Dependency Theory and Environment Essay ⋆ Environment Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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Depende ncy theory is a school of thought that emerged mainly in Latin America in the 1960s and 1970s to explain sustained patterns of poverty and low growth rates in Latin America, Asia, and Africa after World War II. Dependency theory inverted neoclassical development economics, which assumed that economic growth was eventually beneficial to all, even if the benefits were not equally shared. Neoclassical theorists argued that Latin America, Asia, and Africa were underdeveloped because they had not been sufficiently integrated into a global economy. On the contrary, dependency theorists argued that “developing” countries had been integrated into the world capitalist economy since the beginning of European capitalist expansion starting in the 16th century. Long-term poverty and low growth rates in “underdeveloped” regions were the result of the nature of the interactions between developed and underdeveloped countries, which were characterized by relations of dependency. Underdevelopment was therefore the outcome of a process, rather than being an initial condition from which various stages of “development” ensued.

While all dependency theorists share the view that unequal economic and political relations characterize the interactions between developed and underdeveloped regions, there are many differences between them. Dependency theory can be divided into liberal, neocolonial, and neo-Marxist trends. Raul Prebisch (b.1901), an Argentinean economist, exemplifies the liberal school. He argued that poor countries export primary commodities to the rich countries that manufacture the products that are resold to the poorer countries. This “value added” through manufacturing is captured by the developed countries. He advocated import substitution policies, including tariffs and quotas to protect domestic industry and solve these problems. These policies were followed by many developing countries until neoliberal economic philosophy became dominant in international financial institutions in the 1980s.

The neocolonial approach is identified with Andre Gunder Frank (1929-2005). A refugee from Nazi Germany as a boy, he spent much of his early teaching career in Brazil and Mexico. Gunder Frank’s earliest work to deal with dependency was Sociology of Development and Underdevelopment of Sociology (1967). There, he not only critiqued most ideas associated with mainstream development theory, but also presented an influential theory of satellitemetropolis relations, which was one of exploitation, as surplus value in the form of profits was appropriated from the satellite regions by the metropolis. Satellite-metropolis relations also existed within developing countries. Urban financial centers functioned as metropoles for the agricultural hinterlands that provided the primary products that were sold by commercial elites to developing countries. His case studies on Brazil (1963), Chile (1964), and Mexico (1965) showed how the most seemingly isolated and impoverished regions of these countries, such as northeast Brazil, had been intricately linked to global capitalism since the 1600s.

Gunder Frank’s theory of metropolis-satellite relations was partially criticized by Ernesto Laclau, who argued that the existence of market ties between metropolis and satellite did not mean that the satellites were capitalist. Rather, forms of unfree and servile labor that were characteristic of feudal relations often marked their relations. Hence, dependency theorists should also examine the nature of class relations in the countryside in order to understand the dynamics of underdevelopment. However, Immanuel Wallerstein (1974) ignored this distinction, developing a world systems approach that incorporated many of the ideas of the dependency school. He further added the concepts of core, periphery, and semi-peripheral regions, and differentiated between an economic system and a world empire. The core and periphery regions were similar to Gunder Frank’s metropolis and satellite, while the semi-periphery had the function of buttressing the core ideologically and politically.

Dependency theory has a major influence on the field of political ecology, since it helps to show how unequal economic and political relations create poverty, which often produce ecological degradation as a result. So too, economic development programs built around notions of dependency, especially import substitution programs, have environmental impacts since they tend to employ subsidies for industry at the expense of the agricultural sector, with implications for farm product prices, soil exhaustion, and overuse of chemical inputs.

Bibliography:

Amin, Accumulation on a World Scale (Monthly Review Press, 1974);
Andre Gunder Frank, Sociology of Development and Underdevelopment of Sociology (Pluto 1971);
Wallerstein, The Modern World-System (Academic Press, 1974).