International Environmental Politics Research Articles

Nation‐states in a Prisoner's Dilemma with climate change: Applying Edith Stein's theory of the state

AbstractTo get a better picture of the relation between nationalism and global environmental problems within the state‐dominated situation, I present the inherent logic of international environmental politics as a version of the famous Prisoner's Dilemma. I argue that the same contingent bonds that relate the members of nations to their respective nation‐states are part of the contemporary difficulty of actually working together for the common good on the international level by creating exclusive feelings of solidarity—the ‘Prisoners’ of the Dilemma. To reveal the experiential background of nation‐states in this situation, I rephrase and apply Edith Stein's theory of the state as a collective entity. Stein was an inter‐war political philosopher who is now mainly read within religious studies and philosophy of mind. As my argument implies, her work also has relevance for further affect nationalism studies.

Implementing Decisions on Environmental Conflicts Beyond the Nation State

This article theorises the national implementation of European and international decisions on environmental conflicts, integrating both judgments from courts and so-called managerial decisions from (non-)compliance mechanisms in multilateral environmental agreements. Starting from the observation that the impact of climate change is increasing with backlash from populist governments and political regimes against its mitigation, implementing legal obligations in the absence of specialised environmental courts is crucial to protect the environment from harm. However, systematic insights on the national implementation of judgments and managerial decisions made beyond the nation state are underexplored. Following a political science perspective, this article conceptualises the conditions explaining this phenomenon by making use of existing research from various disciplines including political science and law on policy implementation to enable systematic comparisons. For this purpose, the article outlines a concept structural approach based on two hypothesised explanations: one based on the mechanisms used to solve conflicts, and another relating to the legitimacy of relevant institutions and processes of conflict resolution. These explanatory pathways reflect the existing management and enforcement approaches from the political science literature on implementation and follow a conjunctural logic. The theoretical approach developed in this article enables systematic comparisons across decisions and thus accounts for a variety of separate but equally valid explanations. Future research and empirical analysis will directly feed back into the concept structure for further theoretical development and lead to generalisable insights on the national implementation of court judgments and managerial decisions on environmental conflicts. In this way, the aim is to contribute to both political science and legal literature regarding European and international environmental law, environmental politics, and judicial governance.

Assessing the Learning Outcomes of a Role-Playing Simulation in International Environmental Politics

This paper pilots a method of testing the learning effects of a role-playing simulation of negotiations over the Nile basin. Players negotiate how to apply general principles from international law, such as sharing water equitably and avoiding significant harm, to specific circumstances of the river basin. Students are presented with a set of factual statements about the basin and surveyed before and after play as to which facts will be (were) most important in negotiations. Surveys of 75 participating graduate students show interesting patterns: (1) a shift from emphasis on managing risks to exploiting cooperative opportunities; (2) change in the value orientation of the statements students consider most important, with development-oriented values increasing and environment-oriented values decreasing; and (3) change in the dimensions of power students consider most salient, including an increased appreciation for the institutional and knowledge-related elements of power and a de-emphasis on the structural aspects of power. Before-and-after surveying offers an alternative to the more common methods of learning assessment, based on knowledge acquisition or student satisfaction, while discussion of the survey results with students allows for a richer, more reflective learning experience.

Stockholm + 50: A Look Ahead in International Environmental Politics+

The global environmental awareness and regulatory process has covered a trajectory of 50 years. From the innocent times of the first 1972 UN Conference on the Human Environment (UNCHE), the world has travelled very far. It has encompassed a veritable process comprising role of actors, polarizing issues such as balancing of environment-development, emergence of norms and governance forms. In the post-Westphalian governance order, the political landscape has been a determining factor for the contemporary environmental discourse. Even as the global governance architecture has become more complex and hierarchical, what can UNCHE + 50 ordain for our environmental future? What alternatives are possible for survival of the planet earth and betterment of the humankind? This article seeks to examine some of these issues of environmental politics that will determine the future course of action at UNCHE+50 event in June 2022 and beyond.

Environmental norm diffusion and domestic legal innovation: The case of specialized environmental courts and tribunals

AbstractAs international environmental law grows decentralized, it is increasingly important to understand how norms promoting new environmental law institutions diffuse. This article identifies the actor classes that are promoting a norm supporting the establishment of specialized environmental courts and tribunals. It first surveys existing literature on environmental and institutional norm diffusion for foundational insight. Using document review, expert surveys and elite interviews, the article identifies key actors who have sought to promote environmental court establishment. The findings affirm that environmental courts have been promoted by widely recognized agents of environmental norm diffusion, including intergovernmental organizations, regional organizations and nongovernmental organizations. However, the results also emphasize that global environmental norms reflect active engagement by domestic judges, courts and judicial networks. This finding holds broad theoretical relevance for legal transfer and norm dynamics research in global environmental governance. First, while domestic judges are widely recognized for implementing international environmental legal norms and contributing to the governance of specific environmental regimes, this study demonstrates a case where domestic judges' norm entrepreneurship has actively supported the global diffusion of an emergent institutional norm. Second, while institutional actors including intergovernmental organizations, regional organizations, nongovernmental organizations and judicial networks are known to directly advocate new environmental institutions, this article emphasizes that they also catalyse normative dialogue, intentionally facilitating exchanges among domestic judges and actors. Collectively, these insights support ongoing research examining what values domestic environmental courts may reflect and how domestic judges and courts support environmental norm diffusion, broadly. Finally, the interdisciplinary nature of these findings underscores the benefit and practice‐relevance of further integrating norm diffusion scholarship in international environmental law and global environmental politics.

The Emergence of Environmental Policy in China: Multiple Streams and the Shaping of a Technocratic Bias

Was it a result of domestic political changes or of developments in international environmental politics? While the decision to introduce comprehensive modern environmental policies in China has had arguably a long-term impact on environmental governance, few studies have scrutinised the early decision-making process. This article attempts to address the void in scholarship. Adopting the multiple streams framework, the authors argue that the origins of environmental policy in China arose from the confluence of three streams—problem identification, political tensions and policy choices—under Premier Zhou Enlai's sponsorship. The new ecological perspective arising from the environmental policy emphasises scientific principles and technocratic solutions, lending a contrast to an ideological approach that had characterised the previous decades. This process was accompanied by the new political role of an environmentalist group consisting primarily of bureaucrats and scientists who mobilised international experience to identify appropriate technological solutions. This article analytically traces the historical context, problem identification, policy entrepreneurship and key policy instruments that characterised the first phase of Chinese environmental policies. The authors discuss the extent to which key elements of China's environmental policies today may still be shaped by the technocratic approach in the initial phase.

Soviet official critiques of the resource scarcity prediction by limits to growth report: the case of Evgenii Fedorov’s ecological crisis rhetoric

ABSTRACT This paper focuses on official Soviet attitudes towards ‘ecological crisis’ and the rhetoric developed to address it. It analyses in particular the discussions in the Soviet Union that followed the publication of the Club of Rome report Limits to Growth (1972). It contributes to the better understanding of the debate around resource scarcity in a framework of so-called ‘ecological crisis’ as it was conceptualized in the late 1960s to the mid-1970s. It is based on the analysis of writings by the Soviet geophysicist Evgenii Fedorov (1910–81) who was among the few Soviet members of the Club of Rome and thus had direct access to contemporary Western scholarship. The paper explores how such rhetoric accepted and reconceptualized the notion of crisis for use in both domestic and international environmental politics and the associated advancement of technology as the most effective remedy against resource scarcity. Fedorov largely built his ideas on Soviet Marxism and Vladimir Vernadsky’s concepts, which preceded the current notion of the Anthropocene. In addition, his experience in nuclear projects and weather modification research –– both more or less successful technocratic projects – gave him some kind of assurance of the power of technology. The paper also provides some comparison of the views of the problem from the other side of the Iron Curtain through a discussion of the thoughts of the left-wing American environmentalist Barry Commoner (1917–2012), which had been popularized for the Soviet public by Fedorov.

Глобальное экологическое управление и многосторонняя экологическая дипломатия: состояние предметных областей

Governance is so commonly used in academic literature and policy papers in the field of international environmental politics and as such has overtaken the words “policy”, “diplomacy” and “cooperation”. This phenomenon has empirical support – environmental policy is one of the most internalized areas of regulation, and states were no longer the sole subject of international rulemaking. The current state of the art in studying global environmental politics is quite paradoxical. Notwithstanding the increased recognition of the importance of non-state, transnational actors and mechanisms to solve global environmental problems, little attention is been paid to the study of the relationship between interstate and non-state forms of interaction. That raises the question of how multilateral environmental diplomacy and global environmental governance are connected with each other in the academic peer-reviewed journals. What kind of international interactions do they study and what links them? To answer these questions, the peer-reviewed articles from SCOPUS and Web of Science databases on multilateral environmental diplomacy and global environmental governance analyzed through a systematic literature review. To understand the nature of the two approaches in studying global environmental politics, I summarize the differences and then identify the links between them. In each of the research areas, sub-directions and the related content were identified, while the typology of the articles allowed to identify the relationships between them. In each of the research areas, sub-directions and the related content were identified, while the typology of the articles helped to highlight the relationships between them. The main finding includes the confirmation that environmental diplomacy and environmental governance studying mostly in isolation from each other. The main finding includes the confirmation that environmental diplomacy and environmental governance studying mostly in isolation especially regarding the interplay between interstate or non-state forms of cooperation as well as assessments of their significance. Two dimensions of the politics – formal negotiations on collective actions and weakly institutionalized public space that involves various stakeholders, movements and initiatives – exists in parallel to each other. At the same time, the study demonstrated the need to develop more responsive notions of international environmental diplomacy, since it is no longer specific only to the study of negotiations and other forms of interstate interaction.

Analysis of the Rise and Characteristics of Environmental Diplomacy in Australia

In order to explore the rise and characteristics of environmental diplomacy in Australia, the rise and characteristics of environmental diplomacy in Australia through literature review and analysis methods was studied in this research. The results show that Australia’s environmental diplomacy is influenced by international environmental system, international public opinion, national interest and other factors, and its characteristics include diversified participation, strategic promotion of the status of domestic environmental diplomacy, and environmental diplomacy with national interests at the top. To sum up, Australia’s environmental diplomacy have been affected by both international environmental politics and domestic national interest protectionism since ancient times. Therefore, the analysis of the rise of environmental diplomacy in Australian and its characteristics has a positive effect on subsequent research.

Global Environmental Politics and Developing Nations' Climatic Vulnerability Nexus: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis

Climate change is arguably one of the most formidable environmental problems the world is facing nowadays and global environmental politics apprehends the complications further given its interdisciplinary nature and the scientific difficulties involved in climate change. Bangladesh has been recognized as one of the most vulnerable countries to climate change as per the Global Climate Risk Index (GCRI) 2018 at global stage emitting only 0.36 percent Greenhouse gas (carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, per-fluorocarbon, hydro-fluorocarbon, and sulfur hexafluoride) of total global GHG emission, which is lower than most of the countries. A paradox is felt across the globe is that the five major GHG emitting countries emit more than 60 percent of total global GHG emission but are not facing immediate climate risks. While on the contrary, countries like Bangladesh, Maldives, Lesotho or Tuvalu have little to do with GHG emissions but are most exposed to the long-term adverse impact of climate change. More to add, the most exposed countries to climate change are mostly developing or least developed and cannot fund their plans to fight out the climate change. In this global context, the countries at apex climatic risk despite demanding adequate financial support are not getting though. Being devoid of proper assistance from global community, they are getting more exposed to the climatic consequences and rushing to a possible extinction from the world map. This is being realized the most after a major GHG emitting country left Paris Agreement in 2017, believed to be influenced by international environmental politics, to pursue some short-term benefits leaving the long-term goals, and also has vowed to restructure the carbon regulations imposed by the previous administration. With the withdrawal of such a strong economic power from the agreement that pledged 3 billion dollars to the UN Green Climate Fund, at least two-thirds of the pledged amount is at Proceeding, International Conference on Climate Change (ICCC-2019), Dhaka, Bangladesh, 01-03 March, 2019 risk. Also, with the proposed restructuring of the carbon regulations, the global target to reduce carbon emission is expected to receive a major blow. This paper will explore the nexus between nature of global environmental politics and its implications on climate-vulnerable nation's as well as act as a future guideline toward the practitioners and nationwide policymakers in mainstreaming the inclusive resilience issues for the safeguard of the climatic hazard prone third world countries.

Beyond Politics: The Private Governance Response to Climate Change

In the age of globalization, marketization, and decentralization of environmental governance, scholarship on private environmental regimes has proliferated over the past decades and greatly influenced the discourse in international environmental politics. This book aims to argue for the benefits of private governance on climate change. As expressed in the title of the book—Beyond Politics—the authors emphasize the emerging conceptual shift of global climate governance, from the traditionally dominant government policy to a new form of governance by the private sector, including corporations, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and individuals (both households and consumers). This work adds to the growing awareness of the role of private environmental governance by demonstrating numerous examples of private climate governance and developing a theory to explain the growing demand of this new type of regime.This extraordinarily ambitious book starts with a comprehensive description of climate change science and social impacts, followed by the history of action and inaction due to various political, social, and psychological barriers. It presents an extensive number of scholarly perspectives on governance challenge, along with numerous cases of private voluntary activities by corporations, NGOs, and individuals. The authors’ work will be useful in advancing environmental governance studies both theoretically and practically. The book, therefore, should be read not only by scholars from various fields (such as political science, law, economics, and psychology) but also by businesspeople in various industrial sectors and, needless to say, environmental activists and students.Throughout their discussion, Vandenbergh and Gilligan evaluate opportunities and benefits of private governance from the perspective of (1) how much emission reduction would be possible if all household and corporate behavior change were to occur (“technical potential”), (2) how much behavioral change can be expected (“behavioral plasticity”), and (3) to what extent private voluntary initiatives are accepted and implemented (“initiative feasibility”). They argue that voluntary initiatives based on corporations, NGOs, and individuals’ motivation, together with carefully designed private initiatives and continuously developed new technologies, make private climate governance “promising” for problem mitigation, even when it is missing the coercive power and resources of government. Whereas a public governance approach is often inflexible, bureaucratic, and slow in implementation, and frequently restricts business and consumer activities by command-and-control regulatory framework, private governance is economically and politically more feasible, promotes environmental innovation, and is fast and flexible in its creation. Moreover, private governance can leverage the international trade system to expand pressure for climate mitigation across borders where national governments are out of reach for regulating economic actors.Indeed, hundreds of initiatives, standards, and codes of conduct are collectively pressuring global business activities and creating new social values, as the authors discuss. An additional research agenda would nevertheless help further inspire the climate policy engagement of readers. First, even though the data and cases about voluntary practices by the private sector provided in the book (between chapters 4 and 7) are numerous, they are somewhat anecdotal, and the entire picture of the proliferation of private regimes and their efficacy can be difficult to deduce. An expanded sector-based analysis could help clear potential selection bias in the theoretical generalization; the environmental impact of business activities tremendously varies based on industry—from IT, services, and manufacturing to infrastructure and extractive industries.Second, more extensive analysis of the risk and limitation of private governance would make the roadmap presented more promising. Fixing market failures—such as negative externalities, information asymmetry, monopolistic competition, and moral hazard—by using the same market system that created them is challenging. Private actors, especially corporations and consumers, are at the same time both contributors and troublemakers with respect to creating a sustainable world. While they provide innovation and ideas for efficient resource use, they are the very cause of pollution and overconsumption. Similarly, increasingly freer global trade, which can be effective for promoting higher environmental standards in global product chains, is also the very system that proliferated race-to-the-bottom problems in every corner of global society and ecosystems.Finally, analysis of the correlation between public and private governance, rather than disconnecting the two, may be more of an inspiration. A small government approach is not necessarily faster or more efficient, and a large government approach need not always restrict corporate and household activities. National governments fund environmental infrastructure and promote technological and economic innovation, such as upgrading energy grids to lower energy costs and incentivizing fuel-efficient automobile manufacturers and buyers by reducing taxes and regularizing priority traffic lanes. Intergovernmental organizations can also have a normative influence on corporate and consumers’ ecological decision-making. The value of private actors is inevitably embedded in the political and social system, and those two should not be disconnected from each other.

Complex Governance for the Anthropocene

The Anthropocene presents formidable governance challenges, not only in terms of the large uncertainties that surround the impact of humans on the biosphere, but also because it is occurring at a time of profound transformations in international politics. This article builds on the recent literature on complex systems and international environmental politics and identifies some of the core elements of thinking about governance in the Anthropocene. After a brief reminder of the characteristics of a complex system and the challenges that this poses to some of the existing doxa, it proceeds with a discussion of key elements of the system, of aspects of its operation, and of the goals that one should pursue in terms of system dynamics. Approaching the governance of the Anthropocene as a complex system allows us to shape much of current research in IR into a coherent whole, as well as identify the contours of a global international governance system of the environment that takes advantage of the dynamics of the system rather than courting failure by attempting to simplify it.

What Can Be Learned from Experience with Scientific Advisory Committees in the Field of International Environmental Politics?

Scientific advisory committees (SACs) are a critically important part of global environmental policy. This commentary reviews the role of SACs in six global and regional environmental regimes, defined here as the set of rules, norms, and procedures that are developed by states and international organizations out of their common concerns and used to organize common activities. First, SACs play a critical role in putting issues on the political agenda and the creation of an overarching regime. Second, the effectiveness of a given SAC and the associated regime is highly variable. Third, there is also considerable variation in the extent to which the regime is driven by an overarching scientific consensus, for example, high in the case of climate change, lower in the case of whaling. Fourth, the role of science in a given regime is also a function of whether the problem being addressed is relatively benign or more malign, that is to say, marked by deep political disagreements (i.e., climate change). Finally, the cases examined here suggest that the institutional design of the SAC matters and can influence the overall effectiveness of the SAC and by extension, the regime, but it is seldom decisive.

Opportunities and challenges to rural renewable energy projects in Africa: Lessons from the Esaghem Village, Cameroon solar electrification project

Abstract The study’s aim is to identify and analyze opportunities and challenges facing renewable energy technology (RET) penetration in Cameroon. The strengths-challenges-opportunities-responses-effectiveness (SCORE) model, a recently proposed alternative to the classical SWOT matrix is employed. A solar PV electrification project involving the co-authors in Esaghem Village, Cameroon, serve as the empirical referent. The primary data for the study were assembled during the feasibility assessment and implementation phases. The following attributes of the village are classified as opportunities: abundant solar radiation, hilltop location, self-help ethos, environmental stewardship, and effective traditional administrative system. Conversely, the following factors in, or directly tied to, the village were identified as obstacles: small economy and lack of skilled technicians, sparse spatial layout, lack of RET infrastructure, low wind speed, and intense and protracted rainy season, the outdated national energy policy, and recent international economic crisis and environmental politics. These findings hold lessons for RET policymaking and research in Cameroon and other sub-Saharan African countries. In this regard, policymakers would do well to eliminate the identified obstacles and maximize the utility of the opportunities. Future research would do well to interrogate how institutional support structures and market forms jointly or separately affect investments in RET.

China’s summons for environmental sociology

From demand for natural resources to sustainability initiatives, everything seems to hinge on China. China’s environmental entanglements call out for the analysis and understanding that environmental sociologists practice. Environmental sociologists from within and beyond China have begun to explore how society, polity, and ecology intersect, but we have yet to fully take on the challenges that China’s environmental struggles pose. This article focuses on four domains in which China’s experience compels us to rethink our theories: environmental ideology, political economy, civil society and environmental justice, and international environmental politics. In each domain, China’s institutions, discourses, and place in the world-system reframe major currents of thought in environmental sociology. These points challenge us to decenter environmental sociologists’ focus on how things happen within liberal polities in the global North; they likewise push us to reconsider arguments about the South. Together, these challenges present an opportunity to extend our theory and practice, fashioning a more global environmental sociology.

Norms from the periphery: tracing the rise of the common but differentiated principle in international environmental politics

Over the last three decades, constructivist scholars of international relations have created a rich body of literature on the influence of global norms. Until recently, the vast majority of that work focused on norms originating in the developed world and neglected the ideational impact of developing countries. This article confronts this oversight in the literature by tracing the rise of the “common but differentiated responsibility” (CBDR) norm in international environmental politics. The CBDR principle traces its origins to the developing world and today it is part of the framework principles of international environmental agreements. Thus, it represents a global norm promoted by, rather than diffused to, the developing world. In the process of tracing this norm’s rise, this article generates a set of hypotheses about the conditions under which developing countries create global norms.

Contributors

August 01 2017 Contributors Author and Article Information Online Issn: 1536-0091 Print Issn: 1526-3800 Global Environmental Politics (2017) 17 (3): iii–v. https://doi.org/10.1162/GLEP_x_00425 Cite Icon Cite Permissions Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Search Site Citation Contributors. Global Environmental Politics 2017; 17 (3): iii–v. doi: https://doi.org/10.1162/GLEP_x_00425 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentAll JournalsGlobal Environmental Politics Search Advanced Search • Steinar Andresen is a research professor at the Fridtjof Nansen Institute in Lysaker, Norway. He was previously a professor at the Department of Political Science at the University of Oslo and has been affiliated with a number of other research institutes. He publishes extensively, mostly on international environmental politics.• Ian Bailey is a professor of environmental politics at the School of Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences, Plymouth University, UK. His main research interests are in the politics of climate and energy governance, with particular emphasis on the governance of carbon markets in the European Union, Australia, and New Zealand. Other areas of recent research include the role of political strategizing in national and international climate policy; the emerging notions and practices of the green economy; the discursive and material dimensions of smart eco-city initiatives, and justice debates on renewable and non-renewable energy transitions.• Guri Bang is a... You do not currently have access to this content.

The Aarhus convention and process cosmopolitanism

The convention on access to information, public participation in decision making and access to justice in environmental matters (Aarhus) celebrates its twentieth birthday in 2018, yet its ethical potential remains unexamined. This paper assesses its ethical potential via the ethico-normative lens of the English School of international relations, eliciting the degree of pluralism and solidarism evident. It first presents pluralism and solidarism as ideal types against which research objects are assessed. Second, it analyses Aarhus’ trinity of procedural rights, identifying solidarist potential whilst noting pluralist realities. Third, it casts Aarhus as exemplifying a nascent process cosmopolitanism, rendering sovereignty more responsible by enriching it with humanity, which here denotes a rudimentary sense of affinity between humans, irrespective of territorial identities, based on the rights shared by, and duties towards, one another. The paper concludes that Aarhus demonstrates the presence of, and contributes to, a solidarist international society, delineated by convention membership. If weaker cosmopolitanism accords equal concern to humans and stronger cosmopolitanism requires equal treatment, Aarhus demonstrates the feasibility of a stronger cosmopolitanism emerging in international environmental politics. Chiefly, Aarhus seeks to reduce imposed harm, suffered by humans who lack the knowledge and autonomy to influence decisions that affect them. Such headway is tentative, but this is welcomed as evolutionary reform coheres with the persistence of sovereign statehood. Aarhus’ cosmopolitanism, yielding a moderating influence on sovereignty, will not emerge without a stable framework in which states institutionalise it. International politics remains, but can be enriched by procedural approaches to foregrounding human rights, which states must accommodate to be deemed legitimate.

Book Review: The Price of Climate Action: Philanthropic Foundations in the International Climate Debate by Edouard Morena

Edouard Morena The Price of Climate Action: Philanthropic Foundations in the International Climate Debate, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016; 140 pp.: ISBN 9783319424835 (pbk), 37.99 [pounds sterling] We know how corporate-funded right-wing think tanks and foundations have embarked on a crusade to deny the very existence of climate change--for the greater benefit of capital invested in the fossil economy. It should thus be a relief to find out that major liberal US-based foundations (such as the Oak or the Rockefeller foundations) have embraced, since the 1980s, progressive action on climate change--seeking to expand knowledge, awareness, policies and (to a lesser degree) mobilisation around greenhouse gases reduction and climate action. Well, argues Edouard Morena in his new book The Price of Climate Action. Philanthropic Foundations in the International Climate Debate, maybe this is not an unmitigated good. In his well-researched--and concise (140 pages)!--book, Morena argues that philanthropic foundations have had a crucial, even defining, influence on recent climate negotiations, but that their agenda-shaping power (through grant-making and organisation) has also reduced the pluralism of strategies for civil society, and has even marginalised or silenced more radical voices. The worldview of the foundations, especially their visions of top-down elite led technocratic social change--as opposed to more confrontational and mobilisation-driven transformations from below--fits quite well with the general trend of'liberal environmentalism' (a concept coined by Steven Bernstein in 2001) that has dominated international environmental politics over the last 20-30 years. The first chapter gives an overview of the book and the social science literature on philanthropic foundations. The engagement of large liberal US foundations (especially the Rockefeller Foundation) with climate change, since the 1980s, is described in Chapter 2. The author gives a cursory overview of the period and I felt that a larger understanding of the political and economic background would have helped: for instance, the Foundations' involvement in neo-Malthusian population scares in the 1970s or their decisive action in the so-called 'green revolution' could have been more developed, as these episodes have substantially shaped subsequent environmental and climate policies--and cemented US imperialism. Chapter 3 traces the strategic transformation that foundations have operated in the 1990s and 2000s, characterised by 'collaborative, proactive, outcome-oriented and evaluation-driven grantmaking methods with pro-business, market-centred and bottom-up understanding of social change' (p. 41). Indeed, Morena shows how the type of management implemented by these foundations parallels that of business organisations --even the language they use is indistinguishable from neoliberal managerial newspeak. And their overall approach has been to promote market-based, business-friendly, modes of environmental regulations--rather than a radical opposition to capitalist development. …

Advances in International Environmental Politics, edited by Michele M.Betsill, KathrynHochstetler and DimitrisStevis, published by Palgrave Macmillan, 2014, 424 pp., £75.00, hardback.

Advances in International Environmental Politics, edited by Michele M.Betsill, KathrynHochstetler and DimitrisStevis, published by Palgrave Macmillan, 2014, 424 pp., £75.00, hardback.