Edemilson Paraná invites Paola Tubaro to participate in a special issue published in the journal Globalizations that critically interrogates the convergence of environmental sustainability and digitalization. Governments and multi-lateral institutions frame the “twin transition” as a strategy to foster economic growth and durable social prosperity at the same time. However, Paraná argues in his introductory article (co-authored with Rodrigo Santaella-Gonçalves), this agenda is shaped by market logics and geopolitical competition, in ways that ultimately contradict the social and ecological goals it supposedly supports. The special issue has been designed to offer a systemic political-economy perspective on this inconsistency, grounded in critical social sciences and heterodox economics. Overall, it shows how the structural drivers of digitalisation can constrain its green potential and identifies pathways for redirecting the transition towards socially equitable and ecologically sustainable transformations. Paola Tubaro’s article within the issues aims to reconcile two separate trends in the study of the impacts of artificial intelligence (AI), one focused on the natural and the other on the social surroundings that supply resources for its production and use. She introduces the concept of the ‘dual footprint’ as a heuristic device to capture the commonalities and interdependencies between them. For that, she uses two in-depth case studies, each illustrating international flows of raw materials (nature) and of labour services (society). Case studies are a preliminary illustration of a broader idea, that will need to be developed further: that the AI industry is a value chain that spans national boundaries and perpetuates inherited global inequalities. Specifically, she uses the case of Argentina as a provider to the United States and Madagascar as a provider to France, Japan and South Korea. It appears that the countries that drive AI development (here, the United States, France, Japan and South Korea) generate a massive demand for inputs and trigger social costs that, through the value chain, largely fall on more peripheral actors (here, Argentina and Madagascar). While Argentina and Madagascar differ under many respects, in both cases initial hopes of jobs and prosperity have failed to materialise as predominant outsourcing arrangements reinforce informality and precariousness without preventing environmental damage. Put differently, the arrangements in place distribute the costs and benefits of AI unequally, resulting in unsustainable practices and preventing the upward mobility of relatively more disadvantaged countries. The concept of the dual footprint is useful because it grasps how the environmental and social dimensions of the dual footprint emanate from similar underlying socio-economic processes and geographical trajectories. To freely access the article click here

Public debate about work tends to fixate on numbers: jobs created, jobs lost, jobs threatened by automation. Job Quality in a Turbulent Era, a new volume edited by Agnieszka Piasna and Janine Leschke (Edward Elgar Publishing), asks a harder question: what is actually happening to the quality of work? The full book is available in open access via Edward Elgar Publishing. DiPLab’s Antonio A. Casilli and Paola Tubaro contribute a chapter examining how AI and platformization are “fissuring” contemporary workplaces: fragmenting tasks, eroding protections, and reshaping job quality across sectors in ways that aggregate employment statistics simply cannot capture. To cite this chapter: > Antonio A. Casilli, Paola Tubaro. 2026. What is AI Doing to Job Quality? > Platformization, Fissured Workplaces and Dispersion. Agnieszka Piasna; Janine > Leschke. Job Quality in a Turbulent Era, Edward Elgar Publishing, pp.45-60. Casilli_Tubaro_JobQuality_Chap3Download