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IB DP Global Politics — Thematic study: Development and sustainability | SL | Globalization, Development and Sustainability
📋 What You Will Learn
- Define globalization and explain its key dimensions (economic, political, cultural, technological)
- Explain how globalization shapes development outcomes across different contexts
- Analyse the relationship between globalization and sustainability, including environmental and social dimensions
- Compare how different theoretical perspectives interpret globalization's effects on development and sustainability
- Evaluate the claim that globalization promotes or undermines development and sustainability
- Apply levels-of-analysis thinking to show how globalization's effects differ across global, national and community scales
🔍 Guiding Question Does globalization advance development and sustainability for all, or does it concentrate benefits among the powerful while exporting costs to the vulnerable?
🌍 Why This Matters In 2023, the UN's Sustainable Development Goals progress report warned that fewer than 15% of the SDGs were on track — even as global trade and investment reached record levels. The gap between a hyper-connected global economy and stalled human and environmental progress is one of the defining political tensions of our time.
🔑 Key Concept Link This topic engages all four key concepts. Interdependence is the most immediate: globalization is, in essence, the intensification of cross-border interdependence. But power shapes who sets the rules of globalization; sovereignty is tested when global economic forces override national policy choices; and legitimacy is at stake when development models are imposed or when sustainability burdens are distributed unequally. Return to these links throughout.
What Is Globalization?
Before asking what globalization does to development and sustainability, we need to be precise about what it is — and to recognise that even the definition is contested. Some see it as an inevitable, value-neutral process; others see it as a political project that serves particular interests.
📖 Definition — Globalization Globalization refers to the intensification and acceleration of cross-border flows of goods, services, capital, people, ideas and information, producing increasing interconnectedness and interdependence among states, communities and individuals. It is both a material process and a set of contested norms about how the world economy should be organised.
Key dimensions of globalization
- Economic: trade liberalisation, foreign direct investment (FDI), global supply chains, transnational corporations (TNCs), and financial integration (e.g. global capital markets).
- Political: the spread of international institutions (WTO, IMF, World Bank), multilateral governance, and the diffusion of democratic and human-rights norms.
- Cultural: the spread of media, consumer culture, languages and values across borders — sometimes described as cultural homogenisation, sometimes as hybridisation.
- Technological: the internet, digital platforms, mobile communications and automation accelerating all other dimensions.
- Environmental: cross-border pollution, climate change and resource extraction — the ecological dimension that makes globalization inseparable from sustainability debates.
📌 Globalization Is Not New — But Its Pace Is Cross-border trade and migration have existed for millennia. What distinguishes contemporary globalization (roughly from the 1980s onward) is its speed, scale and the ideological framework —