119 - Regular Session. Corporate Power, Politics and the Environment

Session Submission Type: Paper Session

Abstract

The mounting evidence of ecological unequal exchange, whereby the net transfer of energy and matter from low-income peripheral places to high-income core places concentrates environmental problems in the peripheral zones of our world-economy, and the disproportionate impacts of pollution and toxic waste on the poor and communities of color within wealthy societies, calls for analyses that better specify how such inequalities are realized. This panel takes up this call by examining the politics which enable, and occasionally effectively challenge, such inequities. It focuses on how corporate agendas are so often made politically viable, whether they be the agendas of corporations which extract and produce energy that contributes to greenhouse gas emissions or those of agribusinesses which undermine the sustainability of aquifers. The research presented on this panel investigate the mechanisms of corporate power, from the political spending of corporations on lobbying to the often obscured cultural politics of constructing hegemony of ecologically consequential industries. In elaborating these mechanisms, they reveal a shift in scale from national regulation and sovereignty to local rights in the terrain of political struggles over the often adverse environmental consequences of corporate agendas; a scalar shift in line with the neoliberal project’s transfer of responsibility to subnational political agencies for addressing myriad social and environmental problems even as it centralizes policy-making power in the non-transparent transnational decision-making bodies such as the WTO. Collectively, these panelists raise questions about the scale and mechanisms of effective challenges to corporate power in the current neoliberal era.

Sub Unit

• Environmental Sociology

Session Organizer

• Leslie C. Gates, State University of New York-Binghamton

Presider

• Leslie C. Gates, State University of New York-Binghamton

Individual Presentations

• Power Disproportionalities: Linking Emissions Extremes to Social Forces - Anya Mikael Galli, University of Maryland-College Park; Mary B. Collins, University of Maryland

• The Cultural Politics of Coal Production in Central Appalachia - Philip George Lewin, Florida Atlantic University

• Energy Sovereignty in the Age of Fracking: Rethinking Power in Globalizing Lithuania - Diana Mincyte, City University of New York; Aiste Bartkiene, Lithuanian University of Health Sciences; Leonardas Rinkevicius, Lithuanian University of Health Sciences

• Effects of Organizational and Political-Legal Arrangements on Greenhouse Gas Emissions Energy Sector Parent Companies - Harland Prechel, Texas A&M University

• People Can't Live There Unless There is Economic Activity: Structural Impediments to Groundwater Sustainability - Matthew R. Sanderson, Kansas State University; R. Scott Frey, University of Tennessee

Discussant

• Paul K. Gellert, University of Tennessee