Constructing globalization in the Philippines : labour, land and identity on Manila’s industrializing periphery
Creators: name: Kelly, Philip Francis
Publisher: name: University of British Columbia
Year: 2009

description: 'Globalization' has become a powerful icon in academic, policy and business circles. This thesis seeks to trace some of the consequences of both the process and the idea of globalization in the Philippines. The thesis starts by arguing that theories of globalization - economic, technological, political and cultural - have invested in the process an aura of inevitability and necessity. These 'logics' of globalization, widely promulgated by both the political left and right, imply a particular construction of scale that privileges the global above all other levels of analysis. This construction has been used as a discursive legitimation of neoliberal policy prescriptions for development. In seeking to destabilize this construction of the global scale, the rest of the thesis demonstrates the ways in which global flows (particularly of capital and cultural meanings) are in fact embedded, mediated and activated in local social relations in the Philippines. This empirically-based argument starts with a brief historical account of Philippine relations with 'global space' from pre-colonial times to the present, demonstrating that the relationship has been contingent and politically contested over time and has owed as much to national level power relations as to global forces. In the last few decades, in particular, 'globalization' has been both a key material process in the Philippine economy, and an important part of the Ramos administration's legitimation of its development strategies. These have included deregulation, decentralization, trade liberalization, and encouraging foreign direct investment in export manufacturing. This investment has exhibited a spatial concentration in the core region around Manila, and particularly in the province of Cavite. Through multiple scales of analysis - provincial, municipal, village, household and individual -I explore the ways in which experiences of 'globalized' development in Cavite and two of its villages are embedded in 'local' social, economic, environmental, political and cultural processes. These experiences come principally in the form of: changing local labour markets, land conversion from agricultural to urban-industrial uses, and the reworking of cultural identities. One central argument is proposed throughout: that viewing globalization as an inevitable and unavoidable context for development is inappropriate; instead, the processes of globalization must be seen as embedded in social processes and power relations operating in particular places. This argument embodies two further points. First, that the 'places' in which globalization is embedded are at multiple scales which must be seen as interlinked and overlapping rather than distinct and hierarchical. Secondly, while globalization, and its embeddedness in places, operates as a material process, it is also a social construction and political discourse which, by locating the 'driving force' of social change at the global scale, serves to legitimize certain practices and construct a particular relationship between the 'local' and the 'global'.