Climate Crisis

Global Environmental ◽

Climate Crisis

International relations scholarship on climate change exists primarily in the field of Global Environmental Politics (GEP) and outside the substantive purview of mainstream International Political Economy (IPE). This chapter argues that the climate crisis is fundamentally an IPE problem, and it requires attention from IPE scholars as a primary subject of interest. To facilitate engagement, the chapter reviews a diverse literature at the intersection of IPE and climate across three substantive areas: the global climate regime, trade, and renewable energy transitions. Each section offers avenues for research, and provides ideas on how to put concepts and ideas from IPE to work in climate crisis scholarship.

COP-15 in Copenhagen: How the Merging of Movements Left Civil Society Out in the Cold

10.1162/glep.2010.10.2.11 ◽

2010 ◽

Vol 10 (2) ◽

pp. 11-17 ◽

Cited By ~ 68

Author(s):

Dana R. Fisher

Keyword(s):

Climate Change ◽

Civil Society ◽

United Nations ◽

Environmental Politics ◽

Climate Regime ◽

Climate Negotiations ◽

Governmental Organizations ◽

Non Governmental Organizations ◽

What happened to non-governmental organizations' participation at the COP-15 round of climate negotiations in Copenhagen? Although the climate regime has been seen as relatively open to civil society, everything changed in Copenhagen and civil society became increasingly disenfranchised. This article discusses the three main forces that led to civil society's disenfranchisement at this round of the climate negotiations: increased registration, poor planning by the Danish organizers and the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change Secretariat, and the merging of movements. I conclude by discussing implications of the increase in civil society disenfranchisement to the climate regime and to the study of global environmental politics more broadly.

Reversing the Marginalization of Global Environmental Politics in International Relations: An Opportunity for the Discipline

Political Science and Politics ◽

10.1017/s1049096516003024 ◽

2017 ◽

Vol 50 (02) ◽

pp. 473-479 ◽

Cited By ~ 6

Author(s):

Jessica F. Green ◽

Thomas N. Hale

Keyword(s):

Climate Change ◽

International Relations ◽

Environmental Politics ◽

Environmental Issues ◽

Environmental Research ◽

International Policy ◽

Policy Issues ◽

Global Environmental ◽

Using Data

ABSTRACT Despite the increasing urgency of many environmental problems, environmental politics remains at the margins of the discipline. Using data from the Teaching, Research, and International Policy (TRIP) project, this article identifies a puzzle: the majority of international relations (IR) scholars find climate change among the top three most important policy issues today, yet fewer than 4% identify the environment as their primary area of research. Moreover, environmental research is rarely published in top IR journals, although there has been a recent surge in work focused on climate change. The authors argue that greater attention to environmental issues—including those beyond climate change—in IR can bring significant benefits to the discipline, and they discuss three lines of research to correct this imbalance.

Climate Change Bandwagoning: The Impacts of Strategic Linkages on Regime Design, Maintenance, and Death

10.1162/glep_a_00065 ◽

2011 ◽

Vol 11 (3) ◽

pp. 1-9 ◽

Cited By ~ 32

Author(s):

Sikina Jinnah

Keyword(s):

Climate Change ◽

International Relations ◽

Environmental Politics ◽

Special Issue ◽

Political Landscape ◽

Global Environmental ◽

Wide Range ◽

And Function ◽

Climate Change Politics

The entrée of climate change politics to the center stage of international relations has been accompanied by broad range of strategic linkages, which have produced various institutional interactions. This special issue takes stock of the wide range of ways that international regimes are strategically linked to climate change politics. We do this with a view to better understand both how climate change is shaping the global environmental political landscape, and is being shaped itself through strategic linkages to regimes both within (i.e. forests, biodiversity, fisheries, and desertification) and beyond (i.e. security and human rights) the environmental realm. The contributions that make up this special issue explore when, how, and by whom regime linkages should be pursued, how linkage politics are affecting regime development and function, and in turn how these changes are shaping the evolution of global environmental politics and problem solving writ large.

The Third World and Global Environmental Negotiations: Interests, Institutions and Ideas

10.1162/1526380054794826 ◽

2005 ◽

Vol 5 (3) ◽

pp. 48-69 ◽

Cited By ~ 38

Author(s):

Marc Williams

Keyword(s):

Climate Change ◽

Third World ◽

Environmental Politics ◽

Collective Agency ◽

The Third ◽

Environmental Negotiations ◽

Global Environmental ◽

The Third World

Marian Miller provided an engaging and persuasive analysis of the role of Third World states in global environmental negotiations. While Miller focused on the strategies of individual states, this article examines the collective agency of the Third World in global environmental negotiations. The first part of the article explores the debates on the continuing relevance of the Third World as a concept, and contends that the Third World retains relevance in the context of global bargaining processes. The second part of the article highlights the role of ideas and institutions in the continued reproduction of the Third World as an actor in global environmental politics. The final part of the article explores the ways in which the negotiations on climate change have tended to reproduce a distinctive Southern perspective.

Fighting for King Coal’s Crown: Business Actors in the US Coal and Utility Industries

10.1162/glep_a_00388 ◽

2017 ◽

Vol 17 (1) ◽

pp. 21-39 ◽

Cited By ~ 14

Author(s):

Christian Downie

Keyword(s):

Climate Change ◽

Environmental Politics ◽

Energy Sector ◽

Policy Makers ◽

Address Climate Change ◽

Obama Administration ◽

Global Environmental ◽

The Us

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.

Private Environmental Governance and International Relations: Exploring the Links

10.1162/152638003322068227 ◽

2003 ◽

Vol 3 (2) ◽

pp. 72-87 ◽

Cited By ~ 192

Author(s):

Robert Falkner

Keyword(s):

International Relations ◽

Environmental Governance ◽

Environmental Politics ◽

Institutional Arrangements ◽

International Negotiations ◽

Global Environmental Governance ◽

Global Level ◽

Private Governance ◽

This article discusses private environmental governance at the global level. It is widely acknowledged that corporations play an increasing role in global environmental politics, not only as lobbyists in international negotiations or agents of implementation, but also as actors creating private institutional arrangements that perform environmental governance functions. The rise of such private forms of global governance raises a number of questions for the study of global environmental politics: How does private governance interact with state-centric governance? In what ways are the roles/capacities of states and nonstate actors affected by private governance? Does the rise of private governance signify a shift in the ideological underpinnings of global environmental governance? This article explores these questions, seeking a better understanding of the significance of private environmental governance for International Relations.

Global Environmental Politics

10.1093/hepl/9780198826088.001.0001 ◽

2020 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Jean-Frédéric Morin ◽

Amandine Orsini ◽

Sikina Jinnah

Keyword(s):

Climate Change ◽

Hazardous Waste ◽

Water Consumption ◽

Ozone Depletion ◽

Analytical Approach ◽

Environmental Politics ◽

Global Environmental ◽

Diverse Field ◽

New Research

Global Environmental Politics provides an up-to-date introduction to the most important issues dominating this fast-moving field. Going beyond the issue of climate change, the text also introduces readers to the pressing issues of desertification, trade in hazardous waste, biodiversity protection, whaling, acid rain, ozone-depletion, water consumption, and over-fishing. Importantly, the text pays particular attention to the interactions between environmental politics and other governance issues, such as gender, trade, development, health, agriculture, and security. Adopting an analytical approach, the text explores and evaluates a wide variety of political perspectives, testing assumptions and equipping readers with the necessary tools to develop their own arguments and, ultimately, inspiring new research endeavours in this diverse field.

Global Environmental Politics

International Relations ◽

10.1093/obo/9780199743292-0014 ◽

2011 ◽

Author(s):

Loren Cass

Keyword(s):

International Relations ◽

Environmental Politics ◽

Interdisciplinary Approach ◽

Environmental Problems ◽

Natural World ◽

Field Of Study ◽

Science And Policy ◽

Global Environmental Problems ◽

Global environmental politics is a relatively new field of study within international relations that focuses on issues related to the interaction of humans and the natural world. As early as the mid-19th century, scholars wrote about the role of natural resources in global security and political economy. However, much of the literature prior to the 1980s related specifically to resource extraction and development issues. It was only in the 1980s and into the 1990s that global environmental politics began to establish itself as a distinct field with its own dedicated journals and publishers, and the focus of study expanded to include global environmental problems such as ozone depletion, climate change, biodiversity loss, deforestation, and desertification. It has emerged as a center of interdisciplinary work that integrates research from a range of fields, including geography, economics, history, law, biology, and numerous others. The interdisciplinary approach makes it difficult to define the boundaries in this rather immense field of study. The focus in this article will be on global environmental politics research that falls primarily within the larger field of international relations. Global environmental problems present many unique challenges and have thus spawned a range of subfields of study. Global environmental problems frequently involve substantial scientific complexity and ambiguity. This fact has produced a wide-ranging scholarship on the relationships between science and policy. The very long timeframes of both the consequences of environmental problems as well as the efforts to address them create a number of governance challenges given the much shorter political timeframes of politicians and diplomats. In addition, because environmental problems typically do not respect borders, they pose challenges for international cooperation, which has thus produced a growing literature on global environmental governance. The widespread potential for massive economic, political, and ecological dislocation from the consequences of global environmental problems as well as from the potential policies to address those problems have led scholars to study global environmental politics from every paradigm within international relations as well as drawing on research in numerous other disciplines. Finally, efforts to address the consequences of environmental problems have raised controversial ethical and distributive-justice questions that have produced an important philosophical literature within global environmental politics. Global environmental politics has thus emerged as a rich and diverse area of scholarship.

The Paris Agreement as Analogy in Global Environmental Politics

10.1162/glep_a_00622 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 1-8

Author(s):

Nicholas Chan

Keyword(s):

Climate Change ◽

Environmental Politics ◽

Environmental Issues ◽

Paris Agreement ◽

Potential Significance ◽

Environmental Negotiations ◽

Abstract The Paris Agreement is increasingly being used as an analogy in global environmental politics to discuss issues beyond climate change. This Forum article explores the two main ways in which this analogy has been discursively employed: as a symbol of diplomatic success to be emulated and as a model for institutional treaty design. It illustrates the broader meanings associated with the Paris Agreement, reflecting its preeminent public and political profile among environmental issues just a few years into its history and its potential significance in shaping subsequent global environmental negotiations.

A Comparative Look at NGO Influence in International Environmental Negotiations: Desertification and Climate Change

10.1162/152638001317146381 ◽

2001 ◽

Vol 1 (4) ◽

pp. 86-107 ◽

Cited By ~ 65

Author(s):

Elisabeth Corell ◽

Michele M. Betsill

Keyword(s):

Climate Change ◽

Policy Making ◽

Environmental Politics ◽

Analytical Framework ◽

Environmental Negotiations ◽

Explanatory Factors ◽

International Environmental Negotiations

Global Environmental ◽

Global Environmental Policy ◽

There is a need to better understand the significance of NGOs in global environmental politics. Addressing a number of weaknesses in the current literature on NGOs, we have developed an analytical framework for analysis of NGO influence in international environmental negotiations. This paper demonstrates the utility of our framework by applying it to two cases: the negotiations of the Desertification Convention and of the Kyoto Protocol to the Climate Change Convention. We argue that the use of our research framework enables researchers to compare with confidence NGO influence across cases and that such comparison allows for a much needed examination of factors that explain variation in NGO influence in international environmental negotiations. Analysis of explanatory factors contributes to an improved understanding of the degree to which NGOs matter in global environmental policy-making.