Appraising Sociological Approaches to Ecologically Unequal Exchange

Ecologically unequal exchange has enjoyed several decades of rich theoretical and empirical scholarship. Quantitative assessments of the theory in sociology typically sample lower income nations to see whether more trading to high income nations contributes to environmental problems in the former. In this paper, we explore ecologically unequal exchange theory, as well as related traditions, to draw attention to how these theories develop relational understandings of global advantage and disadvantage in socioecological terms. Thus, we argue that relational methods, like social network analysis, among other approaches, better align with the underlying theoretical framework in the research area. More specifically, ecologically unequal exchange’s emphasis on “extractive peripheries” calls for those geographic zones to be the primary site of analysis as opposed to bifurcating nations based on income. We specifically propose social network tools and methods, such as position/role analyses, because they can directly analyze trade data to construct categories of nations, such as extractive export sites. Generally, we argue that these methods better approximate the underlying theory, while acknowledging the utility of the longstanding approach, calling for methodological diversification in general and embracing relational methods in particular.