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.

Although sustainability-related efforts remain central to development, their accomplishment varies across places for a variety of reasons including climatic and geographic differences. This variability makes a regional focus important. In this paper, we investigate ecological footprints in both total and sub-footprint forms as measures of environmental sustainability over time in Africa. We examine economic, demographic, and ecological variables as key factors driving national-level environmental sustainability in Africa over nearly five decades. Our results reveal demographic attributes to be the primary but not the only forces affecting environmental sustainability. We situate our findings both in the context of prior studies and in relation to opportunities for further academic study.

Sustainability standards and certifications increasingly represent multi-billion-dollar brands that partner with corporate firms. We employ the case of South Africa's Rooibos tea industry to analyze the impacts of this shift. Examining five sustainability initiatives, our research focuses on small-scale farmers and the power dynamics shaping their involvement. The Rooibos initiatives engaged multiple approaches, but none realized sustainable outcomes. Third-party and corporate efforts exposed producers to risk and reified dependency, industry actions did not achieve intended goals, and a shared leadership project failed to address material barriers to participation. Yet examples of good practice offer insight into the types of policies needed to improve outcomes. These include shifting from a hierarchical to a relational orientation by reducing certification costs, extending support services, and ensuring inclusivity in planning and governance. We conclude by arguing that markets are a perilous tool for development. Sustainable trade systems nevertheless illustrate the promise of market-based sustainability, as these are providing marginal groups with a platform to demand more equitable arrangements.

An extensive literature is dedicated to examining the proliferation of private sector-led, market-based approaches to address gender inequality. Drawing on insights from feminist environmentalism and environmental sociology, I explore how and why this phenomenon is connected to the environmental crisis. First, I analyze the World Bank’s gender strategy papers for 2001–2023. I highlight the organization's role in entrenching a neoliberal discourse of women's empowerment that erases socio-ecological contexts. Next, I provide an overview of Project Shakti, a women’s empowerment program run by Hindustan Unilever, a subsidiary of the Unilever conglomerate and a corporate partner of the World Bank. Secondary data on program outcomes show that the organization’s selective use of gendered ideologies has increased HUL's rural market share. On the other hand, the benefits for participants are less clear, particularly when considered in the context of the program’s social and environmental footprint. Finally, I present the Exxon Mobil's Foundation's gender portfolio to illustrate how exclusive networks and non-participatory program evaluations have been used by private sector actors to normalize an understanding of women's wellbeing that is devoid of environmental considerations. Together, these cases illustrate how feminist ideals have been used to support elite economic agendas with high environmental costs, while also marginalizing those who seek sustainable development through systemic reform. This phenomenon exacerbates an environmental crisis that disproportionately affects the people these programs purport to empower.

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.

Development ethics emerged as a joint critique of economic development research and practice, giving rise to three alternative traditions: human development, sustainable development, and participatory development. The ethical issues surrounding the mainstreaming of these schools have implications for investigators. In this article, I revisit the transformative values at the root of these traditions to articulate common research principles for an international and interdisciplinary field. Ethicists are asking development researchers to deliver actionable and multiparadigmatic understanding by improving measures, aligning values and approaches, and decolonizing knowledge. While these emerging research models can strengthen development relevancy and impact, they are challenging to facilitate and vulnerable to elite co-optation. Not only should the production of knowledge be rigorous and accurate, but scholars also have a responsibility to query power and embrace difference. The principles presented in this article comprise a set of shared values that may be used as a practical guide for planning, conducting, and evaluating development research across methods, topics, and disciplines.

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.

Hydropower development is making a global resurgence due to endorsement by powerful global institutions such as the World Bank and the imperative to scale up renewable energy production to address global climate change. Employing a green governmentality lens, we analyze the debate surrounding one controversial dam in Laos, the Xayaburi. In the realm of hydropower development in the Mekong, a green governmentality approach allows for both an investigation of the macro-political influences on hydropower development, including trade liberalization and regional economic development, and the micro-political disciplining of state and non-state actors who, through legitimizing particular discourses and practices, reinforce global power relations. Our findings suggest that World Bank-style sustainable development discourses continue to shape ideas and practices relating to hydropower and sustainable development in Laos. However, we conclude that green neoliberalization does not fully explain how the Lao state is operating and that more attention to its practices as an authoritarian state is needed. This case moves the study of green governmentality forward by examining how green neoliberalization operates in a variegated, late-neoliberal world.

Research has highlighted the relationship between production expansion and the creation of sacrifice zones in advanced capitalist economies. Yet, less attention has focused on the establishment of such regions within authoritarian, state-socialist countries. We draw theoretical and conceptual insights from treadmill of production theory and the Gramscian theory of hegemony to delineate the interaction between legitimation processes used by authoritarian states to justify the physical destruction of the environment. Our analysis focuses on the historic case of environmental destruction in Czechoslovakia’s North Bohemian coal mining region. We analyze data from various sources, including in-depth interviews with residents, state media articles, and state archival sources. We find that the interactive processes of coercion, domination, and consent were used to propel the development and legitimation of environmental exploitation in this area. We argue that these processes, and the resultant sacrifice zones, are a central component of the treadmill of production. We conclude by discussing the implications of our results for further analyses of sacrifice zones.

A growing body of scholars in natural resources management have called for the examination of the roles of social capital and social networks in the effective maintenance of community-based projects. Yet, the role of social capital in collective action cannot be effectively understood without studying agency. The goal of this study is to examine how agents’ individual characteristics and their structural social capital, along with broader cognitive social capital elements, shape possibilities for empowerment at the community level. Drawing from an embedded comparative case study of two community-based ecotourism projects in Ghana, we employed a mixed-methods approach combining Lin’s social capital model and Krishna’s agency model to identify and characterize legitimate agents of change in each community, as well as to evaluate the structure of their discussion and nomination networks (i.e., structural social capital). Differences between communities in the network structure of agents, as well as in their types and levels of engagement, resourcefulness, visions and perceptions of socio-ecological context, exposed key barriers to social capital mobilization. Overall, our results indicate that greater community empowerment is reported where greater community trust and a greater cohesiveness of agents with access to external resources are reported. Altogether, this study adds to past efforts in illustrating how a mixed-methods examination of change agents in a CBNRM setting can surface internal opportunities for and constraints on social capital mobilization toward community empowerment.

Stakeholders in the transnational aid sector are increasingly calling for more aid “localization”: relying more on local workers to implement aid projects in their respective home countries. This paper asks: What do aid organizations expect from their local employees, and how do these expectations shape local employees’ work routines? Drawing on data collected from over seven months of fieldwork in Jordan, a major global aid hub, I find that organizations hold cultural assumptions about local workers that shape their recruitment and their expectations of their local employees. Furthermore, these assumptions and expectations are much more ambivalent and conflictual than existing scholarship suggests. Employers want locals who are “Westernized professionals”: impartial, objective, transparent, and dispassionate workers. But they also expect local employees to act in “non-Western” ways, as “traditional locals” (reifying orientalist tropes related to corruption and Arab culture), to make aid projects work. Echoing Bhabha’s argument that colonial subject stereotypes are strategically ambivalent—“almost the same, but not white”—I show how locals engage in specific types of extra work for their employers—what I call hybridized labor—to try to meet these conflicting expectations.

Research on the carbon intensity of well-being (CIWB), a measure representing a country's development in terms of both environmental and human well-being, often explores the role of economic development, while the effects of other aspects of global integration remain under-explored. I use macro-comparative sociological perspectives to investigate the extent to which theories of global integration help explain variation in countries’ CIWB over time. I evaluate propositions drawn from neoinstitutional world society and world polity theories using longitudinal modeling techniques to analyze data from 81 countries from 1990 to 2011. I also examine subsets of more and less developed countries and compare production- and consumption-based measures of CIWB. I find that world society/world polity integration is associated with a reduction in CIWB only in more developed nations, and only when using the production measure for CO 2 emissions, highlighting the complexities of sustainable development in an unequal global system.

Research and policy analysis on gender, development, and globalization have focused extensively on the changing roles and social status of women as one of the keys to reaching global development goals and improving social well-being. Yet at the same time as scholars and advocates highlight the importance of women's autonomy as a key to economic development, the international media are filled with tales and reports of public gang rapes, acid burnings, honor killings, and gang kidnapping and enslavement. We combine observations about growing class inequality among men, theories of male overcompensation, insights on the global crisis of patriarchy, and transaction-cost analyses of asset specificity and sunk costs to explain this gender-based violence. The data required to assess the causes, prevalence, and effects of public gender-based violence are sparse, and this affects our ability to come to definitive conclusions and policy recommendations. In addition to recommending better and more vigorous data collection on public gender-based violence directed at women and girls, we briefly discuss two possible scenarios that could frustrate attempts to improve the status of women in rapidly developing societies or lead to long-term, sustainable gains.

Using primary and secondary historical data, descriptive time-series data, and site observations, this study unpacks the developmental history of one of the United States' oldest, largest, and still working fisheries. This study uses narrative analysis to explore how processes of commodification and the institutional workings of capitalist food regimes drove specific developmental outcomes. Internal comparison across periods enables an analysis of why the fishery declined in recent decades. The case also reveals important dynamics of the capitalist world food system and demonstrates how intersectional considerations, particularly the intersection of race and class dynamics, can bolster the “tragedy of the commodity” theoretical framework. The study thus tests and expands on that framework by including the considerations of cross-cutting inequalities and the world food system. Overall, this study demonstrates how the demands of generalized commodity production, in conjunction with the institutional parameters of a world capitalist food system, link processes of development across terrestrial and aquatic food systems. Furthermore, the internal comparison elucidates the socio-structural factors that drove the severe decline of the 170-year-old Atlantic menhaden fishery.

Predominant analyses of energy offer insufficient theoretical and political-economic insight into the persistence of coal and other fossil fuels. The dominant narrative of coal powering the Industrial Revolution, and Great Britain's world dominance in the nineteenth century giving way to a U.S.- and oil-dominated twentieth century, is marred by teleological assumptions. The key assumption that a complete energy “transition” will occur leads some to conceive of a renewable-energy-dominated twenty-first century led by China. After critiquing the teleological assumptions of modernization, ecological modernization, energetics, and even world-systems analysis of energy “transition,” this paper offers a world-systems perspective on the “raw” materialism of coal. Examining the material characteristics of coal and the unequal structure of the world-economy, the paper uses long-term data from governmental and private sources to reveal the lack of transition as new sources of energy are added. The increases in coal consumption in China and India as they have ascended in the capitalist world-economy have more than offset the leveling-off and decline in some core nations. A true global peak and decline (let alone full substitution) in energy generally and coal specifically has never happened. The future need not repeat the past, but technical, policy, and movement approaches will not get far without addressing the structural imperatives of capitalist growth and the uneven power structures and processes of long-term change of the world-system.

Over the past century, the Mekong River Delta of southern Vietnam has undergone a series of transformations. In the early twentieth century, its forests and marshes were cleared for extensive rice production under French colonial rule; rice production was then intensified along Green Revolution lines under the post-colonial regimes of the 1960s to 1990s, before a dramatic shift toward export-oriented shrimp aquaculture since 2000. Drawing on archival and secondary data, as well as theories of extraction and unequal exchange, this paper traces the development, expansion, intensification, and eventually crisis of rice cultivation in the Mekong Delta. After a brief literature review, the paper consists of three sections. The first examines the origins and drivers of export-oriented extraction in the French colonial period; the second, the shift toward intensive rice production in the developmental states of the postcolonial period; and the third, the return to extraction, in the form of shrimp aquaculture, in the 1990s and 2000s. Building on Bunker's notion of “extractive cycles,” I argue that the Mekong Delta's history of extraction has exposed the region to ecological and economic crises, as well as shaping the long-term trajectory of subsequent development toward the extractive cultivation of export-oriented commodities.

Promoting the ratification of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) was a key objective of the transnational women's movement of the 1980s and 1990s. Yet, few studies examine what factors contribute to ratification. The small body of literature on this topic comes from a world-society perspective, which suggests that CEDAW represented a global shift toward women's rights and that ratification increased as international NGOs proliferated. However, this framing fails to consider whether diffusion varies in a stratified world-system. I combine world-society and world-systems approaches, adding to the literature by examining the impact of women's and human rights transnational social movement organizations on CEDAW ratification at varied world-system positions. The findings illustrate the complex strengths and limitations of a global movement, with such organizations having a negative effect on ratification among core nations, a positive effect in the semiperiphery, and no effect among periphery nations. This suggests that the impact of mobilization was neither a universal application of global scripts nor simply representative of the broad domination of core nations, but a complex and diverse result of civil society actors embedded in a politically stratified world.

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.

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.

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.