Transforming Environmental Politics and Policy - Böcker

Carbon markets are developing and expanding around the world, but how and to what extent is their design shaped by learning and interaction between them? How do these markets function and what is the role of design? Carrying out a ground-breaking analysis of their design and diffusion, this book covers all the major carbon market systems and processes around the world: the EU, RGGI, California, Tokyo, New Zealand, Australia, China, South Korea and Kazakhstan. It offers a systematic, in-depth discussion and comparison of the key design features in these systems with expert contributors exploring how, and to what extent, these features have been shaped by central policy diffusion mechanisms and domestic politics. By focussing on the specific design features of the instruments used, this volume makes important contributions to diffusion theory, highlighting how ETS diffusion processes more often have resulted in design divergence than convergence, and discussing the implications of this finding for the vision of linked systems in the post-Paris era. It will be of significant interest to a broad audience interested in the emergence, evolution, functioning and interaction of carbon markets.

The world is entering a period of unprecedented environmental and political change. By mid-century, climate change will cause dramatic ecosystem shifts. Hundreds, if not thousands, of species will disappear from the earth including icons like polar bears, gorillas, Asiatic lions and bluefin tuna. For many cultures ’species’ are ’place’. As our cultivated global community erodes, international triage decisions about species and local ecosystems will commence and if we are not alert, these decisions will be made on our collective behalf, without local perspective or accountability. Global Environmental Governance, Civil Society and Wildlife illuminates a clear pathway for the environmental, non-governmental community to transition into a co-governance role. Many NGO diplomats have deeper experience and more technical knowledge about policy discussions than their government counterparts and are unburdened by sovereign constraints. The book puts forward the perspectives of developing world civil society and the case that it must play a more significant role in future decision making. Civil society from around the world must be welcomed by governments at the global environmental governance table if we are to hear birdsong after the storm.

Since the 1970s, environmental blockades disrupting the exploitation and destruction of forests, rivers, and other biodiverse places have been one of the most attention-grabbing and contentious forms of political action. This book explores when, where, and why environmental blockading and its associated tactics first arose.The author explores a broad range of questions, including how did tactics and practices first developed and popularised during environmental blockades come to feature regularly in animal rights, peace, refugee, and other campaigns? What are blockaders hoping to achieve? How have such blockades and tactics shaped government policy, the culture of modern politics, and popular understandings of ecology, colonialism, and activism? This book offers the first comprehensive history and analysis of environmental blockading in three key countries: Australia, the United States, and Canada. As the first places to experience sustained protest cycles which fully established, promoted, and developed the environmental blockading repertoire as an ongoing strategic option for movements nationally and internationally, these campaigns were central in creating a new approach to conservation issues. They also played a leading role in making obstructive direct action a regular part of political campaigning, as seen in the form of the Extinction Rebellion (XR), alter-globalisation, climate justice, and other movements.This book draws on rigorous archival research including sources ranging from personal diaries, campaign minutes, and video footage through to police reports and newspaper articles, as well as interviews with more than 30 protest leaders and campaigners. It will be of great interest to students and scholars in the fields of sociology, political science, history, green criminology, and interdisciplinary environmental studies.

Since the 1970s, environmental blockades disrupting the exploitation and destruction of forests, rivers, and other biodiverse places have been one of the most attention-grabbing and contentious forms of political action. This book explores when, where, and why environmental blockading and its associated tactics first arose.The author explores a broad range of questions, including how did tactics and practices first developed and popularised during environmental blockades come to feature regularly in animal rights, peace, refugee, and other campaigns? What are blockaders hoping to achieve? How have such blockades and tactics shaped government policy, the culture of modern politics, and popular understandings of ecology, colonialism, and activism? This book offers the first comprehensive history and analysis of environmental blockading in three key countries: Australia, the United States, and Canada. As the first places to experience sustained protest cycles which fully established, promoted, and developed the environmental blockading repertoire as an ongoing strategic option for movements nationally and internationally, these campaigns were central in creating a new approach to conservation issues. They also played a leading role in making obstructive direct action a regular part of political campaigning, as seen in the form of the Extinction Rebellion (XR), alter-globalisation, climate justice, and other movements.This book draws on rigorous archival research including sources ranging from personal diaries, campaign minutes, and video footage through to police reports and newspaper articles, as well as interviews with more than 30 protest leaders and campaigners. It will be of great interest to students and scholars in the fields of sociology, political science, history, green criminology, and interdisciplinary environmental studies.

This book addresses political knowledge of climate change and its relation to labelling people affected by climate change, either as ‘climate refugees’ or as ‘climate change-induced displaced people or migrants’.By questioning the knowledge of climate change and subsequent labelling of people, this book will spark debate in studies of global climate politics and transnational policy networks. Rather than considering the issue of climate change as a given phenomenon, the author explores how the politicized knowledge of climate change has been produced in international negotiations and how that knowledge is transmitted from global forums to local country levels via climate change action plans and resilience projects. This book introduces the concept of multi-scalar knowledge brokers (MKBs) – individual actors who work at multiple levels (local, national, and international) to transmit the knowledge of climate change from global level to local level.The author uses the primary case study of Bangladesh to demonstrate how the dominant actors in global climate politics – the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), and the World Bank, as well as the USA and the UK – interact with the government and local NGOs in Bangladesh regarding transmitting the knowledge of climate change, labelling the uprooted people, and implementing resilience projects.This book will be of interest to students, scholars, and practitioners of international relations, environmental politics, climate change studies, political ecology, political geography, and migration and displacement studies.The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license. Thanks to the support of libraries working with Knowledge Unlatched www.knowledgeunlatched.org

Environmental degradation is a fast-growing problem that not only threatens to erode future development and undermine economic prosperity, but also victimizes and displaces ordinary peoples and communities in some of the most fragile areas of the world. Often grassroots opposition and mobilization is seen through a secular lens, implying that collective action is merely material and provincial.In this book John Agbonifo argues for a decolonization of the environment and to see the environment from the perspective of local communities. He examines the case of the Ogoni struggle against the Shell oil company, and asks how may we understand the struggle of the Ogoni against the state and Shell? Was the conflict merely about a minority ethnic drive at securing provincial advantages in distributional matters, or the legitimate actions of a local community aimed at preserving its environment and livelihood? Exploring the material and symbolic, provincial and nationalist dimensions of Ogoni motivation, Agbonifo's book is the first serious attempt to discuss these issues.The book will appeal to scholars and students of the Niger Delta conflicts, resource-related conflicts and social movements, in Africa and elsewhere. Those researching in the fields of development studies, political geography, civil society and collective action will also find it useful.

The United States is often perceived as sceptical, if not hostile, to the need to address man-made climate change. US government policy has undoubtedly disappointed environmentalists and scientists who believe more concerted action is needed, but a careful examination of the evidence reveals a number of policy actions designed to investigate, mitigate, and adapt to climate change have been implemented. Laws, regulatory action, and court rulings have led to advances in climate science, action to reduce levels of greenhouse gas emissions and efforts to prepare for the potential consequences of climate change. In this important book Chris Bailey explains and details the challenges and achievements of US climate change policy from its origins to the present day.

There has been a resurgence of community gardening over the past decade with a wide range of actors seeking to get involved, from health agencies aiming to increase fruit and vegetable consumption to radical social movements searching for symbols of non-capitalist ways of relating and occupying space. Community gardens have become a focal point for local activism in which people are working to contribute to food security, question the erosion of public space, conserve and improve urban environments, develop technologies of sustainable food production, foster community engagement and create neighbourhood solidarity. Drawing on in-depth case studies and social movement theory, Claire Nettle provides a new empirical and theoretical understanding of community gardening as a site of collective social action. This provides not only a more nuanced and complete understanding of community gardening, but also highlights its potential challenges to notions of activism, community, democracy and culture.

Across the world states are seeking out new and secure supplies of energy but this search is manifesting itself most visibly in Asia where rapid industrialisation in states such as China and India is fomenting a frantic scramble for energy resources. Due to entrenched societal inequities and widespread authoritarian governance, however, the pursuit of national energy security through transnational energy projects has resulted in devastating impacts on the human and environmental security of local populations. These effects are particularly evident in both Thailand and Myanmar (Burma), which, located at the crossroads of Asia, are increasingly engaged in the cross-border energy trade. Based on extensive fieldwork and theoretical analysis this ground-breaking book proposes a new critical approach to energy and environmental security and explores the important role that both local and transnational environmental movements are playing, in the absence of effective and democratic governments, in providing ’activist environmental governance’ for energy projects throughout the region. By comparing the nature of this activism under two very different political regimes it delivers crucial theoretical insights with both academic and policy implications for the sustainable and equitable development of the South’s natural resources.

Through theoretical discussions and case studies, this volume explores how processes of contestation about knowledge, norms, and governance processes shape efforts to promote sustainability through international environmental governance.The epistemic communities literature of the 1990s highlighted the importance of expert consensus on scientific knowledge for problem definition and solution specification in international environmental agreements. This book addresses a gap in this literature – insufficient attention to the multiple forms of contestation that also inform international environmental governance. These forms include within-discipline contestation that helps forge expert consensus, inter-disciplinary contestation regarding the types of expert knowledge needed for effective response to environmental problems, normative and practical arguments about the proper roles of experts and laypersons, and contestation over how to combine globally developed norms and scientific knowledge with locally prevalent norms and traditional knowledge in ways ensuring effective implementation of environmental policies. This collection advances understanding of the conditions under which contestation facilitates or hinders the development of effective global environmental governance. The contributors examine how attempts to incorporate more than one stream of expert knowledge and to include lay knowledge alongside it have played out in efforts to create and maintain multilateral agreements relating to environmental concerns.It will interest scholars and graduate students of political science, global governance, international environmental politics, and global policy making. Policy analysts should also find it useful.

This book addresses political knowledge of climate change and its relation to labelling people affected by climate change, either as ‘climate refugees’ or as ‘climate change-induced displaced people or migrants’.By questioning the knowledge of climate change and subsequent labelling of people, this book will spark debate in studies of global climate politics and transnational policy networks. Rather than considering the issue of climate change as a given phenomenon, the author explores how the politicized knowledge of climate change has been produced in international negotiations and how that knowledge is transmitted from global forums to local country levels via climate change action plans and resilience projects. This book introduces the concept of multi-scalar knowledge brokers (MKBs) – individual actors who work at multiple levels (local, national, and international) to transmit the knowledge of climate change from global level to local level.The author uses the primary case study of Bangladesh to demonstrate how the dominant actors in global climate politics – the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), and the World Bank, as well as the USA and the UK – interact with the government and local NGOs in Bangladesh regarding transmitting the knowledge of climate change, labelling the uprooted people, and implementing resilience projects.This book will be of interest to students, scholars, and practitioners of international relations, environmental politics, climate change studies, political ecology, political geography, and migration and displacement studies.The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license. Thanks to the support of libraries working with Knowledge Unlatched www.knowledgeunlatched.org

The Arctic has often been seen as a natural area, or even a “wilderness”, where mainly indigenous and subsistence activities have been prominent. Contrary to this, the present volume highlights the very long historical development of resource use systems in northern Europe, across multiple actors and multiple levels, and including varying population groups.The book takes a past-present-future perspective that illustrates the paths to institutional emergence, change or persistence over time. It also illustrates how institutions may themselves drive changes, through a focus on resource use cases in northern Europe. This volume demonstrates that understanding “northern” issues is less about understanding sets of geophysical, climatological or environmental conditions than about understanding social and institutional structures. Understanding these trajectories into the future is seen as a key way of understanding what responses to future change may be likely and what the institutions are that will shape, limit or enable our responses to climate change.This book will be of great use to scholars and graduates in the fields of Arctic and northern-region politics, and to researchers of resource use and climate change with a focus on vulnerability, social vulnerability, adaptation and mitigation.

The scale and severity of our environmental challenges are quickly becoming apparent. The Indian Ocean region features many places particularly vulnerable to the effects of environmental degradation and climate change, which will have profound social, economic, and cultural impacts. The increasing preoccupation with the state of the environment is also having significant political effects, including on the concept and content of citizenship. The language of citizenship has permeated environmental discourse and, conversely, environmental issues are often articulated in the language of citizenship. This book explores environmental citizenship and civil society responses to environmental challenges in the Indian Ocean region. The articles provide practical insights to improve resilience and adaptation, as well as conceptual insights into the nature of environmental citizenship discourse and practice across this vast region, from Mauritius to Malaysia. The volume showcases the complex field of environmental citizenship through a wide range of approaches, and alongside closely related concepts, such as environmental governance, environmental education, environmental justice, and corporate social responsibility. In essence, the book provides a rich, diverse and multidimensional picture of environmental citizenship in the Indian Ocean region.The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue in the Journal of the Indian Ocean Region.

The scale and severity of our environmental challenges are quickly becoming apparent. The Indian Ocean region features many places particularly vulnerable to the effects of environmental degradation and climate change, which will have profound social, economic, and cultural impacts. The increasing preoccupation with the state of the environment is also having significant political effects, including on the concept and content of citizenship. The language of citizenship has permeated environmental discourse and, conversely, environmental issues are often articulated in the language of citizenship. This book explores environmental citizenship and civil society responses to environmental challenges in the Indian Ocean region. The articles provide practical insights to improve resilience and adaptation, as well as conceptual insights into the nature of environmental citizenship discourse and practice across this vast region, from Mauritius to Malaysia. The volume showcases the complex field of environmental citizenship through a wide range of approaches, and alongside closely related concepts, such as environmental governance, environmental education, environmental justice, and corporate social responsibility. In essence, the book provides a rich, diverse and multidimensional picture of environmental citizenship in the Indian Ocean region.The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue in the Journal of the Indian Ocean Region.

Carbon markets are developing and expanding around the world, but how and to what extent is their design shaped by learning and interaction between them? How do these markets function and what is the role of design? Carrying out a ground-breaking analysis of their design and diffusion, this book covers all the major carbon market systems and processes around the world: the EU, RGGI, California, Tokyo, New Zealand, Australia, China, South Korea and Kazakhstan. It offers a systematic, in-depth discussion and comparison of the key design features in these systems with expert contributors exploring how, and to what extent, these features have been shaped by central policy diffusion mechanisms and domestic politics. By focussing on the specific design features of the instruments used, this volume makes important contributions to diffusion theory, highlighting how ETS diffusion processes more often have resulted in design divergence than convergence, and discussing the implications of this finding for the vision of linked systems in the post-Paris era. It will be of significant interest to a broad audience interested in the emergence, evolution, functioning and interaction of carbon markets.

The Populist Logic on the Environment provides a framework that draws from populism’s essence to explain populist politicians’ approaches to the environment.Over the past few decades, populism has spread across the world – particularly in Europe, but also notably in the US, South America, and Asia. Its essential features – especially its ideological 'thinness' – mean that we can observe considerable variations across populists in their environmental stances. This holds across the political spectrum from the left to the right, despite the traditional tendency of right-wing parties to be skeptical of pro-environmental positions and of left-wing parties to subscribe to them. Regardless of variations, however, ‘true populists’ can be expected to consistently anchor environmental stances in people-centrism and anti-elitism – in ways linked to additional party-specific factors. This book systematizes analytically what the literature observes, corrects some of its empirical limitations, and allows for reflection on the commitment by any one populist party to the environment. The authors undertake a cross-regional analysis of four case studies to illustrate their argument: Marine Le Pen’s National Rally in France, the US Republican Party led by Donald Trump, Spain’s Podemos led by Pablo Iglesias, and Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro’s socialist regime in Venezuela.This book will appeal to scholars and students of political science, public policy, environmental studies, sociology, and geography, as well as a general audience interested in populism and the environment.

The Populist Logic on the Environment provides a framework that draws from populism’s essence to explain populist politicians’ approaches to the environment.Over the past few decades, populism has spread across the world – particularly in Europe, but also notably in the US, South America, and Asia. Its essential features – especially its ideological 'thinness' – mean that we can observe considerable variations across populists in their environmental stances. This holds across the political spectrum from the left to the right, despite the traditional tendency of right-wing parties to be skeptical of pro-environmental positions and of left-wing parties to subscribe to them. Regardless of variations, however, ‘true populists’ can be expected to consistently anchor environmental stances in people-centrism and anti-elitism – in ways linked to additional party-specific factors. This book systematizes analytically what the literature observes, corrects some of its empirical limitations, and allows for reflection on the commitment by any one populist party to the environment. The authors undertake a cross-regional analysis of four case studies to illustrate their argument: Marine Le Pen’s National Rally in France, the US Republican Party led by Donald Trump, Spain’s Podemos led by Pablo Iglesias, and Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro’s socialist regime in Venezuela.This book will appeal to scholars and students of political science, public policy, environmental studies, sociology, and geography, as well as a general audience interested in populism and the environment.

Reconsidering Global Environmental Governance: Coloniality, Extractivism, and the Pursuit of Environmental Justice employs the concept of coloniality to examine the relationship between global environmental governance and environmental justice.Global environmental governance is perceived to be the natural solution for global environmental problems; however, its liberal emphasis reproduces colonial hierarchies at the expense of marginalized groups in the Global North and South alike. To develop this argument, this book draws on case studies that elucidate multiple expressions of coloniality in instances of socio-environmental conflict. With a focus on extractivism, the authors explore case studies in Greece and Honduras to illustrate the impact of existing global environmental governance institutions on marginalized groups and local communities, as well as case studies of gender and multispecies justice to highlight the opportunities and limitations of efforts to challenge liberal governance institutions and provide new pathways for enhancing environmental justice.Overall, the book aims to initiate a debate on how to decolonize global environmental politics and will be of particular interest to teachers, researchers, and students of environmental studies, global governance, development studies, political ecology, international political economy, and critical theory, as well as policymakers and civil society specialists.

Understanding and Implementing Environmental Public Policies provides a comprehensive overview of the complex subject of environmental policies. It engages readers in critical thinking on topics related to environmental policy while enabling them to learn common technical terminology and consider the application of environmental policy in Europe.The complex dynamics of global environmental policies and the pressing challenges of the climate emergency are becoming increasingly prominent in today’s landscape. This book aims not only to examine how we can “govern the environment” but also to explore and understand the complexity of the challenges posed by its current state, and looks to reconstruct a European framework of reference. The book critically focuses on environmental issues and identifies the numerous actors involved, analyzing their actions and retracing the policy cycle (formulation-decision-making-implementation-evaluation) in an attempt to outline a path that can be applied to environmental policies.As a practical guide, Understanding and Implementing Environmental Public Policies is intended for students enrolled in university courses or master’s programs dedicated to environmental public policy and politics, as well as for practitioners exploring different perspectives in the analysis of public policies.

Understanding and Implementing Environmental Public Policies provides a comprehensive overview of the complex subject of environmental policies. It engages readers in critical thinking on topics related to environmental policy while enabling them to learn common technical terminology and consider the application of environmental policy in Europe.The complex dynamics of global environmental policies and the pressing challenges of the climate emergency are becoming increasingly prominent in today’s landscape. This book aims not only to examine how we can “govern the environment” but also to explore and understand the complexity of the challenges posed by its current state, and looks to reconstruct a European framework of reference. The book critically focuses on environmental issues and identifies the numerous actors involved, analyzing their actions and retracing the policy cycle (formulation-decision-making-implementation-evaluation) in an attempt to outline a path that can be applied to environmental policies.As a practical guide, Understanding and Implementing Environmental Public Policies is intended for students enrolled in university courses or master’s programs dedicated to environmental public policy and politics, as well as for practitioners exploring different perspectives in the analysis of public policies.

Capitalism, Climate Change, and the Food System in Latin America illustrates the relationship between climate change politics and food systems through a critical International Political Economy perspective. Economic globalization has changed our daily habits. Specifically, it has significantly influenced our food and dietary habits. In other words, there is a predominance of economic rationality in our daily activities, including eating. This characteristic contributes to Greenhouse gas emissions (GHG).This book shows that food is not just about farming or markets. It is also about politics and power. It argues that understanding the political economy of food is key to understanding the relationship between the food system and climate politics. Moreover, the book explains that food policies often look technical, but they reflect choices about who wins and who loses, and they can hide the real complexity of food systems.It considers the political drivers of dietary habits and policies related to the food sector (that contribute to an increase in GHG), and the interrelation between economic growth, capital accumulation, and the cultural meanings of daily practices (e.g., eating and cooking) that connect food production and GHG emissions. By applying the Gramscian concept of hegemony through consent, the book shows how economic rationality contributes to increased GHG emissions in Latin America. The book proposes a new way of conceptualizing world hegemony by moving away from mainstream conceptions that view hegemony as exercised through material power. Furthermore, it discusses climate change politics and shows how it is not only about processes of governance and rule-making, or about power relations, but also about our daily life activities. It argues that power grows not only through relations between states, but also through alliances among social classes, including a transnational capitalist class. Across the chapters, the book shows how economic actors gain consent and expand influence by shaping food policies and food habits. This happens, for example, when policies prioritize certain products and supply chains, promote products linked to market interests, and encourage consumption of new foods in Latin America, including more processed foods.Capitalism, Climate Change, and the Food System in Latin America will be of great interest to students and scholars of environmental politics, international relations, human geography, food studies, and Latin America, as well as to policymakers in the fields of environmental, economic, and food policy.

Through a critical discussion of political ideologies, Political Ideologies and the Anthropocene Crisis seeks to extricate the values of contending traditions – freedom, equality, justice, community, tradition, welfare, family, happiness, sustainability, peace, regeneration of nature etc. – from assumptions of inevitable progress.The Anthropocene epoch is responsible for an impending crisis encompassing global warming, mass species extinctions, environmental degradation and, as a likely consequence, declining quality of life, social disruption and even societal collapse. Significantly responsible for liberal democracies' failure to act decisively in the face of these existential threats are the political ideologies that have dominated western modernity: liberalism/neoliberalism, Marxism, socialism/social democracy and, paradoxically, even conservatism. These ideologies must be freed from their faith in guaranteed progress and limitless economic expansion. At the same time, whilst green ideology clearly addresses ecological crisis, its broad agenda risks alienating adherents of rival ideologies. Contention between the diverse values associated with these ideologies is indispensable to any liberal democratic response to the crisis, provided it is grounded in a shared, scientifically informed commitment to the preservation and restoration of nature.Political Ideologies and the Anthropocene Crisis will be of great interest to students and scholars of Political Science and Environmental Studies, as well as activists, policy makers, and professionals interested in the Anthropocene/environmental crisis and its ideological context.

Through a critical discussion of political ideologies, Political Ideologies and the Anthropocene Crisis seeks to extricate the values of contending traditions – freedom, equality, justice, community, tradition, welfare, family, happiness, sustainability, peace, regeneration of nature etc. – from assumptions of inevitable progress.The Anthropocene epoch is responsible for an impending crisis encompassing global warming, mass species extinctions, environmental degradation and, as a likely consequence, declining quality of life, social disruption and even societal collapse. Significantly responsible for liberal democracies' failure to act decisively in the face of these existential threats are the political ideologies that have dominated western modernity: liberalism/neoliberalism, Marxism, socialism/social democracy and, paradoxically, even conservatism. These ideologies must be freed from their faith in guaranteed progress and limitless economic expansion. At the same time, whilst green ideology clearly addresses ecological crisis, its broad agenda risks alienating adherents of rival ideologies. Contention between the diverse values associated with these ideologies is indispensable to any liberal democratic response to the crisis, provided it is grounded in a shared, scientifically informed commitment to the preservation and restoration of nature.Political Ideologies and the Anthropocene Crisis will be of great interest to students and scholars of Political Science and Environmental Studies, as well as activists, policy makers, and professionals interested in the Anthropocene/environmental crisis and its ideological context.

The Arctic has often been seen as a natural area, or even a “wilderness”, where mainly indigenous and subsistence activities have been prominent. Contrary to this, the present volume highlights the very long historical development of resource use systems in northern Europe, across multiple actors and multiple levels, and including varying population groups.The book takes a past-present-future perspective that illustrates the paths to institutional emergence, change or persistence over time. It also illustrates how institutions may themselves drive changes, through a focus on resource use cases in northern Europe. This volume demonstrates that understanding “northern” issues is less about understanding sets of geophysical, climatological or environmental conditions than about understanding social and institutional structures. Understanding these trajectories into the future is seen as a key way of understanding what responses to future change may be likely and what the institutions are that will shape, limit or enable our responses to climate change.This book will be of great use to scholars and graduates in the fields of Arctic and northern-region politics, and to researchers of resource use and climate change with a focus on vulnerability, social vulnerability, adaptation and mitigation.

Through theoretical discussions and case studies, this volume explores how processes of contestation about knowledge, norms, and governance processes shape efforts to promote sustainability through international environmental governance.The epistemic communities literature of the 1990s highlighted the importance of expert consensus on scientific knowledge for problem definition and solution specification in international environmental agreements. This book addresses a gap in this literature – insufficient attention to the multiple forms of contestation that also inform international environmental governance. These forms include within-discipline contestation that helps forge expert consensus, inter-disciplinary contestation regarding the types of expert knowledge needed for effective response to environmental problems, normative and practical arguments about the proper roles of experts and laypersons, and contestation over how to combine globally developed norms and scientific knowledge with locally prevalent norms and traditional knowledge in ways ensuring effective implementation of environmental policies. This collection advances understanding of the conditions under which contestation facilitates or hinders the development of effective global environmental governance. The contributors examine how attempts to incorporate more than one stream of expert knowledge and to include lay knowledge alongside it have played out in efforts to create and maintain multilateral agreements relating to environmental concerns.It will interest scholars and graduate students of political science, global governance, international environmental politics, and global policy making. Policy analysts should also find it useful.

For a country already uneasy about energy security, the 2011 earthquake and tsunami, which caused a nuclear catastrophe at the Fukushima nuclear power plant, turned pre-existing Japanese concern about the availability of energy into outright anxiety. The subsequent closure of many nuclear reactors meant Japan needed to replace lost power quickly and so had no choice but to secure additional fossil fuels, undermining Japanese diversification policy and increasing global and regional competition for energy. This switch has been at a cost to the already weak Japanese economy whilst the increase in fossil fuel consumption has caused a significant increase in greenhouse gas emissions. In this book Vlado Vivoda examines the drastically changed environment following the disaster in order to analyse Japan’s energy security challenges and evaluate Tokyo’s energy policy options. Looking at how the disaster exacerbated Japan’s existing energy security challenges, Vivoda considers the best policy options for Japan to enhance national energy security in the future, exploring the main impediments to change and how they might be overcome.

Across the world states are seeking out new and secure supplies of energy but this search is manifesting itself most visibly in Asia where rapid industrialisation in states such as China and India is fomenting a frantic scramble for energy resources. Due to entrenched societal inequities and widespread authoritarian governance, however, the pursuit of national energy security through transnational energy projects has resulted in devastating impacts on the human and environmental security of local populations. These effects are particularly evident in both Thailand and Myanmar (Burma), which, located at the crossroads of Asia, are increasingly engaged in the cross-border energy trade. Based on extensive fieldwork and theoretical analysis this ground-breaking book proposes a new critical approach to energy and environmental security and explores the important role that both local and transnational environmental movements are playing, in the absence of effective and democratic governments, in providing ’activist environmental governance’ for energy projects throughout the region. By comparing the nature of this activism under two very different political regimes it delivers crucial theoretical insights with both academic and policy implications for the sustainable and equitable development of the South’s natural resources.

Environmental degradation is a fast-growing problem that not only threatens to erode future development and undermine economic prosperity, but also victimizes and displaces ordinary peoples and communities in some of the most fragile areas of the world. Often grassroots opposition and mobilization is seen through a secular lens, implying that collective action is merely material and provincial.In this book John Agbonifo argues for a decolonization of the environment and to see the environment from the perspective of local communities. He examines the case of the Ogoni struggle against the Shell oil company, and asks how may we understand the struggle of the Ogoni against the state and Shell? Was the conflict merely about a minority ethnic drive at securing provincial advantages in distributional matters, or the legitimate actions of a local community aimed at preserving its environment and livelihood? Exploring the material and symbolic, provincial and nationalist dimensions of Ogoni motivation, Agbonifo's book is the first serious attempt to discuss these issues.The book will appeal to scholars and students of the Niger Delta conflicts, resource-related conflicts and social movements, in Africa and elsewhere. Those researching in the fields of development studies, political geography, civil society and collective action will also find it useful.

The United States is often perceived as sceptical, if not hostile, to the need to address man-made climate change. US government policy has undoubtedly disappointed environmentalists and scientists who believe more concerted action is needed, but a careful examination of the evidence reveals a number of policy actions designed to investigate, mitigate, and adapt to climate change have been implemented. Laws, regulatory action, and court rulings have led to advances in climate science, action to reduce levels of greenhouse gas emissions and efforts to prepare for the potential consequences of climate change. In this important book Chris Bailey explains and details the challenges and achievements of US climate change policy from its origins to the present day.