I have coined the ungainly and contrived word “fragmegration” to capture the inextricable links between the individual and societal tendencies to integrate across boundaries that are the hallmark of globalization and the counter tendencies toward fragmentation that are fomented by localizing resistances to boundary-spanning activities.  I dare to suggest that by viewing the world through fragmegrative lenses one can discern the underlying dynamics of our epoch with a clarity that is not otherwise available.[9] It is not far-fetched to assert that virtually every increment of globalization gives rise to an increment of localization, and vice versa, so thoroughly are the two contrary orientations and processes interconnected.

While fragmegrative dynamics tend to be conflictual, it is useful to reiterate that many environmental issues originate in local communities and the resolution of more than a few of them involve a measure of decentralization founded on the perspectives of localism.  In the energy field, for example, sustainable enterprises are estimated to be most efficient when they are decentralized in the private and nonprofit sector,[10] an estimate that runs counter to practices in many countries but that is quite consistent with the underlying tendency whereby authority is undergoing a continual process of disaggregation as the fragmegrative epoch unfolds.

 

Sustainability as Fragmegrative Processes

Environmental issues and their potential for sustainability fall squarely between fragmentation and integration.  They are profoundly and quintessentially fragmegrative dynamics.  On the one hand, they are pervasively integrative in the sense that the value of preserving the environment and maintaining its viability is widely shared at every level of community.  Rare are those who overtly argue on behalf of exploiting the resources of nature or who oppose the idea of trying to prevent their degradation.  Indeed, it is precisely the integrative underpinnings of environmental issues that brought leaders of 160 national governments and representatives of thousands of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) to Rio in 1992 and comparable numbers of both types of actors to Johannesburg in 2002.  And it is precisely these issues that evoked verbal affirmations of and commitments to the agreements reached in Rio throughout the subsequent decade.  On the other hand, the very same issues have led to pervasive and divisive fragmentation among and within groups, communities, countries, and international systems when actions designed to implement the proposed commitments proved to be highly controversial and, with some notable exceptions, largely ineffectual.  It is no accident that the series of anti-globalization protests that began with the Battle of Seattle in 1999 have in large measure focused on questions of sustainability.

Indeed, the protests have reinforced a long-term process whereby the very idea of sustainability has undergone a significant change of meaning.  Now it connotes “sustainable development,” with the emphasis on sustaining economies rather than nature, a semantic shift that has enabled a vast array of diverse actors to crowd under the umbrella of sustainability and to press their goals in the context of what they regard as unquestionable sets of values.[11]

 

Sources of Fragmegration

What is it about the present epoch that has so markedly accelerated local-global tensions and strikingly raised their salience on the global agenda? I find it useful to respond to this question by identifying eight major sources of fragmegration that shape attitudes and behavior at four levels of aggregation---the micro level of individuals, the macro level of collectivities and states, the micro-macro level at which individuals and collectivities shape and interact with each other, and the macro-macro level wherein collectivities interact and influence each other.  Both the eight sources and the four levels are set forth in Table 1, with the entries in the cells being crude hypotheses that suggest some of---though surely not all---the possible consequences that may flow at each level in response to each of the various sources.[12]  At the very least Table 1 highlights the extraordinary complexity that marks our time.

Table 1: Some Sources of Fragmegration at Four Levels of Aggregation

Levels of Aggregationè ______________ Sources of Fragmegrationê	MICRO	MACRO	MICRO- MACRO	MACRO- MACRO
Microelectronic Technologies	enable like-minded people to be in touch with each other anywhere in the world	render collectivities more open, connected, and vulnerable; empowers them to mobilize support	constrain governments by enabling opposition groups to mobilize more effectively	accelerate diplomatic processes; facilitate electronic surveillance and intelligence work
Skill Revolution	expands peoples’ horizons on a global scale; sensitizes them to the relevance of distant events; facilitates a reversion to local concerns	enlarges the capacity of governmental agencies to think “out of the box,” seize opportunities, and analyze challenges	constrains policy  making through increased capacity of individuals to know when, where and how to engage in collective action	multiplies quantity and enhances quality of links among states; solidifies their alliances and enmities
Organizational Explosion	facilitates multiple identities,  subgroupism, and affiliation with transnational networks	increases capacity of opposition groups to form and press for altered policies; divides publics from their elites	contributes to the pluralism and dispersion of authority; heightens the probability of authority crises	renders the global stage ever more transnational and dense with non-governmental actors
Bifurcation of Global Structures	adds to role conflicts, divides loyalties, and foments tensions among individuals; orients people toward  local  spheres of authority	facilitates formation of new spheres of authority and consolidation of  existing spheres in the multi-centric world	empowers transnational advocacy groups and special interests to pursue influence through diverse channels	generates institutional arrangements for cooperation on major global issues such as trade, human rights, the environment, etc.
Mobility Upheaval	stimulates imaginations and provides more extensive contacts with foreign cultures; heightens salience of the outsider	enlarges the size and relevance of sub-cultures, diasporas, and ethnic conflicts as people seek new opportunities abroad	increases movement across borders that lessens capacity of governments to control national boundaries	heightens need for international cooperation to control the flow of drugs, money, immigrants, and terrorists
Weakening of Territoriality, States, and Sovereignty	undermines traditions and national loyalties; increases distrust of governments and other institutions	adds to the porosity of national boundaries and the difficulty of framing national policies	lessens confidence in governments; renders nationwide consensuses difficult to achieve and maintain	increases need for interstate cooperation on global issues; lessens control over cascading events
Authority Crises	redirect loyalties; encourage individuals to replace traditional criteria of legitimacy with performance criteria	weaken ability of both governments and other organizations to frame and implement policies	facilitate the capacity of publics to press and/or paralyze their governments, the WTO, and other organizations	enlarge the competence of some IGOs and NGOs; encourage diplomatic wariness in negotiations
Globalization of National Economies	swells ranks of consumers; promotes uniform tastes; heightens concerns for jobs; widens gap between winners and losers	complicates tasks of state governments vis-à-vis markets; promotes business alliances	increases efforts to protect local cultures and industries; facilitates vigor of protest movements; polarizes communities	intensifies trade and investment conflicts; generates incentives for building global financial institutions

It should be stressed that fragmegrative circumstances are not necessarily marked by tensions and conflict.  Global orientations and actions can be supportive of local situations, and vice versa.  For example, the U.N.’s Commission on Sustainable Development created at Rio in 1992 has assisted numerous cities around the world promote local arrangements designed to contain and reduce environmental degradation.[13]  This example is encouraging.  It accords credence to the possibility of achieving widespread harmony between local circumstances and global needs as a prime goal of sustainability and global governance.  However, here I want to focus on how the eight dynamics listed in Table 1 may serve to generate tension and conflict in the realm of environmental sustainability.

 

Microelectronic Technologies

Among the consequences that may flow from the Internet, mobile phones, and fax machines are an ever more effective capacity to mobilize like-minded people on behalf of shared goals.  It is a capacity that serves those committed to localism as well as those inclined toward globalism.  Equally important, such technologies level the playing field.  Mobilization in local communities is facilitated by word of mouth as well communication technologies, but the latter make it possible to reach and mobilize the like-minded across national boundaries and great distances.  The Internet has been a major factor in the surging growth of the environmental movement noted below.[14]

 

Skill Revolution

Elsewhere I have argued at length that people everywhere have expanded their skills at dealing with the challenges and crises that mark our accelerated epoch.[15]  It is no longer plausible to take publics for granted, to assume they can be led by their officials to support any course of action.  Rather, equipped with a deeper understanding and more clear-cut values than, say, their great grandparents, today they are more ready to take action in response to circumstances they find wanting.  This greater readiness is perhaps especially evident with respect to environmental issues, sensitivities to which have greatly increased in recent decades.  Stated in the words of one analyst, “The local efforts of citizens have always been crucial to the environmental movement.  Grassroots activism is the seedbed of more organized and enduring efforts and institutions.”[16] Furthermore, the skill revolution along with the new technologies has heightened peoples’ sense of identity and their capacity to shoulder multiple identities.

 

Organizational Explosion

A central pattern of this accelerated epoch is the proliferation of organizations at every level of community, local, national, and transnational.  Equally important, due largely to the Internet and the fax machine, many of them are horizontally as well as vertically structured.  Networks have supplemented hierarchies as an organizational form, and many of the new organizations are conspicuously lacking in hierarchy.  Combined with the processes of localization, the organizational explosion is thus enabling people to find common cause with others in their community and to come together when the need to do so arises.

But it is important to note that the environmental movement is far from unified.  Rather, it can be viewed as numerous environmental movements that are “very diverse and complex, their organizational forms ranging from the highly organized and formally institutionalized to the radically informed, the spatial scope of their activities ranging from the local to the almost global, the nature of their concerns ranging from single issues to the full panoply of global environmental concerns.”[17]  Taken as a whole, the movement is thus “defined by many different voices” which are often in conflict.  “Each cause has its own chorus of supporters and detractors,” so much so that “when advancing their own particular interests for their own political ends, environmentalists may seem less in the business of galvanizing public commitment than dispersing it.”[18]  Since some of these tensions unfold across transnational, national, and local groups, it can readily be observed that the environmental movement is itself subject to fragmegrative dynamics.

 

Bifurcation of Global Structures

Beginning sometime after World War II the overall structure of world politics began to undergo change, to bifurcate, with the flourishing of innumerable actors other than states clambering up on to the world stage and undertaking actions with consequence for the course of events. As a result, what I call a “multi-centric” world evolved that consists of a great variety of collectivities and that has come to rival the long-standing, anarchical state-centric system.  One can reasonably assert that overall global structures are today marked by two worlds of world politics, two worlds that sometimes cooperate, oft-times conflict, and endlessly interact.  The bifurcated evolution of the global system serves to intensify fragmegrative dynamics in the sense that it contributes to a long-term process whereby authority is undergoing disaggregation.  Consequently, the multi-centric world now provides avenues for local groups to articulate their needs and goals as they join with each other in persuading governments in the state-centric world to heed---or at least to hear---their claims.[19]

The environmental movement has been and continues to be both a contributor to and a beneficiary of the bifurcation of global structures.  It has contributed through the explosion of environmental organizations at all levels of community throughout the world.  In so doing the movement has helped to institutionalize and legitimate the processes of bifurcation.  At the same time it has benefited from the institutionalization of the bifurcated structures in the sense that the movement’s diverse voices now have a permanent platform from which they can express and move toward their goals.  It is hard to imagine any future gathering of leaders of the state-centric world that is not accompanied by a simultaneous and adjacent gathering of organizations and individuals from the multi-centric world, a reality that is profoundly and thoroughly expressive of the dynamics of fragmegration.[20]

 

Mobility Upheaval

The accelerated epoch has witnessed a vast movement of people – everyone from the tourist to the terrorist, from the business executive to the immigrant, from illegal aliens seeking work to those fleeing persecution, from students studying abroad to artists and other professionals advancing their careers, from environmentalists attending conferences in Rio and Johannesburg to protesters converging on Seattle and Washington. To cite one quantitative example, there were 635 million international tourist arrivals in 1998, whereas the figure for 1950 was 25 million.[21] In many ways this mobility upheaval, as I call it, has contributed to the integrative dimension of fragmegration, but in one important way it has served to intensify fragmentation. In many countries the migrant, legal as well as illegal, has fostered strong  negative reactions in the host society. Australia’s handling of this problem, its refusal to let boatload of migrants disembark on its shores, is a classic instance of this fragmegrative dynamic.

 

Weakening of Territoriality, States, and Sovereignty

As technologies shrink the world, as people become increasingly skillful, as organizations proliferate, as the multi-centric world expands, and as the mobility upheaval sustains vast movements of people, the meaning of territory becomes less compelling and states and their sovereignty become weaker.  This is not to forecast the end of the state as a central political structure.  Rather it is to stress that states have increasing difficulty controlling the flow of ideas, money, goods, drugs, crime, pollution, and people across their borders, thus contributing substantially to the processes whereby authority is undergoing disaggregation on a worldwide scale.  The fragmegrative consequences of these processes are considerable.  Most notably perhaps, local communities and groups are acquiring greater autonomy and a heightened readiness to contest the integrative forces of globalization.  The recent history of the environmental movement offers numerous examples of clashes that pit local and global forces against each other.[22]

 

Authority Crises

The dynamics whereby authority structures are undergoing disaggregation have contributed to a proliferation of authority crises on the part of governments, local as well as national.  Such crises are most conspicuous when protesters crowd the streets and make strident demands, but an even more common form of authority crisis involves the inability of governments to frame goals and move toward them.  Stalemate and paralysis, in other words, amount to authority crises, and they are pervasive.  Japan’s inability to confront and surmount the long-term decline of its economy and the persistence of widespread corruption and unemployment in China are illustrative of authority crises that derive their strength from stalemated political systems.  NGOs, churches, unions, and a variety of other institutions are also going one or another form of paralysis and upheaval.  Even the Mafia has experienced an authority crisis deriving from its young members defying the dictates of its seniors.  Needless to say, pervasive authority crises have important consequences for the world’s capacity to maximize the governance of sustainability.

 

Globalization of National Economies

The turn toward free enterprise economic systems and a lessening of trade barriers has had a number of fragmegrative consequences.  On the integrative side the emergence of a global economy has led to a greater variety of goods and services being available to more and more people, processes that have also contributed to an ever-greater interdependence among groups and societies.  On the fragmenting side, the globalization of national economies has also served to widen the gap between rich and poor both within and between countries.  More relevant to present concerns, the prevalence of neoliberal economic perspectives underlies the aforementioned semantic shift of the concept of sustainability from an emphasis on sustaining economies rather than nature.  These perspectives have also served to move the role of transnational corporations toward the top of the global agenda, thereby generating conditions for a wide variety of fragmegrative situations, from protests against the world’s economic institutions to boycotts of the goods of corporations that are considered to undermine environmental sustainability.

 

The Governance of Environmental Fragmegration

The discourse that probes the problem of achieving sustainability through global governance largely bemoans the lack of progress since the 1992 convergence of the two worlds of world politics in Rio.  However, when it turns to investigating how more effective global governance might be accomplished, the discourse encounters conceptual difficulties that tend to block a full appreciation of the task.  Three problems are especially noteworthy.  One involves the confusion noted above in which the priorities attached to sustainable and economic development get confounded.  The second consists of a tendency to ignore the high degree to which authority has undergone disaggregation in recent decades and instead to focus on top-down solutions to the governance challenge.  And the third amounts to a disinclination to account for local variations and, consequently, an underplaying of fragmegrative tensions and an undue stress upon the universality of scientific findings.

 

Conceptual Blocks: What Should be Developed?

Intense debate surrounds the question of whether the environment or economies should be developed.   It pits environmentalists against developers, which readily becomes a debate between developed and developing countries.  While some appreciate that the debate can be misleading, that the goals of each group can be compatible and need not be mutually exclusive,[23] that the environment can be sustained even as economies flourish, the central tendency is for the economy and the developers to prevail over the environment and environmentalists.  George W. Bush’s repeated contention that the Kyoto Protocol on Climate Change would be bad for the American economy is a quintessential instance of this outcome as well as a succinct expression of how this conceptual block can prevent both/and formulations from replacing either/or approaches.

 

Conceptual Blocks: Authority

Notwithstanding the many ways in which the eight dynamics listed in Table 1---and especially the organizational explosion, the skill revolution, the weakening of states, and pervasive authority crises---have cumulatively fostered a global stage that is crowded with diverse actors at every level of community who take positions and pursue policies relevant to sustainability, most assessments of what has to be done start at the level of reforming international institutions and then note how the reforms have to be implemented by national and local governments.  Whether the solutions are top-down or bottom-up, they posit vertical flows of authority. 

In effect, therefore, the solutions are cast in the context of the aforementioned weakness wherein analysts still cling to traditional approaches to the nature of authority.  They ignore the ways in which collectivities in both the public and private sectors sustain authority flows horizontally through networks as well as vertically through hierarchical structures.  They continue to posit the state as the prime, if not the only, wielder of effective authority.  Thus, still rooted in the notion that compliance involves those at the top persuading, instructing, or ordering those down the chain of command to conduct themselves in specified ways, no allowance is made for requests and suggestions that evoke compliance through nonhierarchical structures.  In the words of one observer, “So dominant in contemporary consciousness is the assumption that authority must be centralized that scholars are just beginning to grapple with how decentralized authority might be understood. . . . [T]he question of how to think about a world that is becoming “’domesticated’” but not centralized, about a world after “’anarchy,’” is one of the most important questions today facing not only students of international relations but of political theory as well.”[24]