This concluding chapter addresses the normative issues raised by the environment. The environment includes the earth's crust, soil, and natural resources; the atmosphere; all the earth's water; and the biosphere. Human activity has a profound impact on the environment. Indeed, many of the activities that humans engage in — activities which often serve important human interests and goals — result in environmental degradation. Persons depend on the environment in many ways: for their food, health, and for many of their goals in life. As such, humans face a problem when people impact on the environment to such an extent that it undercuts people's capacity to enjoy the standard of living to which they are entitled. Thus, a just account of the environment will take into account both the fact that people have legitimate interests which involve using the environment and the fact that there must be limits on people's environmental impacts.
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Chapter
This chapter examines sustainable development, an integrating discourse covering environmental issues from the local to the global, as well as a host of economic and development concerns. Sustainable development is different from Promethean discourse because it requires coordinated collective efforts to achieve goals, rather than relying on human spontaneity and ingenuity. It is also different from environmental problem solving discourses because it is much more imaginative in its reconceptualization of the terms of environmental dispute and in its dissolution of some long-standing conflicts. After explaining what sustainable development is, the chapter provides a historical background on the concept. It then considers the discourse analysis of sustainable development and concludes by reflecting on the prospects for the success or failure of sustainable development.
Book
Stephanie Lawson
Global Politics is an introduction to international relations. It introduces the key theories and concepts underpinning the discipline, providing a foundation for the study of politics on both a personal and global scale, including issues relating to gender, sexuality, and ethnicity, as well as the economy, environment, and concepts of justice. The text presents theories in their historical context, demonstrating how they can evolve over time. Case studies, both contemporary and historical, and biographies of key figures, help bring these issues to life. Additional features, such as key debates and summary questions, provide opportunities to analyse issues from a range of perspectives.
Chapter
This chapter explores policy outcomes by looking at a number of European countries. It considers some salient policy areas, including those that are decided primarily at the national level, for example health, and policies that are determined at the more macro, European Union (EU) level, for example trade. It also looks at policy areas that involve shared decision-making across different levels of government, examples here include immigration and the environment. The chapter also focuses on the role of position-taking by political parties and other groups, such as interest groups and social groups or movements. It considers how these explain variations in policy outcomes.
Book
Edited by Nicola Phillips
Global Political Economy explores the breadth and diversity of this topic and looks at the big questions that matter today. It addresses essential topics and themes, such as poverty, labour, migration, and the environment. With a strong emphasis on ‘globalising’ the study of this subject, the text introduces the idea that it matters who is talking and writing. It explains that there are different ways of seeing the world, and that bringing together different theoretical and methodological perspectives adds to the depth and richness of understanding. In addition, chapters look at globalism and neoliberalism, finance, trade, production, health, climate change, inequality, crime, migration, and global governance.
Chapter
Peter Newell
This chapter examines how developing countries are managing the relationship between the environment and development. Despite being widely regarded as a threat to their economic development and prospects for growth, environmental issues have come to occupy a central place on policy agendas throughout the developing world. Driven by donors, public concern, and vocal environmental movements, responses to these environmental issues have taken a number of different forms as they compete for ‘policy space’ with other pressing development concerns. The chapter links global agendas to national policy processes, highlighting differences and similarities between how countries respond to various environmental issues. It also considers patterns of continuity and change in the politics of environment in the developing world, along with new policy instruments for environmental protection. It concludes by reflecting on the likely future of environmental policy in the developing world.
Chapter
Sumudu Atapattu
This chapter
considers the link between human rights and environmental protection. It covers
the emergence of environmental rights and its correlation to the human rights
framework as it provided relief to victims of environmental degradation and gave
a voice to marginalized communities despite its limitations. The chapter
provides an outline of the evolution of environmental rights starting from the
enactment of the Stockholm Declaration on Human Environment. It then explores
the recent development in environmental rights, such as the framework principles
on human rights and the environment, Global Pact for the Environment and
Environmental Rights Initiative. The UN Human Rights Committee handled the case
of Teitiota v. New Zealand which revolved around climate
refugees.
Book
Catriona McKinnon, Robert Jubb, and Patrick Tomlin
Issues in Political Theory provides an introduction to political theory and how it is applied to address the most important issues confronting the world today. It has a focus on real-world issues and includes case studies. The text examines important and influential areas of political theory. The text includes chapters on liberty, global poverty, sovereignty and borders, and the environment provide readers with fresh insight on important debates in political theory. Case studies in this text look at contemporary issues including same-sex marriage, racial inequality, sweatshop labour, and Brexit.
Book
Edited by Manjeet Ramgotra and Simon Choat
Rethinking Political Thinkers is composed of six Parts. Part I looks at the boundaries of the political. This Part considers the view of philosophers, such as Plato, Socrates, Sojourner, Aristotle, bell hooks, and Kautilya. Part II discusses social contract theory and criticisms of the theory. The text then turns to liberal modernity and colonial domination in Part III. Part IV covers freedom and revolution and Part V looks at inclusion and equality. Part VI considers violence, power, and resistance. The text then moves on to cover the liberal self and Black consciousness. Part VIII is about sex and sexuality, with a chapter on Michel Foucault among others. The final chapter examines the environment, considering it in both the human and non-human contexts.
Book
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.
Chapter
This chapter looks at the changing nature of ideology in Europe. It also delves into the issue of voter preference and considers how that has changed over time. It is all too often assumed that voters, as well as parties, exist along a single ideological left-to-right continuum. However, the truth is that there more deviations from this continuum than we might have in the past assumed. With the emergence of new salient issues, such as immigration, the environment and European integration, the old assumptions no longer hold true. The chapter also looks at populism, which it defines as a thin-central ideology. The final questions of this chapter are: how has populism challenged our current model of democracy? What does the future hold in this regard?
Chapter
Kate Macdonald
This chapter addresses global production, which has powerful effects on the incomes, working conditions, and development opportunities of populations around the world. It is not surprising that the organization and regulation of global production have become one of the most contentious subjects of debate within the field of Global Political Economy (GPE). The chapter confronts several difficult questions linked to these debates. Who does the work of global production, and how has its organization changed over time? Who exercises power within evolving systems of global production, and what winners and losers do such arrangements produce? How is global production governed, and with what consequences for labour rights and the environment? In exploring these questions, analytical lenses drawn from a range of political economy perspectives help us to make sense of the complex economic and political forces through which the organization and governance of contemporary global production is shaped and contested.
Chapter
Hayley Stevenson
This chapter begins by looking at mainstream and critical perspectives on the relationship between globalization and the environment. It shows how race and gender are implicated in the distribution of environmental harms, and how clean and safe environments in the Global North often come at the expense of communities in the Global South. A case study of green technology reveals that this asymmetry also characterizes efforts to transition to more sustainable societies. There are four key perspectives on globalization and the environment: liberal environmentalism, eco-Marxism, environmental justice, and ecofeminism. The chapter then turns to the topic of global governance to see how environmental multilateralism has developed over the past five decades, and the tensions that remain between global rules on trade and the environment.
Chapter
Ann-Christina L. Knudsen
This chapter examines the common agricultural policy (CAP) in the context of political rather than economic terms. It first provides an overview of the development of the European agricultural welfare state, explaining why and how agriculture was able to claim and uphold a special position in Europe. It then considers CAP's achievements and unintended consequences and cites financial pressure as a strong incentive for CAP reform in the early 1990s, as was the pernicious international impact of the policy. It shows how concerns about the environment and food safety, and about the possible impact of European Union enlargement into Central and Eastern Europe, maintained the momentum for reform. Given the broad political commitment to supporting farm incomes, and sustaining a viable countryside in the EU, however, the chapter suggests that CAP is likely to endure in some form or other.
Chapter
Robyn Eckersley
This chapter examines the evolution of U.S. foreign policy on environmental issues over four decades, from Richard Nixon to Barack Obama. It first considers U.S. environmental multilateralism and foreign environment policy before explaining how the United States, despite being widely regarded as an environmental leader during the Cold War period, has increasingly become an environmental laggard in the post-Cold War period. The chapter attributes the decline in U.S. leadership to the country’s new status as the sole superpower, the more challenging character of the new generation of global environmental problems that emerged in the late 1980s, the structure of the U.S. economy and political system, and key features of U.S. grand strategy.
Chapter
This chapter examines four of the most important contemporary issues in international relations (IR): international terrorism, religion, the environment, and balance and hegemony in world history. It also considers the different ways in which these issues are analysed by the various theories presented in this book. The chapter begins with a discussion of what the issue is about in empirical terms, the problems raised and why they are claimed to be important, and the relative significance of the issue on the agenda of IR. It then explores the nature of the theoretical challenge that the issues present to IR and how classical and contemporary theories handle the analysis of these issues. The chapter addresses Samuel Huntington’s ‘clash of civilizations’ thesis, the influence of religion on politics, opposing views on the environment issue, and how throughout history different state systems have come to equilibrate on either balance of power or hegemony.
Chapter
Jon Barnett and Geoff Dabelko
This chapter examines the concept of environmental security, focusing on how it has both broadened and deepened the issue of security. It first traces the origins of environmental security, showing that it is the product of a merger of international environmental agreements, efforts by the peace movement to contest the meaning and practice of security, the proliferation of new security issues in the post-Cold War era, recognition that environmental changes pose grave risks to human well-being, and the growing community of research practice that seeks to build peace through natural resource management. The chapter goes on to consider the different meanings of environmental security, along with four major categories of environmental security problem: how environmental change can be a factor in violent conflict or a risk to national security, how war and preparation for war can damage the environment, and how environmental change can pose a risk to human security.
Chapter
B. Guy Peters
This chapter examines five main approaches in comparative politics that represent important contributions: old and new institutional analysis, interest approach, ideas approach, individual approach, and the influence of the international environment. The role of ‘interaction’ is also explored. After explaining the use of theory in comparative political analysis, the chapter considers structural functionalism, systems theory, Marxism, corporatism, institutionalism, governance, and comparative political economy. It also discusses behavioural and rational choice approaches, how political culture helps to understand political behaviour in different countries, self-interest in politics, and the implications of globalization for comparative politics. The chapter concludes by assessing the importance of looking at political processes and of defining what the ‘dependent variables’ are.
Chapter
Geoff Dabelko
This chapter discusses the concept of environmental security. It explains the way environment and climate change have both broadened and deepened the issue of security. It describes the evolution of the concept as a merger of international environmental agreements, efforts to contest the meaning and practice of security, the proliferation of new security issues in the post-Cold War era, recognition that environmental and climate changes pose grave risks to human well-being, and the growing community of research practice that seeks to build peace through natural resource management. The chapter examines the different meanings of environmental security, and then explains four major categories of environmental security problems—namely, the way environmental change can be a factor in violent conflict, the way environmental change can be a risk to national security, the way war and preparation for war can damage the environment, and the way environmental change can be a risk to human security. It explains how environmental security can mean different things to different people and can apply to vastly different referent objects in ways that sometimes have very little to do with environmental change.
Chapter
This chapter studies how the scope of global politics has been extended over the last half century or so to include the impact of human industrial activity on the environment. The environmental movement and ‘green theory’ have grown out of concerns with the deleterious impact of this activity and the capacity of the planet to carry the burden of ‘business as usual’ in a world driven by the imperatives of endless growth. Many now believe that the impact on the earth’s systems is so significant that the present geological period should be recognized as the ‘Anthropocene’. Climate change is probably the most prominent issue associated with the Anthropocene at present, but it is not the only one. The chapter examines a range of issues in global environment politics, starting with the reconceptualization of the present period. It then moves on to an account of the environmental movement, the emergence of various ‘green’ ideologies and theories, and the politics of science. This is essential background for considering the role of the state and its sovereign powers in the context of global environmental politics.
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