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Geographer David Angel explores a variety of policy options that can contribute to clean industrial growth in developing economies. |
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Meet the researchers:
Asking the right questions
Interview with Professor David Angel
In a recent interview, geographer
David Angel discussed his research into policy initiatives designed to foster
environmentally friendly or "clean" industrial growth in Asia.
You've recently co-edited a book titled Asia's Clean Revolution. How did your interest in the possibility of environmentally friendly industrial growth develop?
I started working on this about seven years ago when I was asked to carry out a review for a US government agency called the United States-Asia Environmental Partnership. This was an agency that had been set up with the dual mission of promoting poverty-reducing growth in Asia at the same time as enhancing exports of environmentally friendly products and production equipment within the region. My job was to see whether the agency was focused on the right priorities and had strategies in place to achieve its goals. Coming out of that review I got very interested in the prospects for a much more aggressive approach to improving economic welfare and environmental quality in Asia. And I decided to begin some research on the topic that eventually led to this book.
How did you become interested in Asia?
My initial interest in Asia was actually more in North-East Asia. I'd been working in Japan and Korea on issues of technology change and industrial development, particularly the role of policy in promoting economic competitiveness. That turned out to be a very crowded field of research. A lot of economists were working in that area. Very few people were working at the intersection of economic change and the environment. I felt it was a very important problem to work on and there was a huge gap that, given geography's history working at the crossroads of the social sciences and natural sciences, could be interesting work in. I'm an economic geographer by training and at the time I had been retooling a little bit the work I was doing, in part because of the strength of the geography program here at Clark in the area of nature-society studies. At that point I hadn't really been doing very much work on environmental issues, but I was encouraged by my colleagues here at Clark to look at how my work as an economic geographer might intersect with human-environment work, most of which had to date focused upon agricultural economies, forestry, things like that. There had been very little research done on the industrial-urban economies. So a whole nexus of things came together to make it an interesting problem to work on.
Asia itself for me resulted from a chance encounter. I had worked in Europe, Eastern Europe, Russia and North America. I'd done some work in East Asia but I hadn't worked extensively in Southeast Asia, which is where most of my work is today. I think I track that connection back to about eight years ago on my last sabbatical when I had a fellowship from the Abe Foundation to study in Japan. The foundation particularly encouraged what I would call trilateral work--work that brought the United States and Japan together to do collaborative work on global problems. And the development challenge of Asia was certainly one of those global problems. Of all the places I've worked, I think I've enjoyed most working in Asia.
Have you made trips to Asia in conjunction with this research?
I go there several times a year. The approach we take to our research is to partner with researchers, policymakers, and NGOs (non-governmental organizations) and research institutions in different countries in Asia. We build a team of people who carry out the work in multiple countries. The purpose of going to Asia is as much to liaise and work with our collaborators, as it is to actually do the work itself.
Are these collaborators other academics or are they from other kinds of organizations?
They are from lots of different organizations. Some are academics, some work in universities or research institutes, while others are full time policy officials. We work closely with some people in the environmental department of the Asian Development Bank. We also work with government officials who are involved with environmental and economic policy within their governments, and also with people who work in environmental and economic NGOs. We're really looking to build a broadly based network of institutions involved in research, policy, and advocacy as well as firms and corporations that are interested in this work.
Is there an example of one country--it doesn't have to be in Asia--that provides a good example of having achieved clean industrial growth?
There are two or three examples. It is important to stress that we're quite ambitious in our goals. The focus of our work is really a transformative policy framework. One measure of environmental performance globally is the ratio of energy used per unit of GDP (gross domestic product). How much energy is used to provide $1 of GDP? Historically, in a country like the United States, we have been improving that ratio at about 1% per year. So every year we become 1% more efficient in the amount of energy we use to produce a dollar of GDP. We're looking to potentially double that ratio and to substantially improve environmental performance.
What we can do at the moment is not so much point to one country that's been completely successful at clean growth, as point to very specific instances of particular environmental problems that have been successfully dealt with. As an example, we often cite the palm oil industry in Malaysia. Palm oil production has some very significant water pollution issues associated with it and yet is very important to the livelihood of rural communities in Malaysia and other countries. And so the policy challenge concerned how to dramatically reduce the water pollution associated with palm oil production and at the same time continue to enhance the international competitiveness of the palm oil industry.
What happened was that the Malaysian government, in cooperation with a research institute, went on a global crusade, really, to identify technologies and strategies that would allow it to de-link the growth of the industry from pollution emissions. They were successful in doing that in the 1980s. And it's a good example of how if there's partnership between different organizations (government, business, environmental groups), and if there's technology available that can really transform the economic-environment relationship, that it is possible to do that. So we have projects that we can point to and what we're interested in doing is multiplying those projects a thousand times. That's what policy does. The world is so big that it's very hard to change one factory at a time or one farm at a time. So the key point of entry is policy. How can you create a policy framework and a set of initiatives that can have a multiplicative effect and make a huge difference?
There are a lot of people who don't really understand what geographers do, and what geography is really about. Can you explain how your perspective as a geographer has led you to see these problems in a unique way?
Let me start by saying that these projects, of all the work I've done, have really confirmed the value of the geographical perspective and the kind of research designs and methodologies geographers use. I was trained as an economic geographer and in many ways what distinguishes economic geographers from economists is a concern with difference across space. How do things work out differently in one place from another and what are the implications of that for how we study the economy?
Geographers also view the economy very widely. They include the relationship between the economy and the environment as one dimension of what is being studied. For example, when I'm studying economic change and the environment in Asia, there's an enormous difference across countries and regions in the nature of the development process that's underway and in the results that are achieved. Why is it that one city in China has had considerable success in reducing air pollution, whereas in another city the problem continues without much abatement? The training of geographers to be sensitive to the way processes work at multiple geographical scales and result in particular outcomes at particular places has proven an effective and necessary strategy for understanding what's going on in those places. I find a lot of converts to geography in the work I do!
So when you're looking at things from a geographical perspective, you're not just looking at differences between places. You're also examining differences in how problems are dealt with at the local, regional, national or global levels.
Yes. As an example, the most recent work I'm doing is focused on what is sometimes called trade liberalization. There are a number of intergovernmental initiatives underway at the moment to reduce tariffs in ways that would promote greater trade, in this case between the U.S. and Asian economies, and would also liberalize investment regimes to make it easier for U.S. companies to invest in Asia. This is in many ways an international or global process. What I'm interested in is how that liberalization plays out in differences in particular places. What does it mean to factories in China to adopt relatively modern technology from the United States? And what are the factors at the local and regional scales that determine whether that opportunity for using newer, cleaner technology is actually taken up in a particular factory in, for example, rural China. That combination of international, national, regional and local processes always comes together in particular ways in particular places.
It seems that you couldn't really have an understanding of the problem without looking at it from all these perspectives.
A lot of people who aren't geographers tend to write fairly sweeping generalizations about policy initiatives and to cite examples that are consistent with their generalizations. The difference with geography is that it attempts to explain the differences. Understanding why things happen the way they do in particular places is what geographers try to do.
Can you talk about the nature of the research process on which this project is based?
I start with a problem. I've always been interested in working on fairly chunky, important problems. Then I try to find a way to break up those problems into manageable research initiatives relevant to the policy process that will help to deal with those kinds of problems. Development and the environment is a huge challenge and one of the issues is to identify the important points of entry to a problem like that. In my case I've come to focus very much on something called environmental intensities: how do you reduce energy use, materials, pollution per unit of output. Within that I try to identify crucial points of policy entry. Then I conduct research, applied research-most of my work is quite applied-to see whether particular policy initiatives are successful or not. I'm continually involved in this kind of iterative, circular conversation between basic research and applied policy work, and trying to make sure that they work in synchrony. I mainly do theoretically informed empirical work. That's in part because it provides the necessary evidence to convince policy-makers of the strategies they should pursue, and also because I think you learn a tremendous amount visiting factories and farms and actually seeing how things work on the ground.
How much do you have to find out about individual technologies?
I need to know enough to be able to ask the right questions. I don't need to know the answers to the questions necessarily. Again, the way we do that is through partnerships. For our current project, which is on the cement industry, I've been doing a lot of reading about technologies used in manufacturing cement. When we get to the point of developing the actual questionnaire that cement manufacturers will complete, we enlist several cement company owners and their staffs to be advisors on our project. They then provide information on the technical issues such as how a particular kind of question should be asked and whether the question will be understandable by a particular firm. As long as you partner with people effectively, partnering is far more successful than trying to do everything yourself.
It sounds like you get to learn about a lot of subjects that you might not otherwise have been exposed to.
And that's what I enjoy doing. It might seem like the cement industry is not a particularly glamorous topic of study, but actually it's fascinating to go to a cement factory in China. To see the difference in environmental performance between a world-class factory and an older, highly polluting factory is a very moving experience. You go to a small village where they're using older technology and the air pollution is visible and is clearly having devastating health effects on people who live in that village. And then you go to a more modern factory and see that it is quite possible to produce cement not only more economically, but also to a higher environmental performance as well. Those experiences become very important in driving you forward and gain support for the policy approaches that achieve this.
You co-edited Asia's Clean Revolution. Can you talk about what the editing process involves?
Writing and editing this book is in many ways just the end product of the process of
collaboration. In this particular book there were fourteen different authors from about
seven different countries. All of those authors were members of institutions with whom we'd
collaborated. What we have tried to do is involve people, not just at the early stages of
research, but all the way through to the write-up and publication of the research. Our role
in this project was to bring to conclusion the participation of all these different researchers,
both in North America and in Asia.
We used a particular device to do this. Every one of the chapters was co-authored by an American
author and by an Asian author. We paired up these authors and supported them through a grant
from the U.S.-Asia Environmental Partnership. Our task as editors is to bring the chapters
together into a meaningful whole. It's a lot of hard work, but it's very important to bring
the research you do to publication. We tried to write a book that would be of interest both
to an academic audience and to a broader policy audience. That was perhaps the greatest
challenge, to write in a way that is lucid and accessible to a diversity of audiences, both
in North America and around the world. We also were fortunate to work with a good press that
was very supportive of us. Greenleaf is an
environmental press that specializes in publishing books about sustainable development.
Sustainable development is a bit of a buzzword these days. Can you explain what that is?
Sustainable development isn't particularly well defined. Many people cite a very common definition: the notion that sustainable development is making sure that the natural and social resources available today will be available for future generations. That's a very evocative notion and, in general, sustainable development builds on that basic idea. It's ensuring that the global life support systems of the planet are stable as we go through the process of economic change.
But sustainable development isn't just concerned with the environment. It's also concerned with issues of equity, poverty reduction and justice. People talk about weak sustainability when it's in framed in terms only of environmental goals, and strong sustainability when it's also concerned with social justice. In our work we lean toward that latter definition. Our basic goal in Asia in terms of policy work is to try to find ways to support poverty-reducing growth that also mediate the challenge to the environment. If all we did was to find ways of reducing air pollution without paying attention to reducing poverty, our work would be largely irrelevant to the things that are happening in Asia today. Environmental initiatives will not be successful unless they're grounded in things that improve people's lives.
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Additional Resources
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Finding a research question