Expansive Globalisation: Rescuing The Environment?

Globalisation is a contrary process with both creative and destructive capabilities. This paper argues that globalisation needs to be considered within an expanded definitional context if its capacity for environmental good is to be realised. This is because there is an automatic, well-justified conflation typically made between economic globalisation and global ecological decline. It is all too easy in these circumstances to dismiss globalisation and look solely to a strengthened nation state as its antidote. However to do so denies the creative capacities of globalisation, for instance, in facilitating the growth of transnational environmentalism, in fostering a sense of global environmental community and prompting the emergence of efforts at least towards global environmental governance. This paper searches within globalisation itself for positive counter trends to the ecological disaster scenarios that are invariably linked to globalising forces. It argues that these counter trends are to be found in globalisation in its political, cultural and social entirety and in transformations of the globalising era beyond economic globalisation.