Introduction to Ecologically Unequal Exchange in Comparative Perspective

Ecologically unequal exchange (EUE) is generally understood as the unequal material exchange relations among countries holding different positions in the world-system. Proponents of this perspective center attention on the harms created in the process of withdrawing energy and other resources from less developed countries (and regions) by developed countries (and regions) and the export of hazardous production and waste disposal activities from the developed to the less developed countries. Such relations not only damage the environment, but they have adverse health, safety, and socio-economic consequences for the human populations of less developed countries and they represent a form of environmental injustice and a legacy of ecological debt. Less developed countries are particularly vulnerable to the risks posed by material withdrawals and hazardous exports because less developed states and domestic firms have limited means for or interest in managing risks and many workers and citizens are often unaware of the risks associated with these hazards. EUE relations are also a source of many environmental distribution conflicts throughout the world-system. EUE continues to be a vibrant area of scholarship within world-systems analysis. Its origins can be traced to the work of Stephen Bunker (1984, 1985, 2005; Bunker and Ciccantell 2005). Bunker introduced the idea of ecologically unequal exchange by building on earlier structural analyses of unequal economic exchange, including those by Latin American economists Raúl Prebisch and Celso Furtado within the UN Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean, as well as the critical analyses of unequal economic exchange by Arghiri Emmanuel (1972) and Samir Amin (1976). Interest in ecologically unequal exchange has grown over the past decade as witnessed by the publication of several collections (Jorgenson and Clark 2009; Hornborg and Martinez-Alier 2016) and important contributions by Foster and Holleman (2014), Hornborg (1998, 2011, 2015), and Jorgenson (2016a, 2016b). We add to and extend this literature by including articles that explore various qualitative, quantitative, and evaluative dimensions of ecologically unequal exchange in the contemporary world-system.