“The Material Footprints of Finance in a Low-Growth Era: A Panel Regression and Comparative Study.”

• In Event: 50620 - Section on Environmental Sociology Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 18: Metabolic Rifts and Shifts

Abstract

As the world turns to carbon free sources of energy, there is growing anxiety that rising demand for minerals will increase pressure on global and regional earth systems, but especially in the extractive economies of global South nations. Additionally, many scholars and international organizations have raised concern that, in affluent nations, current rates of aggregate raw material consumption are presently unsustainable. These concerns have long been articulated by environmental social scientists, such as those drawing on political-economic approaches that focus on production, growth, and environmental change. However, the affluent world is, increasingly, marred by dynamics associated with slow-growth and financialization—tendencies that remain theoretically and empirically underexplored as structural drivers of unsustainable development. This study examines the relationships between the growing financial turn and the material footprint of nations, a common measure of the net environmental requirements to sustain a population’s consumption practices. Findings suggest that financialization aids in upholding unsustainable consumption patterns in affluent nations. Additionally, high-consuming nations show comparatively lower rates of growth and higher rates of financialization relative to low-consuming nations in the sample. Our findings point to the reality that additional theorizing is required to properly characterize new forms of, and linkages between, unsustainable economic inequality, exploitation, and intensified environmental withdrawals in the world’s richest nations.

Authors

• Tim P Clark, Catawba College

• Patrick Trent Greiner, Vanderbilt University

• Andrew Robert Smolski, North Carolina State University

• Stefano B. Longo