Today’s global crisis combines a number of interlinked events with huge implications for human and planetary well-being. It reflects and accelerates an epochal change in the world order: our degradation of the natural environment, rapidly developing technologies, competition for resources, widening inequalities and dwindling trust in institutions.
The crisis began with the failure of Lehman Brothers in September 2008 and the collapse of many smaller financial firms, causing massive disruptions in world stock markets, which quickly spread into real economies. Financial stress accelerated a decline in economic growth and caused millions of people to lose their jobs, homes or vast sums of wealth.
Unlike local crises that are contained within the closed borders of their communities, global crises are deterritorialized and non-locally specified (Cottle 2011). As a result, consumers disproportionately blame national and international institutions for the local impacts of global crises. Their causal attributions are often based on the notion that they could have prevented or manipulated global crises (i.e., controllability).
In particular, when the cost of living rises as a result of global crises – as ranked by GRPS respondents – consumers blame national and international institutions that they hold responsible for preventing or mishandling these crises. For example, the higher energy prices resulting from the Russian and Ukrainian crisis have led to painful inflation in most countries, which has pushed families into poverty, reduced business activity, slowed economic growth and left countries like Europe facing gas rationing this winter.
About the Author
