Ecopolitical catatonia: How political fantasies sustain inaction in global environmental politics

With the publication of this issue, 23-1, we are deeply honored to become the fifth editorial team for Global Environmental Politics. We are excited to keep building on the strong foundation laid by previous editors, including most recently Steven Bernstein, Matthew Hoffmann, and Erika Weinthal. As a result of the enduring commitments of all previous editorial teams—together with the high-quality research and writing by all authors published in these pages, and the often unseen but necessary and much appreciated work by countless reviewers over the past two decades—the journal’s impact factor reached 4.145 for 2021. A truly collective effort, Global Environmental Politics continues to be the premier academic home for research on issues related to global environmental politics and governance.Our many years of experience as associate editors of Global Environmental Politics have given us a head start on our new roles, but we are grateful that we have been able to rely on the support of Erika, Matt, and Steven, alongside the invaluable work by Susan Altman as managing editor, to smooth the transition. Joanna Lewis kindly agreed to stay on as an associate editor, and we are happy to have brought in Mark Axelrod, Kate Neville, and Yixian Sun as new associate editors. We also want to thank Beth DeSombre, who has given much time and service to the journal as the book review editor. Last but certainly not least, we greatly value the service and guidance of the GEP Editorial Board.Scholarship on global environmental politics has always benefited from the application of interdisciplinary perspectives using a multitude of methodological approaches, but the value of diversity, equity, and inclusion is increasingly recognized by researchers as well as policymakers, stakeholders, and activists. As editors, we will seek to further enhance the pluralism of articles published in Global Environmental Politics along multiple dimensions—including issue areas, geographical scope, methodologies, and theoretical frameworks—while maintaining a core focus on advancing theory through rigorous empirical work. This includes keeping up with new approaches to collecting and analyzing qualitative data as well as rapidly advancing trends in network analysis, statistics, and quantitative content analysis. To this end, we will continue to publish research notes, as instituted by Erika, Matt, and Steven. Alongside the research articles and forum articles, research notes bring new methods and datasets to the attention of readers and help broaden methodological horizons.Diversifying our pool of authors and readers remains a critical, albeit sometimes challenging, task for all of us who are involved in the editorial work. Important progress was made by our predecessors, but we believe that there is still room to continue to improve representation among our authors, our readership, and our editorial board. We are planning a number of activities to expand the geographical and disciplinary scope of the journal, including reaching out to scholars from all over the world to find out what they want from us. We will then use their feedback to develop programs intended to expand access and inclusion. This may involve a greater use of online tools and virtual events that can foster community building across long distances, as well as working with MIT Press with the goal of having more open-access articles.As quickly as scholarship is evolving, the world is changing faster. We are living in times that can be both exhilarating and frightening. Global Environmental Politics is deeply rooted in rigorous academic traditions, but there is room to foster new thinking and ideas. This is why we are also committed to mentoring junior scholars as well as scholars from under-represented groups, to ensure that they can successfully add their voices to our collective conversation by publishing in the journal. It is also why we value our many thoughtful and supportive reviewers for shepherding the work of early-career scholars through to publication and providing feedback that will help these scholars succeed with future submissions. It is a supportive scholarly community that allows Global Environmental Politics to thrive, and we are committed to maintaining that spirit of cooperation along with our standards of excellence for the journal.Finally, we would like to thank everyone for their tireless work in writing and reviewing during the worst of the global pandemic. We are committed to resuming outreach by the journal and working actively on diversity, equity, and inclusion. We remain open to new ways of working to the betterment of our community.

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.

There is wide consensus among global environmental politics (GEP) scholars about the urgent need for leadership in international climate negotiations and other environmental issue areas A large number of GEP studies elaborate rhetoric and actions of aspiring leaders in GEP. In particular, these studies seek to identify which states have sought to provide leadership in international negotiations on the environment, and how they have exercised this role in institutional bargaining processes at the international level. The biggest share of GEP studies generally focus on leadership in environmental governance within the United Nations (UN), and international negotiations on climate under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change in general, or the role of the European Union (EU) in those negotiations in particular. Many GEP scholars have also investigated the leadership role of the United States in international environmental regime formation, whereas there are no systematic investigations concerning China’s leadership in GEP. In addition to the states, GEP literature identifies a wide range of other actors as potential leaders (and followers) in environmental issue areas: international organizations, non-governmental organizations, corporations, cities, religious organizations, social movements, politicians, and even individuals. Since leadership is a social relation, a growing number of scholars have moved to study perceptions of leadership and to conceptualize the relationship between leaders and followers. GEP scholars also identify some qualitative aspects a leader must have in order to attract followers. Many empirical studies show that despite the EU’s aspiration to be a climate leader, it is not unequivocally recognized as such by others. At the same time, it seems that some forms of leadership, especially those based on unilateral action, do not necessarily require followers and recognition by others. In addition to the leader–follower relationship, the motivation of leadership constitutes one of the key controversies among GEP scholars. Some argue that self-interest is a sufficient driver of leadership, while others claim that leaders must act for the common good of a wider constituency (or at least be perceived to do so). To conclude, most scholars studying leadership in GEP regard structural leadership (based on material capabilities and hard power) as an important type of leadership. Much less attention has been paid to the social dimensions of leadership; this is undoubtedly a gap in the literature that prospective studies ought to fill.

Global Environmental Politics has provided an accurate, up-to-date, and unbiased understanding of the world's most pressing environmental issues for thirty years. The eighth edition continues this practice by covering critical new developments in global environmental politics and policymaking. Updated case studies on key issues such as on climate change, endangered species, ozone depletion, desertification, whaling, hazardous wastes, toxic chemicals, and biodiversity detail the ongoing development of major environmental treaty regimes, and new case studies on mercury and marine biodiversity showcase the challenges of creating new treaties during a period of significant global change. There is also new material on the implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals, the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, trade and environment, and the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on environmental diplomacy. Updated information about global environmental trends, paradigms, and actors completes this comprehensive introduction to contemporary international environmental politics. Global Environmental Politics is vital reading for students of environmental politics and anyone wishing to understand the current state of the field and to make informed decisions about which policies will best safeguard our environment for the future.

We are excited and privileged to become the fourth editorial team for Global Environmental Politics with the publication of issue 18-1. We have the good fortune to follow Kate O’Neill and Stacy VanDeveer, and a challenge to live up to the high standards they and previous editors have set for the journal. Under their tutelage, the journal’s five-year impact factor is an impressive 2.526. Through the hard work of our predecessors, and the creativity and efforts of authors and reviewers, Global Environmental Politics is now the premier academic home for research on the politics of the global environment.Thanks to Stacy and Kate, the transition to the new editorial team has also been relatively smooth. We have quickly learned that much credit for that also lies with the journal’s managing editor, Susan Altman, to whom we are especially grateful for staying on and ensuring the continued high quality of the editorial and production process. We have also learned that editing the journal is a team effort. Fortunately for us, two of the associate editors, Aarti Gupta and D. G. Webster, will be staying on, and we are pleased that Susan Park and Henrik Selin agreed to join them. We also want to thank Beth DeSombre, who will continue as book review editor.Global Environmental Politics is an inclusive journal in the sense of starting with a broad conception of “global,” “environmental,” and “politics.” We see this inclusivity as crucial to the ongoing success of the journal. It allows GEP to be a focal point for scholars from multiple disciplines, and it means that the conversations in GEP speak to the broad range of theoretical and methodological approaches and perspectives necessary to push our knowledge of global environmental politics forward. While readers of this journal need no reminder of the importance of the issues it covers, the salience and urgency of improving our understanding of politics in the current global context of environmental challenges could hardly be greater. We will work to ensure that GEP continues to be the go-to source for exploring and explaining those politics to both disciplinary and wider audiences in the academic and policy worlds.We pledge to build on the already strong foundations for this task and to implement some small changes to continue improving the journal. Our goals and priorities include the following four areas:1. Further enhance the pluralism of the journal’s offerings along multiple dimensions (issue area, geographic scope, methods, and theoretical approaches, including normative theory that addresses questions such as environmental justice) to capture the full range of scholarship on global environmental politics.2. Continue to broaden the journal’s audience. The GEP community is one of the great strengths of this journal. We think that this community can be expanded to increase the communication and cross-fertilization of new knowledge and innovative research in GEP. We will thus work to strengthen connections to multiple communities that focus on environmental politics—regional, national, and global academic organizations and scholarly networks. We also intend to engage with scholars of politics beyond political science (e.g., political sociology, political geography, political anthropology, political economy, and legal studies).3. Actively explore opportunities for greater engagement with practitioners as we collectively seek to understand and act on the multiple environmental crises facing the world and to do so justly. We will seek more work on the practice/theory interface and will encourage forum articles that focus on this nexus.4. Institute a few practical changes to tweak what is an already well-oiled machine. These include:• an editorial introduction in each issue, to put articles into context and conversation;• more forum articles that focus on the big picture of GEP and the practice/theory connection;• occasional research notes—the first appearing in this issue—that quickly communicate and spotlight new research tools, methods, approaches, and data sources generated by our community.• continue to build GEP’s social media presence so we can maintain and expand the GEP community.While we hope these modest experiments in structure and outreach will bring GEP to even wider audiences and raise the journal’s profile, in the end its quality and impact stem from the GEP community. We thank you for your contributions and interest in the journal, and we very much look forward to continuing to provide the best possible platform for excellent work in our field.This issue kicks off with an exploration of the perennial and crucial question of the role of individual behavior in the pursuit of solutions to global environmental problems. Beth DeSombre’s forum article examines why seeking globally effective individual behavior change is likely to be a frustrating endeavor. However, understanding the challenges of altering individual behavior can lead to insight on figuring “out how to change many actions by large numbers of people at the same time.”Global Environmental Politics has been an outlet for innovative research on non-state and hybrid forms of governance. The research articles begin with Marjanneke Vijge’s contribution on the extractive industries transparency initiative in Myanmar highlights the role of multiple stakeholders across different levels of scale in natural resource governance. She examines the effects of transparency on civil society empowerment in Myanmar, a country emerging from decades of military rule. Through extensive fieldwork and interviews with stakeholders, Vijge shows that it is important to focus not only on what information is being disclosed but also on the process of constituting and debating transparency.While politics often works through institutional arrangements at multiple levels, it also plays out in interactions with environmental change. Jeff Colgan’s article addresses such links, specifically focusing on security issues. He is particularly concerned with how climate change may interact with nuclear waste that remains buried in large quantities in ice sheets, causing a number of unanticipated environmental effects. He examines the case of secret US military bases in Greenland, where nuclear ballistic missiles were once stored and minimal decommissioning took place. Colgan draws attention to the indirect environmental consequences of climate change—what he refers to as “knock-on-environmental problems”—the interactions between climate change, local pollution, and human-made infrastructure.A core topic of inquiry since the founding of GEP is the study of international regimes. As these regimes have developed, the ability to do fine-grained research over time and across cases has improved, increasing our knowledge of the effects, limits, and interactions among them. In this issue, Jo-Kristian Røttereng examines the role of carbon sinks, which have been central to the climate change convention since its inception in 1992. Specifically, he draws upon an original data set covering carbon capture and storage (CCS) and reduced emissions from deforestation and forest degradation in developing countries (REDD+), to explain why different industrialized countries favor carbon sink-based options over other mitigation measures. Røttereng finds that industrialized countries that produce fossil energy—particularly oil—increasingly favor carbon sink-based measures, which allow them to maintain their energy economies while also undertaking climate action steps.Taking advantage of our current ability to assess the impact of regimes over time, Andreas Tveit’s article highlights that even frontrunners in international environmental action often fall short of their commitments, a puzzle poorly explained by extant compliance scholarship. His in-depth case study of Norway’s failure to meet its 2010 emission targets for nitrogen oxides under the 1999 Gothenburg Protocol draws on key elite interviews to show that even leading environmental states can be sensitive to compliance costs, but normative pressures to comply as target deadlines loom can be a major motivator for increased action. This factor, previously unexplored in the literature, plausibly affects both leading and laggard countries.Environmental justice is also a central theme in Joshua Gellers and Chris Jeffords’ article. They provide the first systemic quantitative assessment of how well procedural environmental rights entrenched in law, such as access to information and participation in environmental decision-making, produce environmental justice.Finally, we are particularly excited to launch our new occasional Research Notes section with Jean-Frédéric Morin, Andreas Dür, and Lisa Lechner’s introduction of their new comprehensive data set on environmental provisions found in 630 trade agreements signed between 1947 and 2016. This incredible—and hand-coded—tool holds enormous promise for analyzing research questions on topics including international institutional design, policy innovation, regime complexity, policy diffusion, and regime effectiveness. As a small sampling of this tool’s potential, the authors assess whether countries include trade provisions in environmental agreements to legitimately promote stringent environmental standards, or as mere window dressing for protectionist interests.

What explains the choice of corporate political strategy in environmental politics? Drawing on recent models of actor strategy formation in political economy, this article argues that basic material interests of firms are translated into strategies in the context of institutional environments. I advance a typological model that posits how distributional effects—positive versus negative—and perceived regulatory pressure—low versus high—interact in leading firms to adopt one of four ideal-type strategies: opposition, hedging, support, and non-participation. This article examines the model through the case of corporate strategies in the making of the European Union’s Emission Trading Scheme. The article contributes to theory-building on business strategy in environmental politics by offering a probabilistic explanatory model, and it flags hedging strategies as an increasingly prevalent form of business behavior.

As the journal Global Environmental Politics reflects on the past twenty-five years and looks forward, taking stock of early-career researcher (ECR) perspectives is a critical exercise for ensuring that the journal and the field of global environmental politics remain healthy and productive. In this article, we incorporate insights generated through focus groups and surveys from fifty-one ECRs from around the world to explore, first, where ECRs think global environmental politics is headed; second, ECRs’ visions and hopes for the future of global environmental politics research; and third, what structural components (training, job market, disciplinary organizations) are necessary to support ECRs in producing the next generation of environmental politics research. Exploring these questions, we propose a start to a “next-generation research strategy,” focused on how global environmental politics scholars should be researching empirical topics. We conclude by addressing the challenges ECRs face in implementing this strategy and how institutions—including associations, journals, and training programs—can support ECRs in this endeavor.

Part 1 The global context: global environmental politics from Stockholm to Rio the Third World and environmental politics the link between global inequality and environmental degradation. Part 2 The Third World and environmental regime formation: the Third World at the bargaining table hazardous waste trade biodiversity and technology transfer atmosphere and climate. Part 3 Conflict or cooperation in global environmental politics: the future of global environmental politics the Third World after Rio.

There are multiple consequences of growing turbulence for the study and practice of global environmental politics (GEP). Marginalized groups experience global crises earlier and more acutely than dominant groups. Feminist lenses, along with others that focus on how power works within global politics, illustrate the processes that make this so. Reflecting on gender allows us to connect global crises to the social, political, and economic factors that influence them. It necessitates putting equity and justice at the heart of our effort to study and address those phenomena and processes that come to be named “crisis.” This chapter explores various opportunities as well as obstacles to using gender lenses to evaluate crisis in GEP. It is essential that we both critically reflect on how we recognize and study crisis and turbulence, as well as evaluate ways that global turbulence is gendered, raced, and classed, and work towards building justice into our paths forward.

In a multilevel and multicentric governance arena, pathways and mechanisms of influence are several and non-state capacities for technical leadership and norm entrepreneurship prove more significant than is the case within a strictly multilateral framework. Among actors with such capacities are municipalities, which multiply their influence through horizontal and vertical relationships. Transnational municipal networks present opportunities for both intermunicipal dialogue and the pooling of global influence, highlighting the presence and influence of the city in the world. This paper examines the collective response of some cities to climate change, exploring the place of cities in global environmental politics through analysis of two transnational municipal networks: the International Council of Local Environmental Initiatives' Cities for Climate Protection and the International Solar Cities Initiative. The article addresses the following questions: How might municipal efforts toward a climate-stable future be significant to the larger issue of ecological justice in global environmental politics? Might cities be able to redefine the rules of the game and take a stand on ‘inefficient’ norms? After briefly accounting for the relationship between cities and the world, the article characterizes technical leadership as a legitimizing force of and in global environmental governance and norm entrepreneurship as a potential source of contestation and subversion in global environmental politics. The paper describes what cities are globalizing, in terms of pollution, environmental degradation, and risk, and in terms of management and politics. Finally, the article explores the possibility that emerging horizontal and vertical relationships, intermunicipal relationships, and relationships between cities or networks of cities and other scales of governance potentiate legitimizing roles for cities in climate governance and subversive roles in climate politics. A Chinese version of this article's abstract is available online at: www.informaworld.com/rglo

This chapter briefly explores the importance of global environmental politics. Global environmental politics is both an area of activity and practice, on the one hand, and a field of research and study, on the other. Environmental changes and associated politics occur at all geographic and social levels. Environmental changes can occur locally and be caused by what happens locally, as when local water supplies are polluted by domestic sewage or industrial effluents. This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book describes the theories and methods used to explain global environmental politics. It provides a historical overview of global environmental politics as an academic discipline. The book focuses on mainstream theories, notably realism and rationalism that have been most commonly used by scholars, and sometimes even by practitioners, to explain the international politics of the environment.

Global environmental politics has emerged as a center of interdisciplinary work that integrates research from a range of fields including international relations, comparative politics, geography, economics, history, law, climatology and biology. This chapter briefly reviews the emergence of global environmental politics as a distinct subfield within the discipline of international relations since the 1980s. Global environmental politics emerged relatively recently as a distinct field of study within the larger domain of international relations. The chapter provides a brief overview of the evolution of global environmental politics scholarship as well as offering entry points to begin exploring the great variety of topics within the field. Global environmental politics offered case studies to test hypotheses flowing out of the work on international regimes. Environmental problems are frequently characterized by scientific complexity and extensive uncertainty regarding causes and/or solutions.

Among the many strengths of higher education is the adaptability of faculty to create curricula in response to the changing needs of society. Since the 1950s, there has been a growing awareness of the consequences of modernity on natural environmental processes. This, in turn, has led to a dramatic increase in course offerings on many subjects related to the environment and sustainability, including substantial teaching and research activity in global environmental politics. Examining what is being taught in the nation’s classrooms provides an opportunity to gain insight into how college teachers are preparing students for the world they live in. One way to demonstrate the complex ways in which global environmental politics can be taught is by viewing it through the lens of Shulman’s framework, called “pedagogical content knowledge.” Derived from principles in contemporary learning theory, Shulman proposed approaching pedagogy by having teachers work through six steps: comprehension, transformation, instruction, evaluation, reflection, and new comprehension. Viewing the teaching of global environmental politics through these six steps is useful to seeing the depth and complexity of teaching in this particular subject area. Using this framework, an analysis of how college teachers have approached their course preparation shows that most professors continue to use conventional approaches to teaching. These approaches include a traditional way of teaching, mostly lecture with classroom interaction and group work and a traditional choice of content, with an emphasis on literature with western epistemological worldviews. From this examination, one can conclude that the teaching of global environmental politics can be strengthened by integrating Shulman’s framework into the classroom: setting the context; building positive social norms; emphasizing inquiry, discovery, and synthesis; and creating the possibility of transformation.

This chapter analyses the interactions between the European Union and global environmental politics. It gives an overview of the EU’s status as a partner in international environmental negotiations and as a party to multilateral environmental agreements. Looking at how the EU functions internally in the context of international environmental negotiations, it discusses the internal division of competences, the external representation and the internal coordination process in the EU. It also reviews the roles the EU plays in international environmental negotiations, the impact the EU can have on global environmental politics and the future challenges confronting the EU as it seeks to exert leadership.

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