Decoupling Reconsidered: Does World Society Integration Influence the Relationship Between the Environment and Economic Development?

• In Event: 254 - Section on Environment and Technology Roundtables (one-hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 15. Globalization

Abstract

This study advances sociological scholarship on environment and development by examining whether nations more embedded in the pro-environmental world society are more or less likely to experience a relative decoupling between economic development and carbon emissions through time. If connections to world society urge countries to enact pro-environmental policies or invest in cleaner technologies to adhere to global norms, world society may help facilitate changes posited by ecological modernization theory and thus a decrease in the effect of economic development on carbon emissions. The authors calculate a network centrality measure using national-level membership data on environmental international nongovernmental organizations (INGOs), and then employ the measure to create four subsamples of nations that are relatively more or less integrated in the environmental world society. The authors use interactions between measures of economic development and time in two-way fixed effects models to estimate the potentially changing effects of development on carbon emissions for the four subsamples of nations from 1970 to 2009. The results indicate that nations that are the most embedded in the environmental world society experienced a moderate decrease through time in the effect of development on carbon emissions, while the effect of development on emissions increased through time in the most peripheral nations. The findings suggest that world society theory provides a useful perspective for explaining the role of transnational regulatory and normative structures in partially mitigating the harmful effects of economic development on the environment.

Authors

• Wesley Longhofer, Emory University

• Andrew K. Jorgenson, Boston College