Introductory Remarks

The expression “think globally, act locally” has been widely considered a kind of symbolic statement encapsulating a behavioral strategy in the contemporary globalized world. It means that each individual, as well as social collective, should take into consideration some broader and larger spectrum of factors, ideas, and values reflecting much more than the immediate issues of their community or place in order to enact particular strategies for activities performed in their close environment. The basic idea underlying such reasoning is the assumption that every community and every place in the contemporary social space presents a specific permutation and/or particular implementation of more general events, processes, structures, institutions, and solutions relating to social problems.

This perspective draws significantly from the concept of globalization which might be understood, by at least some contemporary authors, as a process of uniformization, or even standardization, of human society, despite some observable social—and especially cultural—differences. The global economy has been noted as a leading force in such an approach.

The phrase “think globally and act locally” has been used frequently in reference to environmental issues. Certain efforts resulting, for example, in the global lowering of carbon dioxide emissions should not necessarily be grounded in some local activities and solutions, but such local initiatives, undertaken in many places and communities, might have an aggregate effect on the global (trans-local) scale. Such reasoning has overemphasized that the cumulative effect of some local activities might result in some global (trans-local) changes. But this problem might be considered in an entirely opposite way. The global-local problem also requires, for example, the analysis of behavior patterns performed by global corporations within some local milieus. As Amey (2013) stresses:

From this perspective, the “global” does not seem to be a kind of “sum of locals.” Quite to the contrary, the local seems to be a consequence of the global impact in a particular context.