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One of the reasons that environmentalism is portrayed as a sentimental sensibility subscribed to by tree-huggers and extremists is environmentalism longstanding love of and respect for nature. These days, the idea of nature has come under attack. Empiri ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper critically examines the application and conception of sustainable development, and then seeks alternative theories or visions for the global "economy." In this work distinction is drawn between chrematistics and economics. This approach is extremely helpful in the translation from normative theories to practical politics. As one alternative I look at the "new" old radicalism including "descroissance," a bifurcated theory/cum movement currently inspiring environmentalists, scholars cum/and activists, in Geneva and Paris. A third approach is original in that it builds on the Aristotilean concept of "economic" and "economy," and looks into theories of knowledge and meanings attached to life. The intent is to find fresh concepts for building a global environmental theory with a view to practical application. It involves a search into the history of science and the nature of happiness. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The linguistic turn in philosophy and in understandings of politics should have made clear the constructed nature of our political realities, and this has become an influential aspect of theoretical developments, yet the main features of the international system are not necessarily amenable to reconstruction in practice. In this paper an examination of the emerging discourses of global environmental politics will indicate the challenges it faces in coping with existing political practices, and the prospective patterns of conformity to environmental policy norms that may be candidates for future strategies in global environmental politics. In doing so it aims to relate theory and practice in GEP. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

2009 ISA Annual Conference Research Proposal:Women Finding the Center: Eco-Tourism in East AfricaNadra HashimIn 2001 scholars at Lund University in Sweden published a study on environmental protection in ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper draws on conceptualizations from International Political Economy and Global Environmental Politics to examine the discursive space and technologies that have come to constitute recent transfrontier conservation approaches. In this discursive space, an ecological/scientific discourse of bioregionalism views organisms and ecological processes as crossing political borders and management entails an application of economic neoliberalism that reduce social and ecological processes to a single metric of profit or loss which can then be tapped by the "market." By privileging expert scientific knowledge and a trans-boundary territoriality and a market-driven standardization, contemporary eco-regional approaches driven by international conservation organizations propose the creation of "govermentalized localities" that are linked through transnational spaces. The paper dismantles these assumptions by elaborating issues at the intersection of power/knowledge, institutional arrangements, and subjectivity formation. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many authors have shown that scientific uncertainty may be used as a red herring in environmental negotiations; an excuse for postponing necessary but costly actions. Solutions to this problem generally involve improvements in institutional design, such as the various mechanisms described as “the precautionary approach”. In theory, rules that require early responses to environmental problems in spite of uncertainty, should lead to proactive governance. In practice, effective application of precautionary approaches has been the exception, rather than the rule. Here, I argue that this variegated success is observed because uncertainty is a red herring in analysis as well as negotiation. By focusing on uncertainty as the problem we implicitly assume that precaution would be exercised if the science were certain. However, evidence from organizational science, political psychology, and domestic environmental politics suggests that most people are environmental satisficers, not maximizers. Our willingness to pay depends on a threshold of acceptable costs in the present, rather than some discounted vision of the future. The distinction is difficult to prove empirically, but the implications are profound. Precaution becomes a question of institutional feasibility as well as institutional design. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past decade political scientists have struggled to determine the conditions under which transnational advocacy networks are able to impact domestic environmental policy decisions. Keck and Sikkink (1998) have empirically found that advocacy networks are more likely to succeed when they frame environmental issues (such as deforestation) as human rights issues (i.e. bodily harm or injustice towards individuals). This formulation does not adequately consider the causal effects of network structure on movement strategy and policy outcomes. We argue that variation in network structure, defined by the differential number of connections between nodes of activists, is more critical than human rights ?framing? in explaining why some movements are successful at effecting policy change and others are not. Using four critical case studies, we show 1) that network structure is antecedent to the decision to incorporate human rights into environmental movements, and 2) more centralized networks achieve greater levels of success at the domestic policy level. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Developing countries and developing country scholars have long (and rightly) argued that international politics, and within that global environmental politics, have ignored them and their interests. Indeed, a basic tenant of ?Southernness? is the strong belief that the countries of the South and their interests lies (or have been marginalized to) the periphery of the global agenda; that developing countries have the space to react to the global agenda but do not possess (and have not been allowed) the means to proactively shape this agenda. This paper will not dispute this stream of thinking but will suggest that precisely because developing countries have been wary of the international environmental agenda, and because they have been reactive, they have inadvertently had a significant impact on the evolution of the global environmental governance architecture. Using the lens of three key debates in the evolution of the global environmental architecture ? the creation of UNEP in 1972, the creation of CSD and the restructuring of the GEF in 1992, and the attempt to create a new environmental organization in the late 1990s-to-date ? this paper will chart the consistency of developing country interests on global governance (as articulated by the G77) and depict how the developing country fear of global environmental governance has had a deep impact on the current ?system? of global environmental governance. In tracing the Southern impact on the institutions of global environmental governance, the paper will review the early years of UNEP when its placement in Kenya and its original agenda was shaped very much by developing country reluctance towards the emergent environmental agenda. The restructuring of the GEF was, similarly, shaped not simply by the industrialized will to invest in certain issues but also by developing country fears. The CSD, on the other hand, was actually demanded by developing countries themselves. While none of these institutions can be claimed as an astounding success, these examples do point out that Southern reactiveness in global environmental politics has not been without impact. As with so many other arenas of global politics, developing country attitudes towards global governance need to be understood not as moves which try to maximize gains but as moves that seek to minimize losses. The same strategy is seen in the Southern reaction to recent reforms in International Environmental governance. Once again, developing countries are motivated not by the desire to construct a system that will be conducive to their interests (they do not believe that such a system is possible within the existing status quo). They are motivated, instead, by a desire to ensure that any emergent system is no worse than the existing one. It is both interesting and instructional that this reactive stance has had significant impacts on the prevailing system of global environmental governance. Most particularly in the adoption of sustainable development as a now universally accepted goal of environmental governance. Indeed, it could be argued that the prevailing system of global environmental governance has been structured as much by Northern environmental proacctivism as by Southern reactiveness. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents the case that the most important challenge presented by environmental skepticism is regarding global environmental citizenship. Environmental skepticism, or the political counter-movement that works to undermine mainstream environmental knowledge claims, works to disassociate ecology from society and de-legitimize any kind of redistribution of ecological space, using Andrew Dobson?s ideas of ecological citizenship as a point of reference. First, the threat of ecological citizenship to the dominant social paradigm that has elicited skepticism as a representative of contemporary conservatism and the rear guard for the dominant social paradigm is explained. The assumption of ?deep anthropocentrism? is also explained as a pivotal point in understanding the skeptical world view. All of these points lead to the larger claim that skepticism is working to resist change in civic obligation at a global level and resist ecological criteria from counting, and as such is an important counter-movement meant to protect Northern consumption of Southern ecology. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on directions and trends in environmental policy-making in the European Union (EU) since 1992. Changes in Commission priorities, the political environment, and the relationship between member States and the EU have had a significan impact on legislative and enforcement strategies and policies. The debate over subsidiarity has not ended but has been reformulated. Now, flexibility mechanisms have been created to address the gray areas between state and EU responsibilities. Implementation and enforcement remain as major problems. The difficulty of meeting environmental targets has been affected by enlargement, i.e. Kyoto. The success of policy instruments such as framework legislation, voluntary agreements, economic instruments and increased juridicial activity will determine the future of the EU as a global leader in environmental protection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]