Environmental foreign policy

Abstract

This chapter examines the theoretical approaches to environmental foreign policy (EFP) in the context of multiple levels of governance and investigates how policymaking operates at the crossovers. This is a particularly timely topic due to the growing pressures of environmental degradation, and the role of foreign policy as an important mechanism of political agency in global environmental politics. The chapter introduces EFP and the two main approaches that are used to describe, analyze and explain its operation across multiple levels: state-centered analysis and multilevel governance. It discusses the changing politics of foreign policy in light of greater complexity of the system of global governance. The chapter points out several foreign policy challenges at the crossovers between the domestic and the international, such as defining environmental problems, strategizing about institutional choice, dealing with transscalar civil society, and responding to equity concerns arising from the system’s growth.