DEVELOPMENT AND GLOBALIZATION:
Course Description
Syllabus pdf

     Our world is increasingly interconnected, yet characterized by great inequalities among and within nations. Environmental leaders need to understand how these realities shape, constrain, and provide opportunities for sustainable development.

     Globalization began centuries ago. Structures established during colonialism still contribute to poverty and unsustainable resource use in the global North and South alike. Deep-rooted cultural patterns still affect how people in different places and social positions perceive and interact with the natural world.

Weeks 1 –3 concern the reshaping of the world between 1492 and the mid-20th century.
Weeks 4 – 5 examine Development as an intentional enterprise of governments, international agencies, academic analysts, and activists. We assess theories of modernization, marginality, and dependency, reinterpretations of import substitution and export-led growth, and more recent critiques, including new theories of globalization and “anti-development” arguments.
Weeks 6 – 8 address the material dimensions of today’s world-market economy: where are resources produced and consumed, and with what human and ecological consequences? We consider the economic and political structures through which exchange of commodities are organized and examine the linkages among capital mobility, labor migration, food insecurity, environmental degradation, and debt. We compare recent interpretations of globalization in terms of “hypermodernity” and “post-capitalism”.
Weeks 9 – 12 cover multilateral institutions of economic and environmental governance. We analyze the human and eco-economic impacts of the World Bank and IMF and how their missions of have evolved and been “greened”. We discuss the contradictions of the WTO and recent global environmental treaties, and the roles of social movements and NGOs in restructuring and re-imagining sustainable development.

This course may be elected to satisfy the MEM Social Science core course requirement. It also offers opportunities for experienced students to explore classic and new literature and do country-specific background research for masters or doctoral projects.

FES 839b Globalization and Development
Weekly topics

Part I – GLOBALIZATION AND DEVELOPMENT IN CONTEXT– weeks 1 - 4
The world before 1492; Colonialism: Globalization Phase I
Globalization Phase II: Resource control and famine creation
Peasant economics, enclosure, agrarian transition, and the shock of modernization

Part II - THE DEVELOPMENT PROJECT AND ITS CRITICS weeks 5 - 8
Development as an Intentional Enterprise 1
Anti-colonialism, socialism, pan-Africanism, 3rd world revolutions;
Modernization as an antidote to communism
Development as an Intentional Enterprise 2
The invention of underdevelopment and its cures;
Modernization theory; “Clash of civilizations”?
Development as an Intentional Enterprise 3
Dependency and World-Systems theories; Import-substitution industrialization;
Anti-development

Part III - FROM DEVELOPMENT TO GLOBALIZATION weeks 9 - 12
The international political and resource economy
Food, famine, population, entitlements,
Ecological poverty; the green revolution; the global food regime;
Development in the context of globalized production
From Fordism to flexible accumulation; ‘post-capitalism’
Tme-space compression and hypermodernity
Political economy of resource exchange and financial flows;
The debt treadmill and other contradictions of globalization

Part IV DEVELOPMENT INSTITUTIONS, INTERVENTIONS AND RESPONSES
weeks 13 - 14
Big Development:
The World Bank and the IMF / Structural adjustment
Neoliberalism and the devolution of states / The GATT and the WTO
Civil society, “social capital” and social movements