Questioning Development: Global Integration and the Ecological Efficiency of Well-Being "Cancelled"

The author investigates the extent to which sociological theories of global integration, including political economic, military, and world polity theoretical orientations, help explain different countries’ carbon intensity of well-being.  The carbon intensity of well-being approach provides a way to measure a country’s progress toward simultaneous environmental and social sustainability by asking how energy (or ecologically) intensely (or efficiently) a nation-state is producing well-being for its citizens.  This research utilizes statistically rigorous longitudinal modeling techniques, addresses core sociological issues of inequality, human well-being, and development, and explores questions of sustainability and energy use key to environmental sociology.  This is a burgeoning area of research and yet looking at the effects of political economic, military, and world society integration is relatively unexplored for this topic in the sociological literature.  Results indicate that varying forms of integration have an impact on states’ abilities to provide environmental protections and well-being for citizens, and therefore unequal levels and various types of global integration are important to consider in environmental and development planning.