Globalizing the treadmill of production: a solutions-oriented application to Ecuador

Resumen

A foundational theory in environmental sociology, Allan Schnaiberg’s treadmill of production theory (1980), and subsequent elaborations of the treadmill of production theory, is best known and used to explain how societies have created environmental and social disruptions. Less well known and less utilized aspects of the original theory include proposed strategies to slow the treadmill of production, with the goals of decreasing withdrawals and additions, and increasing social justice. This paper revisits Schnaiberg’s original conceptualization of the treadmill of production theory to: (1) highlight and reinvigorate these under utilized portions of the theory, (2) apply the theory’s social change model to explain the case of Ecuador’s changing development trajectory from the 1970s to 2017, and (3) develop an aspect of the theory that was not in Schnaiberg’s original conceptualization; namely, how pressure from the global political economy affects states’ choices, and ultimately, their choices about social-environmental development trajectories. The broader goal of the paper is to contribute to public environmental sociologists’ quest to understand the conditions and the actions that offer the most promise for solving the intertwined social-environmental problems in a globalized political economy.