The Political Economy of the Car

Abstract

“What happens if the Chinese all have cars?” This question, posed on page 3 of Matthew Paterson’s Automobile Politics: Ecology and Cultural Political Economy, provides a thematic link between the two books reviewed in this essay, Paterson’s and Kelly Sims Gallagher’s China Shifts Gears: Automakers, Oil, Pollution, and Development. At one level, this link is quite loose. For Paterson, China is one among many examples of the growth in the geographical spread of, and therefore the environmental impact of, car culture, an example that he does not discuss in any particular detail. For Gallagher, China is the focus of the study. Beyond a common focus on cars and the environment the books have little in common, in terms of empirics or methodology. At another level, however, the common focus on the effects of car culture provides an important link. The two books offer radically different approaches to a fundamentally similar set of concerns. These two approaches are emblematic of two distinct literatures in the aeld of global environmental politics. Gallagher’s book is an example of what might be called the policy approach to global environmental politics. This approach is consistent with the mainstream approach to international political economy as practiced in the United States, as found in journals such as International Organization. This approach focuses on minimizing environmental externalities from international economic activity while at the same time minimizing the cost to that activity of controlling environmental externalities. Paterson’s book is an example of the critical approach to global environmental politics, consistent with an approach to international political economy that is more likely to be considered mainstream in Britain than the United States, and is found in journals such as Review of International Political Economy. This approach focuses on the ways in which environmental degradation is part and parcel of