Abstract

The global community is confronted with an unprecedented array of overlapping environmental crises, threatening humanity and non-human species, though the impacts remain highly uneven, with nations and communities least responsible for contemporary ecological problems paying the highest cost. With widespread climate disruption projected to intensify in the coming years and decades, this work illustrates the critical need for effective and democratic governance. It unpacks the prevailing relations of power connected to the global political economy of advanced capitalism, dominant debates and disagreement about how environmental crises are understood, and how governments and various actors respond to climate crises based on these understandings and power structures. It pays particular attention to how uneven development and colonialism have shaped inequality and ecological decline, showing that effective and meaningful responses to planetary crises will also need to respond to the deep injustices and inequalities that mark the contemporary GPE.