Routledge Handbook of Global Sustainability Governance

Agni Kalfagianni is Associate Professor at the Copernicus Institute of Sustainable Development, University of Utrecht, The Netherlands.Doris Fuchs is Professor of International Relations and Sustainable Development and speaker of the Center for Interdisciplinary Sustainability Research at the University of Muenster, Germany.Anders Hayden is Associate Professor of Environmental Politics in the Department of Political Science at Dalhousie University, Canada.

"The heating planet and species extinction are now widely recognised existential threats to global sustainability (outside the US Republican Party) but the vast majority of policy responses ‘take the world order as a given and try to find solutions within established parameters’. This volume brings together a swathe of radical alternatives to the status quo, ranging from new planetary ethics to rethinking democracy, facing challenges from North-South inequality to financialisation, and proposing new approaches from consumption corridors to sustainable zero-growth – and many more. A timely and scholarly snapshot of a fast-moving crisis and the transformative responses it requires." — Ian Gough, Visiting Professor, London School of Economics, UK"The Routledge Handbook of Global Sustainability Governance brings much needed critical attention to the theories, ethics, conduct and practice of sustainability governance. Addressing vital questions of how to bring about transformations towards a more humane and sustainable society, I recommend it for its timeliness, breadth of coverage, and the quality of scholarship from both established and more junior academics." — Peter Newell, Professor of International Relations, University of Sussex, UK"The Routledge Handbook of Global Sustainability Governance brings together a set of essays that provide an essential guide to these turbulent times. Providing fresh thinking on key concepts and principles from power to responsibility, justice to ethics and questions of growth, sufficiency and what the good life entails, this handbook asks us to examine what transformative governance of our global challenges will entail. Working through a range of key problematics, including resource extraction, financialisation, consumption and population, this is indeed a Handbook for our current condition, one which will allow us to explore and interrogate how we have come to govern our environmental challenges towards particular ends and where the possibilities lie for shifting course." — Harriet Bulkeley, Professor in the Department of Geography at Durham University, UK"This volume is notable for its transformative perspective, challenging longstanding rhetoric around sustainability to suggest new thinking that directly confronts the need for deep changes in response to the planetary crisis. The contributions not only identify alternative pathways for societies and governance, but also critically engage their ethical implications. With sustainability thinking once again on the rise with the advent of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals to guide global policy, the critical interventions of this volume are especially timely and important." — Steven Bernstein, Professor of Political Science, and Co-Director of the Environmental Governance Lab, University of Toronto, Canada

• Introduction: Critical and Transformative Perspectives on Global Sustainability Governance Part 1: Conceptual Lenses 1. Power and Legitimacy 2. Environmental Governance as Performance 3. Engaging the Everyday: Sustainability as Resonance 4. Materiality and Nonhuman Agency 5. Worlding Global Sustainability Governance Part 2: Ethics, Principles, and Debates 6. Justice 7. Representation of Future Generations 8. The 'Good Life' and Protected Needs 9. Post-Eurocentric Sustainability Governance: Lessons from the Latin American Buen Vivir Experiment 10. Responsibility 11. Religion 12. Sufficiency Part 3. Key Challenges 13. North-South Inequity and Global Environmental Governance 14. Growth and Development 15. The Mining Dilemma 16. Financialising Nature 17. Environmental Countermovements: Organised Opposition to Climate Change Action in the United States 18. A Critique of Techno-Optimism: Efficiency Without Sufficiency is Lost 19. Consumer Values and Consumption 20. The Population Challenge Part 4: Transformative Approaches 21. Beyond Magical Thinking 22. Democracy in The Anthropocene 23. Living Well within Limits: the Vision of Consumption Corridors 24. Beyond GDP: The Economics of Well-being 25. Beyond A-Growth: Sustainable Zero Growth 26. Work-Time Reduction for Sustainable Lifestyles 27. Decarbonisation 28. Localism, Sharing, and Care Conclusion: Global Sustainability Governance – Really?