Linking Globalization, Consumption, and Governance

Linking Globalization, Consumption, and Governance The Spread of “McWorld” Global Cooperation for Sustainable Consumption From Johannesburg to Cancún and Beyond

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Linking Globalization, Consumption, and Governance

“Consumption in the world’s richest countries can take a great but often hidden toll on distant peoples and places.”

Today’s global economy has a tendency to insulate consumers from the various negative impacts of their purchases by stretching the distance between different phases of a product’s lifecycle—from raw material extraction to processing, use, and finally disposal.

Yet at the same time, the environmental and social challenges accompanying economic globalization are spurring innovative forms of political mobilization across international borders. Shifting to more environmentally sustainable patterns of consumption and production worldwide will require strengthening these alliances and pursuing new ground rules in order to forge a global economy based on protecting, rather than plundering, the planet’s natural wealth.

The Spread of “McWorld”

“...onrushing economic, technological, and ecological forces…demand integration and uniformity and…mesmerize peoples everywhere with fast music, fast computers, and fast food…, one McWorld tied together by communications, information, entertainment, and commerce.”

—Benjamin Barber, Jihad vs. McWorld, 1995

Today, the global spread of “McWorld” is rapidly bringing the consumer society of the West to the rest of the planet. The globalization of the consumer economy is closely linked with the general economic boom and growth in the movement of goods, services, and money across international borders, which accelerated during the 1990s. Over the decade, the value of world trade in goods increased by nearly 50 percent, reaching $6.25 trillion. Exports of commercial services such as banking, consulting, and tourism expanded even faster. And foreign direct investment surged dramatically, reaching a peak of $1.4 trillion in 2000.

One subcomponent of the overall expansion in world trade has been rapid growth in trade in a range of particularly environmentally sensitive commodities, such as minerals, forest products, fish, and agricultural produce. In some cases, countries whose ecological “footprints” exceed their available ecological capacity, such as Japan, the Netherlands, and the United States, have imported these goods from countries enjoying surpluses—in effect enabling them to live beyond their ecological means.

Meanwhile, corporate strategies focused on boosting consumer demand in developing countries have lead to increases in purchases of all manner of goods, from cars and televisions to paper and fast food. While it is ethically problematic to suggest that developing countries are not entitled to have the same options for material consumption that have long been taken for granted by western consumers, the global adoption of industrial country–style consumption patterns would place unbearable strains on the health of Earth’s natural systems

Global Cooperation for Sustainable Consumption

“…all countries should promote sustainable consumption and production patterns and… governments, international organizations, the private sector, and NGOs, among others, should play important roles in bringing about the needed shifts.”

The 1990s saw the emergence of many important international agreements and commitments embracing the need to transform unsustainable patterns of consumption and production. Among these initiatives:

• Agenda 21, the action plan that emerged from the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, called on international institutions and national governments to promote greater energy and resource efficiency, minimize waste generation, encourage environmentally sound purchasing, and shift toward pricing systems that incorporate hidden environmental costs.
• The U.N. Commission on Sustainable Development has provided a useful annual venue for governments and others to discuss consumption and production issues. Though the deliberations have produced little concrete action, they resulted in the successful revision of the 1998 U.N. Guidelines for Consumer Protection to include more environmental factors.
• The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development has sponsored a series of meetings and papers aimed at encouraging governments to implement innovative sustainable consumption and production policies, including product ecolabeling, “take-back” legislation, reductions in harmful government subsidies, and environmental taxes to internalize environmental costs into the price of products.
• The U.N. Environment Programme has been an active player in efforts to promote sustainable consumption on a global scale, including through a product life-cycle initiative, green procurement, and work with the advertising, fashion, finance, and retail sectors as well as consumer and youth groups.
• Governments have strengthened several international treaties that address the global environmental threats posed by consumption and production—including the 2000 Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety, the 2000 Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants (POPs), and the 1997 Kyoto Protocol.
• Several new initiatives have emerged in the corporate and financial sectors, including the United Nations’ Global Compact, which calls on participating companies to integrate nine core values related to human rights, labor standards, and environmental protection into their operations, and the Equator Principles, which call on leading banks to manage environmental and social risks in their lending operations.

More recently, at the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg, South Africa, governments agreed to develop of a 10-year framework of programs to accelerate the shift toward sustainable consumption and production. These include offering a better range of products and services to consumers, providing more information about the health and safety of various products, and establishing programs of capacity building and technology transfer to help share these gains with developing countries. The World Summit also generated more than 230 partnership agreements among diverse stakeholders.

Unfortunately, the limited gains made since 1992 in shifting toward more-sustainable patterns of consumption and production have been largely overwhelmed by the continued global growth of the consumer society. And so far, governments have found it more politically palatable to discuss the production side of the equation than controversial lifestyle issues.

From Johannesburg to Cancún and Beyond

“Fundamental differences remain between international trade rules and emerging environmental practices that could impede efforts to promote more-sustainable patterns of consumption and production.”

The provisions of the World Trade Organization (WTO), too, stand to have a large impact on the ability of both consumers and governments to promote sustainable business practices worldwide. The European Union and the United States, for instance, have been embroiled in major agricultural trade controversies over the use of hormones in the beef industry and over the labeling of genetically modified organisms—both of which have important implications for the right of consumers to make their own choices about the possible health and environmental impacts of their purchasing decisions. Meanwhile, there is rising concern about possible clashes between international trade law and the international environmental treaties needed to encourage consumers and producers to shift to more environmentally sound practices.

At the same time, however, international trade negotiations can provide opportunities to push for policy reforms needed to promote more-sustainable consumption and production. For example, WTO rules and negotiations could be used to encourage countries to reduce and reform governmental subsidies to environmentally sensitive industries, such as agriculture, fossil fuels, fishing, and forestry. Or they could be used to provide preferable trade treatment to “green consumer goods” such as energy-efficient lighting, recycled paper, organic produce, and certified forest and fish products.

The breakdown of WTO negotiations in Cancún in September 2003 provided reform-minded governments and activists with an opportunity to push for bringing future trade negotiations into better balance with sustainable development concerns. Although the way forward is not immediately clear, the terms of the debate may be shifting as people worldwide come to understand that our current unsustainable course threatens both human well-being and ecological health.