Context: Local and global

The context of the local and the global was a key tension in most if not all of the literature examined. Situating the research within a globalizing world has in some way pre-determined this first tension between the local and the global. However, as the research developed the multiple meanings of the local and the global as applied to educational practice grew beyond Vayda’s description of denser and wider contexts.

The review indicates that there seems to be some agreement with Beck’s idea of globality, which means

… that from now on nothing which happens to our planet is only a limited local event; all inventions, victories and catastrophes affect the whole world,

20

Thomas Princen, Matthias Finger and Jack Manno, “ Transnational linkages” in T. Princen and M. Finger, Environmental NGOs in world politics: Linking the local and the global (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 228.

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and we must reorient and reorganize our lives and actions, our organizations, and institutions, along a ‘local-global’ axis.21

However, there is less unity in terms of what constitute the local and the global within a globalizing context, and more specifically its implications to popular environmental education practice.

Examining the definitions of the local and the global has often focused on the dualities of extremes in terms of both space and scale. Nireka Weeratunge in her anthropological work of human and environment relationships writes that she uses the terms local and global not as a dichotomy but as two ends of a spectrum across both geographical and cultural spaces. This approach, she argues is based on the recognition of the “lack of definitional stability and the problems of boundaries” in using these terms.22

Michael Peter Smith23 agrees that there is a need to move beyond the global-local duality. This relationship, according to him, is a

… false opposition that equates the local with a cultural space of stasis, ontological meaning, and personal identify and the global as the source of dynamic change, the decentring of meaningfulness, and the fragmentation / homogenization of culture.24

21

Ulrich Beck, What is globalization? (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000), p. 11. 22

Nireka Weeratunge, “Nature, harmony and the Kaliyugaya: Global/local discourses on the human- environment relationship”, Current Anthropology, vol. 41, no.2 (April 2000), pp. 249+. (Expanded Academic ASAP Int’l Ed: Item no. A62022729 23

Michael Peter Smith, “The disappearance of world cities and the globalization of local politics” in Paul Knox and Peter Taylor (eds), World cities in a world-system (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 249-266.

24

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as a series of two-dimensional ‘nested’ spatial scales, where the local is within the regional, within the national, and within the global. Often it appears as a three- dimensional one, where the ‘larger’ scale appears as higher and more dominant to the ‘smaller’ scale. Beauregard identifies a second approach26 to spatial scales that helps to broaden it into a “socio-spatial process” by incorporating the “geographical reach of actors”, which is often not limited to either purely local or global. He concludes that

… once we recognize that major actors frequently operate at numerous spatial scales, then we must abandon a simple geographical nesting of scales and a rigid categorization of actors in terms of spatial reach.27

This reconfiguration, according to Beauregard, results in spatial scales existing only temporarily as ‘purely’ local, national, or global, because it has in essence incorporated the interest and actors from other scales. The reconfiguration of spatial scales into socio-spatial processes is significant in terms of the dominant construction of the local and the global in environmental education, which is often limited to the biophysical space within a particular geographic scale.

This narrow view of the local and the global is equally evident from the popular slogan of the environmental movement "Think Globally, Act Locally". The slogan aims to promote a global awareness to the scope and scale of environmental problems while focusing on localized environmental action. However, the slogan tends to maintain the dichotomy, the false opposition and dominance of the global over the local. Activists and authors, like Vanda Shiva28

25

Robert Beauregard, “Theorizing the global-local connection” in P. Knox and P. Taylor (eds), World cities in a world-system (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 232-248.

write that limiting action to the local playing field frees up the global playing field to those who possess the more

26

Beauregard, p. 239. 27

Beauregard, p. 240. 28

Vandana Shiva, “The Greening of the Global Reach” in Jeremy Brecher, John Brown Childs, and Jill Cutler (eds), Global visions: beyond the new world order (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1993), pp. 53 - 60.

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powerful knowledge and the technology. Often therefore, its is the transnational corporations and the global institutions that end up defining the global and what are considered as global priorities.

This critique of the popular slogan does not suggest, according to Princen, Finger and Manno that “every environmental NGO with international pretensions must deal simultaneously with village leaders and the United Nations.”29 They emphasize that these biophysical-political linkages and global-local linkages can be multi-tiered, and can be addressed by the coalitions and networks of NGOs that exist at different levels.

In attempting to address the dichotomy of the local and the global, there are authors who have proposed words that combine the global and the local, as both space and process. An example of this combination is “glocalization”.30 Roland Robertson, a key exponent of cultural globalization theory, argues that

… the distinction between the global and the local is becoming more complex and problematic, to the extent that we should perhaps speak in such terms as the global institutionalization of the life-world and the localization of globality.31

He later proposed the term glocalization, based on the recognition that the local and the global are not mutually exclusive and that the process of globalization and localization are essentially “complementary and interpenetrating.”32

29

Princen, Finger and Manno, p. 229. 30

Ronald Robertson, “Glocalization: Time-space and homogeneity-heterogeneity” in Mike Featherstone, Scott Lash and Ronald Robertson (eds), Global modernities (London: Sage, 1995), pp. 25-44.

31

Roland Robertson, Globalization, Social Theory and Global Culture (London: SAGE, 1992), pp.52- 53.

32

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… the ability of a culture, when it encounters other stronger cultures, to absorb influences that naturally fit into and can enrich that culture, to resist those things that are truly alien and to compartmentalize those things that, while different, can nevertheless be enjoyed and celebrated as different.33

These same concepts have filtered into the literature on education. Apel observed that glocalization,

… a kind of globalization that also has local implications, … in the future will no longer be an abstract concept somehow remote from adult education, but a word with concrete implications for our everyday reality, demanding new types of competence and judgment skills, and requiring us to assume new responsibilities.34

For CEC, the discussion of the global has always been two-pronged. First, it involves studying particular global environmental issues like climate change, ozone layer depletion, loss of biodiversity and transboundary pollution. Second, it involves the critical examination of environmental issues in the context of globalization, specifically, the dominant global development paradigm, global economic policies like GATT, and global institutions like the IMF and the World Bank.

Based on these discussions, the following research questions are proposed. First, the thesis examines CEC’s constructions of the local and the global. Second, it studies CEC’s attempts to link the local to the global. Third, it analyzes the findings from the first two questions and examines its implications on progressive contextualization of its educational practice.

33

Friedman, p. 295. 34

Heino Apel, “Development, environment and sustainability – Changing perspectives in development-oriented adult education”, Adult Education and Development, no. 46 (1996), pp. 125- 142.

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