Abstract
In order to curb environmental impact, absolute resource use reductions are urgently needed. To reach this goal, multi-scalar synergies and trade-offs in global resource use must be effectively addressed. We propose that better understanding the role of extractive economies—economies that extract raw material for export—in global resource use patterns is a prerequisite to identifying such synergies and trade-offs. By combining a system-wide environmental accounting perspective with insights from political ecology and political economy research, we demonstrate that (1) the extractivist expansion may be the corollary of reduced immediate environmental impact in the industrialized countries; and (2) the material flow patterns on which this result is based do not suffice to identify the mechanisms underlying extractivist development and its role in global resource use. Our work on extractive economies illustrates that, in order to supply transformative knowledge for sustainability transformation, biophysical and socio-political conceptualizations of society-nature relations must be more strongly integrated within the interdisciplinary sustainability sciences in general and social ecology in particular.
Highlights
If we are to have any chance at sustainability transformations, we must reduce our global resource use in absolute terms [1]
Rather than a full-fledged socio-ecological analysis of extractive economies, we offer an exploration of quantitative material flow data that can be used to characterize extractive economies and a discussion of the ‘bridges’ to political ecology and political economy research that identify qualitative and space-sensitive understandings of the factors and mechanisms shaping resource use in extractive economies and, by extension, globally
We propose that social ecology’s conceptualization of society as simultaneously socio-cultural and biophysical [19] allows this research field to serve as an umbrella under which the socio-metabolic and political-economic analyses of extractive economies can enter into productive dialogue
Summary
If we are to have any chance at sustainability transformations, we must reduce our global resource use in absolute terms [1]. In order to come to a better understanding of extractive economies, we propose that it is necessary to (1) identify resource use trajectories of these economies and their role in global resource use patterns and (2) integrate insights from such empirical work within a conceptual framework allowing for the identification of functional mechanisms in this particular form of societal organization of resource use. This is, a tall order and not one we will fulfill with this article. Such an understanding is essential for assessments of this particular development trajectory but is a prerequisite to evaluating the sustainability of the world’s wealthiest economies
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