SUPERVISOR: Martin SCHMID  

PROJECT ASSIGNED TO: Mislav RADOSEVIC

The project is built on the view of industrialization of forests in Austria from the 18th to the 20th century as a socio-ecological transition and not just a technological and economical one. The main hypothesis of the project is that the industrialization can be analyzed as a shift of socio-ecological forest regimes, with broader changes in sociocultural and ecological properties and traits of forests; key features of that shift include simplification and loss of diversity both in the social and in the ecological dimension of forests, and the way the two interact. The project situates forests as coupled socio-ecological systems, embedded within broader sociocultural and ecological contexts. By studying historical cases like the one on Steyr estate across varying scales, it aims to trace the long-term legacies of socio-ecological regimes of forest use and their effects into the present. Key points of  research in INFEST are cultural programs, social practices and biogeochemical stocks and fluxes.

My dissertation will cover the social practices as integrative part of the wider project research. By choosing a local case study of the Steyr Estate forests in Upper Austria, it is the aim of this research to analyze the removal of social practices in a smaller, micro-historical scale and to compare it with similar case-studies in other parts of  Europe to better understand the impacts of the reshaping of society and forest landscapes in 19th Century Europe. The dissertation will focus primarily around servitutes or easement rights such as firewood and timber rights in Steyr Estate forests. It will showcase how were those rights percieved by the foresters and Estate administration after the Revolution 1848/1849, what prompted the long and complex removal process of those rights and describe the process itself in greater detail by analyzing the servitute removal and regulation documents kept in the State Archive of Upper Austria in Linz. 

(2) Does the EGD represent a real social-ecological transformation, or will it continue the structural offshoring of social-environmental impacts to other regions?

(3) What is the material footprint of the policies laid out in the EGD?

(4) How will the associated extractive activities (in particular mining, agriculture and forestry) affect social and environmental conditions in the extracting regions?

(5) What policies and other measures could mitigate excessive displacement of social-environmental loads to extra-EU territories?

The investigation combines concepts, methods and tools from ecological economics and social ecology. It draws on the theory of “ecologically unequal exchange” (EUE), which ecological economists have developed in order to analyse the uneven distribution of the benefits and burdens associated with natural resource use along global supply chains. International trade allows importers to appropriate resources needed for additions to physical infrastructure and consumption from other regions while displacing the associated environmental impacts. Environmentally-extended multi-regional-input-output (EE-MRIO) analysis has emerged as a powerful tool to provide empirical information on the environmental impacts of global value chains. This dissertation project combines EUE theory and (EE-MRIO) analysis to explore the displaced social-environmental impacts associated with the changing resource use patterns that the EGD will likely bring about.

The project aims to improve the understanding of the scale and type of the likely externalised social-environmental impacts. This understanding is urgently needed in order to adjust and design policies that will ensure the EGD contributes to the global social-ecological transformation rather than to merely shift pressures to other regions.