Gender and Comparative Environmental Politics

Author(s):  
Nicole Detraz

This chapter uses gender lenses to evaluate recent population debates and the implications of dominant discourses within those debates. It asks about the gendered implications of environment and population discourses by focusing largely on population discourses in the US context that have also tended to have implications far outside US borders. Paying particular attention to the politics of climate change, the chapter argues that environment and population discourses in multiple spaces continue to reflect rigid gender norms and assumptions about who in society are environmental saviors and who are environmental problems. It argues that failure to critically evaluate population discourses contributes to injustice among peoples and among states. While the most extreme forms of population discourses linking women’s fertility to food insecurity and environmental decline have shifted away from their most extreme versions, other developments are also worrying from the perspective of gender justice.

Author(s):  
Andrew Dobson

Environmental problems have an international—even a global—character. Environmental politics is therefore, at least in part, an international politics. ‘Local and global, North and South’ considers how the national and international dimensions work—or not—together highlighting an apparently insurmountable faultline between the global North and the global South. Despite numerous obstacles, multilateral environmental agreements are possible. By comparing and contrasting two cases—the ozone layer and climate change—the factors and conditions that make for successful agreements are analysed. The local level, which is also crucial to environmental politics, is then considered because this is where environmental implications are felt most viscerally and its battles are fought most keenly.


2017 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 21-39 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christian Downie

Over the last two decades, business actors have received growing attention in global environmental politics. In the context of climate change, scholars have demonstrated the capacity of business actors to directly shape outcomes at the national, international, and transnational levels. However, very little work has focused exclusively on business actors in the coal and utility industries. This is surprising, given that resistance from these industries could delay or even derail government attempts to address climate change. Accordingly, this article focuses directly on the preferences of business actors in the coal and utility industries. Drawing on interviews with executives across the US energy sector, it considers business preferences on two of the most important attempts by the Obama administration to limit emissions from coal: the Waxman-Markey bill and the Clean Power Plan. In doing so, it provides new insights about the preferences of these actors and the divisions within these industries that could be exploited by policy-makers and activists seeking to enact climate change regulations.


Significance The move, designed to ease migrant outflows from the sub-region by improving work opportunities and living standards, forms part of a broader effort by the Biden administration to pursue more humane migration policies. Impacts Further executive orders are expected in the coming days, including to raise a refugee admissions cap to 125,000, up from 15,000. Legislation could take a long time to get through the US Congress, leaving executive orders vulnerable to legal challenge. Climate change will worsen droughts, flooding and food insecurity in the coming years, compounding migration pressures.


2018 ◽  
Vol 57 (3) ◽  
pp. 307-321 ◽  
Author(s):  
Manzoor Hussain Memon ◽  
Naveed Aamir ◽  
Nadeem Ahmed

Climate change has now become a reality that has intensified the sufferings of people living in arid ecosystems. Decrease in rainfall, rise in temperature and increase in the frequency of extreme events are some of the changes observed in the semi-arid desert of district Tharparkar. For thousands of years, people of Tharparkar are coping with drought and aridity of the land by using indigenous knowledge. However, global changes in the climatic pattern and deterioration of social and economic conditions have pushed the inhabitants of this arid region into extreme vulnerable situation. This paper investigates the link between climate-induced natural disasters, particularly drought, from the perspective of changing climate patterns which have resulted in food insecurity and water scarcity. The paper analyses the rainfall pattern in the last 38 years—dividing it into two periods i.e. from 1975-1994 and 1995-2014. The findings of the paper have challenged the prevailing notions about aridity and rainfall patterns in Tharparkar district. The research found that there is an increase in average annual precipitation in the district with erratic patterns. Thus, the nature of drought in the district has changed from its historic pattern of less or no rainfall to more but erratic rainfall that is more threatening to livelihoods of the people that in turn have multiplier effect on water and food insecurity. In particularly, women are more vulnerable in the absence of social security and lack of basic necessities for their survival amidst drought. For instance, traditionally the burden of managing water resources falls on women, which leads to an increased work load during the time of drought and also water scarcity. JEL Classification: Q54, Q56, Q25, I30 Keywords: Climate, Environment and Development, Drought, Water, Poverty


Author(s):  
J. R. McNeill

This chapter discusses the emergence of environmental history, which developed in the context of the environmental concerns that began in the 1960s with worries about local industrial pollution, but which has since evolved into a full-scale global crisis of climate change. Environmental history is ‘the history of the relationship between human societies and the rest of nature’. It includes three chief areas of inquiry: the study of material environmental history, political and policy-related environmental history, and a form of environmental history which concerns what humans have thought, believed, written, and more rarely, painted, sculpted, sung, or danced that deals with the relationship between society and nature. Since 1980, environmental history has come to flourish in many corners of the world, and scholars everywhere have found models, approaches, and perspectives rather different from those developed for the US context.


2020 ◽  
Vol 26 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Linda J. Bilmes

AbstractThe United States has traditionally defined national security in the context of military threats and addressed them through military spending. This article considers whether the United States will rethink this mindset following the disruption of the Covid19 pandemic, during which a non-military actor has inflicted widespread harm. The author argues that the US will not redefine national security explicitly due to the importance of the military in the US economy and the bipartisan trend toward growing the military budget since 2001. However, the pandemic has opened the floodgates with respect to federal spending. This shift will enable the next administration to allocate greater resources to non-military threats such as climate change and emerging diseases, even as it continues to increase defense spending to address traditionally defined military threats such as hypersonics and cyberterrorism.


2021 ◽  
Vol 56 (3) ◽  
pp. 174-177
Author(s):  
Karl Aiginger

AbstractAfter President Trump’s departure, many expected that the transatlantic partnership would return to its previous state with the US playing a leading role. This article challenges that view. Instead, a new world order is foreseen, with different partnerships and spheres of influence. Europe can decide whether it wants to remain small and homogeneous or a larger but also more heterogenous Union that leads in welfare indicators such as life expectancy, fighting poverty and limiting climate change. Expanding this lead and communicating its uniqueness can empower Europe to combine enlargement and deepening, which appears unlikely without changes in governance and self-confidence.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document