scholarly journals Worlding the Study of Global Environmental Politics in the Anthropocene: Indigenous Voices from the Amazon

2018 ◽  
Vol 18 (4) ◽  
pp. 25-42 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cristina Yumie Aoki Inoue

Many socioenvironmental struggles around the globe involve trying to protect the disappearance of other “worlds.” Along with biological diversity, human languages, traditions, understandings, and the intimate relationships between peoples and their lands are under attack through various forms of colonization, capital expansion, or simply the globalization of lifeways. Scholars of international relations have recently come to appreciate that the world is made up of many worlds, and that great pressures threaten to reduce its diversity. This work has been essential for understanding the struggle of maintaining many worlds on a single Earth. Such scholarship has yet to penetrate fully studies of global environmental politics (GEP). This article extends such sensitivity and scholarly effort to GEP by dialoguing with Indigenous ways of knowing. It argues that Indigenous struggles are struggles for the survival of many worlds on one planet and that we could learn from this. The intention is not to generalize Indigenous knowledge but rather to make a call for engagement. Through Creative Listening and Speaking, a worldist methodology, the article focuses on the Yanomami’s forest-world and presents a few perspectives to illustrate how relational ontologies, stories of nonhierarchical and dialogical divinities, make ways of knowing and being from which we could learn how to relate to the Earth as equals.

2003 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 72-87 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Falkner

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.


Author(s):  
Loren Cass

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.


Author(s):  
Erin R. Graham

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.


2017 ◽  
Vol 50 (02) ◽  
pp. 473-479 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jessica F. Green ◽  
Thomas N. Hale

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.


2008 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-5 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Princen

Although global environmental politics (GEP), like other areas of international relations, should be theorized, no single unified theory of GEP is in the offing, nor should be. Nevertheless, assuming that the ultimate societal goal is ecological and social sustainability, at least three elements are necessary in that theorizing: starting points, metaphors, and normative content. The primary starting points for GEP include concern for irreversible diminution of the earth's life support systems, the consequences of ever-increasing throughput of material and energy, and the injustices of uneven distribution. Inappropriate metaphors of the environment include the machine and the laboratory; appropriate ones include spaceship earth and a watershed. Appropriate norms include ecological capping and zero waste. Finally, the theorizing effort needs to be explicit about the questions being asked. Are they about environmental improvement or sustainability? Are they about easing the environmental burdens of the powerless or easing the adjustment costs of the powerful?


Author(s):  
John S. Dryzek

The Politics of the Earth provides an introduction to thinking about the environment, through investigation of related political discourses. The text analyses the various approaches which have dominated environmental issues over the last three decades and which are likely to be influential in the future, including survivalism, environmental problem solving, sustainability, and green radicalism. This new edition includes more on global environmental politics, as well as updated and expanded examples including more material on China. The text looks at the most modern discourses, including discussions surrounding climate change, and reworks the material on justice and green radicalism to include more on climate justice and new developments such as transition towns and radical summits.


2011 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 1-9 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sikina Jinnah

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.


2008 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 8-24 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Mason

Transboundary and global environmental harm present substantial challenges to state-centered (territorial) modalities of accountability and responsibility. The globalization of environmental degradation has triggered regulatory responses at various jurisdictional scales. These governance efforts, featuring various articulations of state and/or private authority, have struggled to address so-called “accountability deficits” in global environmental politics. Yet, it has also become clear that accountability and responsibility norms forged in domestic regulatory contexts cannot simply be transposed across borders. This special issue explores various conceptual perspectives on accountability and responsibility for transnational harm, and examines their application to different actor groups and environmental governance regimes. This introductory paper provides an overview of the major theoretical positions and examines some of the analytical challenges raised by the transnational (re)scaling of accountability and responsibility norms.


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