”- defining
spaces for “survival” (of the fittest) among competing colonial states
(Martinez Alier, 1990:47).
[3] The concept of gentrification, as for instance described by Raymond Williams in The City and the Country (1973), transcends the more common application to the revaluation process of urban properties. For example, Sharon Zukin’s definition of gentrification in relation to “the displacement of lower-income, often ethnic and racial minority residents from newly-desirable centre-city locations” (1990:37) could as well be applied to similar processes taking place in the countryside or remote areas.
[4] In the last few
months, several regional cable, open TV and radio stations have been purchased
by major companies: the (only and) private Channel 7 of the Neuquen province by
CEI, a publishing and electronic media corporation with several links to oil
and banking companies such as the Citicorp, and the public Channel 10 of the
Rio Negro province by Clarin, the most important media and telecommunications
giant in Latin America after Televisa in Mexico and O Globo in Brazil. For the
latter operation, Clarin signed an agreement in which it promises to renew the
existing equipment and to maintain a vaguely defined “regional content”, but is
also is dismissing 30% of the current personnel. Both channels cover most of
the cities of the interior and rural areas in provinces in which mining, oil,
natural gas, timber extraction and tourism are the major sources of income.
[5] A concept used to describe similar processes in
[6] Every economic or social theory starts, implicitly or explicitly, with a definition –socially mediated or abstractly constructed- of needs, and provides ideas and norms about how to satisfy them. Victoria Rader, along with Gustavo Esteva, discusses the concept of needs extensively and says: “the basic needs approach adopted by authorities in times of social unrest assumes not only the oppressive political order but the oppressive economic order, which is the source of powerful dehumanizing forces: the obsession with material standards of living, the creation of artificial and chronic scarcity, the separation of needs from their means of satisfaction, and the weakening of family and community supports” (Rader, V. (1990) “Human Needs and the Modernization of Poverty”, in Conflict: Human Needs Theory” Burton, J. (Ed.) , New York, St. Martin Press.
[7] Adam Smith, in his Moral Sentiments also recognized “moral concerns” and tried to discern between science and morality, a distinction that went lost in The Wealth of Nations seven years later (1776), where he first used the idea of a guiding “invisible hand” that was equated to “Providence” (for instance in the distribution of land among “a few lordly masters”) in a first reference to a “natural” law in society (Lutz, 1988:35-39).
[8] One of the relevant sources to follow the ongoing debate is undoubtedly the journal Capitalism, Nature, Socialism.
[9] “it is pretty clear that an economist, like a poet, uses metaphors. They are called models,” says Donald McCloskey (in Babe, 1995:9).
[10] One of the “complicated”, if not entertaining, side of calculations is what most escape to our recognition. Complicated calculations have always attracted some kind of attention and social admiration, as in the Arab legend of Sissa, who is believed to be the creator of chess in the 5th century BC. King Hiram offered to reward him with gold, but Sissa asked to be paid in a 1:2 progression of rice grains for each square of the chess board, starting with one grain (1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, and so forth). It would have been physically impossible to comply (over 87,000 trillion rice grains) without losing innumerable kingdoms. Smart calculations might have been always used to gain certain advantages, but this does not imply, conversely, that any calculation is inexorably destined to be used for domination. In many cultures, as in the ancient Arabic world, astronomy and numbers were just a social game or philosophical interrogation. After the industrialist era and the proportions of environmental and social changes, some kind of abstraction that goes beyond previous direct social experience (we do not have cultural memory of the ozone hole, for example) is necessary in order to integrate multiple other dimensions (e.g. spiritual meanings, other non-monetary values) into the debate. That is complexity, and a good example of it is the multiple social and cultural dimensions in the struggle to avoid the patenting of seeds and life in general.
[11] Herrera, A et al. (1976) Catastrophe
or new society? A Latin American model
[12] “On