McMichael – Development and Social Change, 5e – Instructor’s Resources
Chapter 7
Global Countermovements
Chapter Summary:
This chapter examines social movements that question the development project and corporate globalization.
The chapter reviews movements for global justice, including environmentalism, feminism, cosmopolitan activism,
and food sovereignty. Challenges for environmental movements include creating alternatives to capital- and energyintensive agriculture and agro-forestry to restore local ecologies, and building alternative models to bureaucratic,
top-down development plans. It is recognized that feminism has impacted the development agenda but women’s
material conditions and social status have not followed. Movements including the Via Campesina, the Brazilian
Landless Workers Movement and the Zapatista movement in Chiapas, Mexico are addressed as examples of
cosmopolitan activism. These movements question the assumptions of uniformity in the global development project
and assert the need to respect alternative cultural traditions as a matter of global survival.
The chapter concludes by questioning how effectively these movements will interconnect politically, and
how they will negotiate with existing states. They resist the globalization project and present new forms of politics
that aim to recover democratic forms of social organization and extend civil society.
Chapter Outline:
I.
Introduction
a. The globalization project is relatively coherent and has powerful support
b. Its discourse and rules are always in contention because it is realized through inequalities
c. Framed as a discourse of rights and freedom
d. Countermovements resist aspects of globalization
e. This chapter examines origins and goals of some counter movements
i. “Global justice movements:” environmentalism, feminism, cosmopolitan activism and
food sovereignty
ii. Conservative responses: religious fundamentalism
II.
Environmentalism
a. Questions modern assumptions that nature and its bounty are infinite
b. Northern environmentalism
i. Inspired by Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962
1. Documented the disruption in the earth’s ecosystems caused by agricultural
chemicals
2. Dramatized dependency of life on sustainable ecological systems
3. Emphasized West’s rationalized perception of nature as “external” to society
and belief that it is infinitely exploitable
ii. Green movements challenge unbridled economic growth, call for scaling back to a
renewable economic system of resource use
1. Agricultural sustainability and organic food movement strive to reverse
chemical- and capital-intensive agriculture
2. Preserve human health and enhance leisure
c. Southern movements: Environmentalism of the Poor
i. Attempts to protect existing cultural practices
ii. Question market forces (in contrast to Northern environmentalism that seek to regulate
environmental implications of the market)
iii. Many examples where local communities challenge environmentally damaging practices:
1. Late 20th century:
a. Tropical forest dwellers aim to protect rainforests
b. 1980s export boom intensified logging and beef pasturing
c. Environmental stresses from mining, damming, resource overuse, green
revolution
d. Common denominator of environmental movements:
i. Finiteness of nature, from neo-Mathusian spectre on population, land and food, to
concerns about dwindling raw materials
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ii. Threat to dynamic, living ecosystems and to human health from epidemics
iii. Producing “renewable” resources undermines ecological sustainability as tree plantations
(monocultures) do not have regenerative properties of natural systems
iv. Recognition of shortcomings of economic notions of value (which renders environmental
impact invisible) lead to demands for ecological accounting
Change of thinking
i. Stimulated by New Social Movements’ critique of capitalist developmentalism and
search for new forms of social and political action, and subjectivity
1. Examples: greens, feminism, shackdwellers, food sovereignty, worker-owned
cooperatives, participatory budgeting, food policy councils, neighborhood
associations, landless workers
2. Critique economism, centralism and hierarchies of the development project
3. Formal rights for abstract citizens are secondary to developing practices that
question dominant values and power relations
ii. Growing awareness of limits of “spaceship earth”
iii. Growing conflict on margins between local cultures and global market
iv. Pressure of rural poor on natural resources has intensified during the era of neoliberalism;
environmental movements pursue self-organized “sustainable development”
1. Resistance to the Narmada Dam succeeded in forcing the World Bank to
withdraw support, reflecting assertion of marginal populations for control over
their lives
Sustainable Development
i. 1987 Brundtland report Our Common Future defined “sustainable development” as
“meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations
to meet their own needs”
ii. Did not resolve debate over cause of environmental degradation: poverty vs. wealth
1. Poor people as causing environmental stress on resources; population control
and economic growth are suggested solutions
2. Environmental stress due to global inequality and affluent lifestyles
3. Herman E. Daly’s impossibility theorem: “a U.S. style high-resource
consumption standard” is no longer appropriate for planetary sustainability
Earth Summits
i. 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) Rio de
Janieiro or “Earth Summit”
ii. Document Agenda 21 detailed global program
iii. Global South recognized North’s interest in reducing CO2 emissions, preserving
biodiversity, and rainforests; agreed to participate in global program in return for
financial aid; called for investment by North in sustainable development
iv. UNCED detoured from the question of global inequities
1. Called for environmental protection without distorting international trade and
investment
2. Privileged global management of environment over local/national concerns
3. Maintaining viability of global economy vs. addressing deteriorating economic
conditions in South
v. The globalization project is alive and well
Managing the Global Commons
i. Global environmental management aims to preserve planetary resources
ii. Southern grassroots movements: global environmental managers focused on managing
global environment to ensure profitability of global economic activity
iii. New global ecology is not about social justice or distribution but about
1. Reducing greenhouse gas emissions (automobiles and burning forests)
2. Protecting biodiversity (especially in tropical forests)
3. Reducing pollution in international waters
4. Curbing ozone-layer depletion
iv. World Bank established Global Environmental Facility (GEF) to fund global ecology
initiatives
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50% of projects in first tranche were for biodiversity protection
UNCED with Food and Agriculture Organization planned to zone Southern land
for cash cropping
3. The problem is posed as surplus populations and scarce resources, but not
situated in larger framework that recognizes extreme inequality of access to
resources
a. Example: Brazil – 1% of population owns 44% of fertile agricultural
land; 32 million people are destitute. SAPs, grain imports and soy
exports displace peasants. Landless people who do not join the Sem
Terra (see below) or migrate are incorporated into “poverty
management programs
v. Priorities of global environmental managers differ from local managers
1. Indigenous peoples, including India’s “scheduled tribes,” China’s “minority
nationalities,” Malaysia’s “aborigines”, etc. have rights to land and selfdetermination recognized by International Labor Organization
2. World Bank recognizes “limited capacity” of indigenous peoples to participate
in national development due to “cultural barriers or low social and political
status”
a. Perpetuates idea that cultural minorities need guidance
b. Subordinates minorities to national development initiatives
Environmental Resistance Movements
i. Collaboration of IFIs and governments to prioritize securing territory and foreign
exchange
ii. Environmentalism of the poor takes two forms:
1. Active resistance to curb state and market invasions of habitats
2. Adaptation to renew degraded habitats
a. Example: Chipko movement in central Himalayan region of India:
i. Gandhian strategy of nonviolence – women’s treehugging
protests against logging, and “pluck and plant tactic” of
uprooting non-native plantation trees and replacing them with
indigenous trees
Case Study: Las Gaviotas – Tropical Sustainability
i. Early 1970s, built a sustainable village in Colombia supported by rainforest regeneration,
renewable energy technology, hydroponic farming,
ii. Supports 200 workers, 50 resident families, 500 children in school. Adults rotate among
jobs in the village
iii. Is “green capitalism” possible? Plans for carbon sequestration, potable water production
and ecotourism gain support from a Belgian socially responsible corporation
The development project has established new institutions that often have weakened or destroyed
indigenous institutions for “sane and durable” development
Two-fold challenge for southern environmental movements
i. Create alternatives to capital- and energy-intensive agriculture and agro-forestry to
restore local ecologies
ii. Build alternative models to bureaucratic, top-down development plans
Feminism
a. Féminism first appeared in France in 1880s as movement for women’s rights
b. 1970s “second-wave feminism” as women’s liberation movement for gender equality took on
multiple meanings
c. Has transformed our understanding of meanings of development, institutionalized policies to
improve gender equality
d. Three threads of an alternative development agenda: valuing equality in productive work, valuing
the work of social reproduction, and reorienting social values from economism to humanism
correspond to three phases of feminist influence on development: economic justice in the
workplace, policy supporting unpaid labor, and identifying the threat to sustainability in patriarchy
and the market system
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Feminist influence on development
i. 1975: Mexico City UN World Conference on Women: extending development programs
to include women created Women in Development (WID) movement and framed UN
Decade for Women 1976-85
ii. Shifted from integrationist to agenda-setting approach to involve women as decisionmakers toward Gender and Development (GAD), refocusing on different development
priorities and needs of women and men
iii. Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women adopted
by UN in 1979
Feminist Formulations
i. WID: redresses women’s unequal access to participation in defining economic structures
and policies and in production
1. Women have always been producers, but development has focused on male
cash-earning activity
2. Development should address education, health care, family planning, and
nutrition
3. Women perform unpaid labor as well as paid labor with net benefit to
communities
ii. GAD
1. Recognize how gender discrimination is socially constructed
2. Must understand intra-household relations of productive and reproductive work
to understand impact of development on households
3. Shift focus to gender relations and making visible social reproduction allows
policymakers to see where it “pays” to deliver resources to women
iii. Transnational Feminist Networks (TFNs) have proliferated
1. TFN’s include DAWN (Development Alternatives with Women for New Era),
WIDE (Women in Development Europe), WEDO (Women’s Environment and
Development Organization), etc.
2. Diane Elson’s Male Bias in the Development Process (1991): SAPs assume
women’s infinite capacity to perform work of social reproduction
3. Feminist paradigm has emerged
a. Recognizes limits, silences and violence of the economic model that
accounts for “productive work” via a system of accounting that does
not count “costs” such as discrimination, environmental degradation, or
the work of social reproduction
b. Conventional development paradigm posits rationalist (Eurocentric)
approach, discounts diverse non-European knowledges governed by
ecological and cultural practices where stewardship to nature is
cultural, rather than a program
c. Development is a relational, not universal process. We must question
our assumptions about what other societies need.
Women and the Environment
i. Women have played a key role in protecting local resources
ii. Under colonialism, with emergence of private property, women assumed roles as
environmental managers of the commons
iii. This role is not “natural,” but part of gender relations in which women’s role is social
reproduction
iv. Countless resource management activities of women’s organizations around the world
1. Preservation of biodiversity in market and kitchen gardens, household
provisioning beside and within cash-crop systems
2. Example: Kikuyu women’s groups in Laikipia coordinate decisions about
resource access and use
Women, Poverty, and Fertility
i. Feminists enter debate about population control because it has been directed at women
via female infanticide, forced sterilization, development agencies’ family planning
interventions
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ii. Feminists advocate women’s control over their fertility without targeting women as
source of population problem
1. World population of nearly 6 billion is expected to double by 2050, and studies
show female education and health services reduce birthrates
2. Evidence on contraceptive use in Bangladesh supersedes conventional theories
of “demographic transition” (that birthrates decline with economic growth); they
“dispute the notion that ‘development is the best contraceptive,’ showing that
“contraceptives are the best contraceptive”
3. Correlation between women’s rights and low fertility rates
iii. Population debates have incorporated elements of feminist perspective, in 1994 UN
Conference on Population and Development, which states that women have the right to
reproductive and sexual health”
Women’s Rights
i. Feminism has impacted the development agenda but women’s material conditions and
social status have not followed
1. 1989 UN World Survey on the Role of Women in Development: economic
progress for women has stopped; social well-being has deteriorated in many
cases
2. 2011 UN Women Report claimed more than half of working women in the
world (600 million) have insecure jobs without legal protection
ii. There are different approaches for balancing women’s international rights with respect
for cultural differences
1. Example: In Muslim cultures, with considerable variation, women’s rights are
subordinated to male interpretations of the Koran
2. “Principled approach” – human rights trump state religious laws
3. “Balanced approach” – juxtaposes gender rights and religious freedoms to
clarify boundary claims
4. “World-traveler approach” – emphasizing cultural sensitivity
iii. 2005 UNESCO report: Much is yet to be accomplished across the world regarding
women’s rights
Cosmopolitan Activism
a. Questions the assumptions of uniformity in the global development project; asserts the need to
respect alternative cultural traditions as a matter of respect and global survival
i. Cosmopolitan localism is based in the valuing of diversity as a universal rights
b. Case study: Andean Counterdevelopment or “Cultural Affirmation”
i. Dialogical method of cosmopolitan localism; privileging local worldview over western
knowledge, no assumed universal truth
ii. In Peru, PRATEC (Andean Project of Campesino Technologies) recovers and
implements traditional peasant culture and technology via education of would-be rural
developers
c. Example: 1994 Zapatista Peasant revolt in Mexico’s southern state of Chiapas
i. Peasants revolted against NAFTA, which undermined protections for communal lands
and deregulated commodity markets
ii. Illustrates cosmopolitan localism because it links the struggle for local rights to political
(neoliberal policy) and historical context (Emiliano Zapata and Mexican revolution)
iii. EZLN movement inspired disadvantaged communities around Mexico to mobilize
around similar demands
d. Case Study: The New Labor Cosmopolitanism and Social Movement Unionism
i. Concept of “cosmopolitan activism” applies equally to labor movements
ii. Although the globalization project has relocated traditional blue-collar industries from the
North to the South, TNCs and the international division of labor has limited the
relocation of wealth.
iii. New labor internationalism to challenge global and/or footloose firms that divide labor
forces across national borders, and to states that sign anti-labor free trade agreements
(FTAs)
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iv. Cross-border unionism has been created, such as 1990s alliance between the Authentic
Labor Front, U.S. United Electrical Workers, Teamsters, Steel Workers and four other
U.S. and Canadian unions.
v. Transnationals Information Exchange (TIE) forged global networks of labor organization
and are aided by:
1. Communication technologies
2. Substantial alliance building via NGOs joining with labor organizations to
mobilize consumers around fair trade/production norms.
vi. Social Movement Unionism connects casualized labor across national boundaries through
social networks, addressing racism and immigrant workers
vii. Demand democratization, linking economic, political and social rights
viii. What institutions will protect and sustain the rights of transnational unions?
Food Sovereignty Movement
i. 1 billion people are food insecure; 6 corporations handle 85% of world grain trade
ii. Food sovereignty movements resist the global conception of food security
iii. Alternative concept of food sovereignty is to protect local farming and revitalize
democratic, cultural, and ecological processes at the subnational level
iv. Example: Via Campesina – 200 million farmers’ transnational movement
1. Advances concepts of farmers’ collective rights and biodiversity
2. Food self-reliance is prioritized over trade
v. Most significant chapter of Via Campesina: The Brazilian landless workers’ movement
(MST)
1. Has settled half a million families on land seized by takeovers of unworked land,
drawing legitimacy from Brazilian constitution that sanctions confiscation of
uncultivated land
2. Land seizures lead to formation of cooperatives, and transformation of economic
struggle into political and ideological struggle
a. Democratic decision-making, cooperative relations, participatory
budgeting, democratize access to knowledge
b. MST’s 1600 government recognized settlements include clinics,
training centers for healthcare workers, 1200 public schools employing
3800 teachers serving 150,000 children
c. Priority of producing staple foods for low-income consumers led to
agreement with Lula government for direct purchase of MST produce
for National Zero Hunger campaign
vi. Case Study: The Case for Fair Trade
1. Has become a method of transcending abuses of the free trade system in which
people establish just prices, environmentally sounds practices, healthy
consumption, and a direct understanding of the relationship between producers
and consumers
2. Fair trade exchanges have annual market value of $400 million
3. Umbrella NGO Fairtrade Labeling Organizations International (FLO)
harmonizes standards
4. Utilizes mechanisms that markets have generated
5. Can fair trade democratize the whole global market?
Summary
a. Social justice movements question the development project and corporate globalization
i. Some withdrawal into alternative projects: women’s cooperatives, agro-ecological
practices
ii. Attempts to reframe development as a question of rights and social protections (feminist
movement, social environmentalism, local autonomy rebellions, right-wing
fundamentalism)
b. How effectively will these movements interconnect politically? How will they negotiate with
existing states?
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c.
d.
They may breathe new life into politics; they transcend the centralizing thrust of development
states; present models for recovering democratic forms of social organization, extending civil
society
Many communities look to NGOs to represent them. How representative and accountable are
NGOs?
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