Introduction: the state, energy and the environment

Abstract

States have always been key strategic-relational fields for the unfolding of environmental governance, though that relationship is nowhere fixed or uniform. Yet with the growing global awareness of the challenges presented by climate change, international policy makers and scholars alike have increasingly positioned environmental concerns as part of a broader set of geopolitical challenges in the current geological age commonly referred to as the ‘Anthropocene’. Political geographers have always been concerned with the intersection between state power, nature and the environment, but only recently have scholars begun to push beyond the familiar concerns of ‘environmental security’ to undertake a broader study of ‘environmental geopolitics’ or ‘geopolitical ecologies’. In part, this is due to political geography’s deeper cross-fertilization with nature-society geography and political ecology. But it is a reflection of the actually changing geographies of the state with respect to natural processes related to climate change, shifting energy economies and infrastructures and new modes of measuring and governing the natural world. Yet our changing natural geographies are inextricable from political geographies of the state, which are variably understood as the root cause, challenge and solution to the global challenges of climate change, energy use and environmental transformation.