Opposition to the social and environmental impacts of large-scale mining has become more visible in Chile since the early 1990s, yet not all mining projects catalyze mobilization. Building on the concept of defensive mobilization, I argue that opposition is more likely when a project is perceived as a threat to some members of a community. Using a data set of all major mining projects submitted for environmental licensing since environmental impact assessments were implemented in Chile, I identify the conditions under which mining projects lead to opposition. The results, based on binary logistic regression analysis, show that projects threatening agrarian and indigenous communities, where threats to existing water and land uses are especially salient, are more likely to be opposed. Community challenges are also more likely for projects majority-owned by international investors. About four out of every ten proposed projects have faced opposition, and only a handful of projects have ever been definitively rejected, even as projects that are found to violate regulations are increasingly fined and challenged in court as well as facing protests and public scrutiny.

Many intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) now place a high priority on universal social protection as a means for achieving sustainable development. Is this shift toward universal social protection just talk, or does it signify a more substantial emphasis on welfare within development policy? We present a theoretical framework for understanding discursive changes in global policy as rebranding, fads, trends, or paradigm shifts. We then conduct a comparative, semi-structured review of official language related to social protection used by six key IGOs (International Labour Organization, International Monetary Fund, United Nations Children’s Fund, United Nations Development Programme, World Bank, and World Health Organization) across five dimensions of social protection (labor market, health, family, housing, and education) before the introduction of the United Nations 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Then, employing the framework, we analyze the findings of this review to determine the significance of the discursive shift toward universal social protection in the context of the 2030 Agenda. We document that, at present, universal social protection is an influential policy trend that has shaped how IGOs understand and act on social issues. These findings inform theoretical debates on the relationship between discursive and substantive policy change and contribute to a growing literature on transnational social protection. They also have implications for efforts across agencies and sectors to enhance social protection and achieve the Sustainable Development Goals.

This paper discusses the process of “accumulation by dispossession” of water resources by the institutions of the transnational state and the role of nationalism in the resulting movement for reappropriation. A comparative analysis of Latin American countries is conducted using data obtained from UN databases and historical accounts. The object of this analysis is to delineate a causal pathway surrounding the dynamics of water sovereignty in the age of global capitalism. I find that privatization is not likely to occur if there is a lack of crisis or there is a socialist executive; however, if privatization does occur, and the appropriating action is taken by a multinational corporation, activated nationalist sentiment may lead to reappropriation of water resources.

Green technologies have become a field of competition between countries that are looking for new areas of economic growth and building low-carbon economies. This paper focuses on the case of electric vehicles (EVs) to look at the various actors embedded in the innovation network and explore the progress of and challenges to the diffusion of EVs in China. It complements a systems of innovation approach with the theory of institutional legitimacy, and discusses the regulative, normative, and cultural-cognitive types of legitimacy for different EV-related actors in China. We argue that the EV industry has gained a certain level of regulative legitimacy from the Chinese central state and some local states, but because of power struggles among stakeholders, it has not achieved much normative or cultural-cognitive legitimacy. In fact, it seems that what consumers want is different from what the central and local states have promoted. The discrepancy in different types of legitimacy is also because state investment in green technologies is more of an industrial policy than an environmental policy, seeking to leapfrog China into a technological powerhouse. We thus propose that when studying systems of innovation, it is important to take into account power dynamics across actors and the interactive process of establishing legitimacy, because institutions should not be taken as static, pre-given structures. The different layers of institutions are not always congruent, and when faced with conflicting institutional demands, actors may develop strategies to adapt and change the institutions.

Conceptual discussions of sustainability emphasize the interdependent relationship between relevant social and environmental factors. Yet, traditional quantitative analyses of the topic have tended to estimate the exogenous or direct/indirect effects a predictor variable has on a particular measure of sustainability. We examine the endogenous, interdependent relationship between the three E’s of sustainability (economy, equity, and ecology), incorporating country-level data for 1990 through 2015 into cross-lagged structural equation models with reciprocal and fixed effects. Results from these longitudinal models suggest that over time, at the country level, increasing economic inequality reduces renewable energy consumption, with no evidence of reciprocal feedback. Keeping in mind the limitations of the analysis, we tentatively argue that the modern form of development has constrained the potential for the sustainability goals to feed back into each other.

Tunisia's legacy of “state feminism” and its strong civil society—including human rights, labor, and women's rights organizations—have placed Tunisian women in advance of their Arab sisters, and women are present across an array of professions and occupations. Still, most Tunisian women remain outside the labor force, face precarious forms of employment, or are unemployed. This article examines women's employment patterns, problems, and prospects in the light of an untoward economic environment, conservative social norms, and feminist advocacy. Drawing on interview and documentary data, and informed by feminist political economy and institutionalism, it highlights the importance of institutional supports for working mothers and improved work conditions to encourage more female economic participation and stronger labor-force attachment and thus to weaken patriarchal attitudes and values. The paper points to the need for both class-based and gender-based policies with respect to women's economic participation and rights.

This research explores how empowerment programs impact gender-based violence and the social structures that lead to such violence in the first place. Drawing from interviews with former participants in empowerment programs that focus on building community leaders, the study examines how grassroots women lead interventions and their effects on leaders’ and survivors’ lives. We find that although most survivors had displayed some agency in independently resisting violence, their efforts were more effective when coupled with a support network and access to resources. With the intervention of leaders, the survivors were able to better negotiate for justice with a renewed sense of agency. For the leaders, participation in programs gave them an identity independent of their status within the family. They promoted change by developing independent, innovative intervention strategies that worked despite the tight structural constraints of gendered norms.

The world is facing a crisis of global warming due to the release of CO 2 and other greenhouse gasses by human activities. Many scholars and stakeholders argue that information and communication technology (ICT) development will mitigate CO 2 emissions. Advocacy of technological solutions to CO 2 mitigation is consistent with ecological modernization theory's assertion that reflexive societies will modernize sustainably. In contrast, we define the “treadmill of information” as the unique contribution of ICT development to environmental degradation. We examine the impact of ICT development on total CO 2 emissions and source-sector emissions from electricity, buildings, manufacturing, and transportation using a multilevel growth model for panel data from 113 countries split into the world, developed country, and less-developed-country samples. We find that the level of fixed telephone development is a strong predictor of higher CO 2 emissions in less-developed countries, while internet use predicts higher CO 2 emissions in developed countries. The effect of mobile telephone development is not significant. Thus, it appears that ICTs are not having an ameliorative effect on global warming as expected by ecological modernization theorists, and instead reinforce the treadmill of production's negative effect.

The macro-comparative decoupling literature has often sought to test the arguments made by the treadmill of production (TP) and ecological modernization (EM) theories. However, due to data limitations, these studies have been limited to analyzing the years after 1960. Given that both theories discuss historical processes operating before 1960, analyzing pre-1960 data is warranted to more comprehensively test the propositions made by both theories. We assess the long-term relationship between economic growth and CO 2 emissions from 1870 to 2014 using a sample of global North nations. We use Prais-Winsten regression models with time interactions to assess whether, when, and how much CO 2 emissions have decoupled from economic growth over time. We find that significant relative decoupling has occurred twice since 1870: during the last 30 years of the nineteenth century, the timing of which is contrary to what both the EM and TP theories might expect, and after 1970. We also observe that the relationship remained relatively stable from the turn of the twentieth century to approximately 1970, which aligns with the arguments made by the classical TP work. We conclude that shifts in the global organization of production have shaped the magnitude of the economic growth–CO 2 emissions relationship and its changes over time, which has implications for climate mitigation policy.

Understanding the politics of caste, corruption, and wealth is essential for combating poverty in India. However, relatively few studies have systematically analyzed how these factors explain patterns of poverty combining state-level indicators with household and child-level outcomes. Focusing on child poverty as an outcome measure, this paper tests the explanatory potency of John Harriss's typology of state government political regimes, Transparency International India's measures of state corruption, and state-level wealth. Using data on 120,988 children from the third National Family Health Survey (2005–2006) and multilevel models, we find that Harriss's typology of state regimes better explains child poverty differences between states than Transparency International India's corruption index. States whose political regimes are historically dominated by upper-caste groups tend to have an adverse effect on poor children of lower castes, compared to states dominated by lower-caste groups. This adverse effect is amplified in wealthier states.