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This paper argues that fiction and literary non-fiction should play an important role in the environmental politics classroom, and explores how such works might best be employed. The paper draws on experience with past, present, and future-oriented liter ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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 Empiri ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

According to one observer, global environmental politics today is much less a project of addressing widespread environmental degradation than it is one of supporting “the private capture of public goods” on a worldwide scale. The Global Environment Facili ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article deals with key issues and challenges related to the relationship between trade and the environment. Among the issues discussed in the article about trade and environment include trade and environmental quality, trade and environmental policy, and trade and environmental politics. Political and policy arguments over trade and environment are founded on the possible impact that growing trade and investment flows will have on environmental quality.

The article assesses the role of developed and developing countries in responding to the impact of climate change. It addresses the issues of global environmental politics within the framework of international relations based on the review of major publication outlets for climate politics research. The origin of the politics of climate change, the political response to climate change and the role of the international community in minimizing its impact are also addressed.

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]

In the last several years many of the most far-reaching environmental policies in the United States and around the world have been implemented by local and regional governments. Simultaneously, however, many argue that the last few decades have seen neoliberal economic ideology, which rejects a strong role for government in regulating business and private activities to promote social goals such as environmental protection, become entrenched at all levels of the state. At first glance it therefore seems quite unlikely that cities caught in the grips of neoliberal ideology and at the mercy of the whims of mobile investment capital would engage in government-led processes of environmental reform and ecological modernization. This paper explores this apparent tension. It is argued that rather than being contradictory, neoliberal globalization has served to encourage the rise of city sustainability programs as a form of urban entrepreneurialism. Many of these programs do offer important environmental benefits and have the potential to genuinely reduce the ecological footprint of cities. However, because they operate within the framework of neoliberalism, they are not likely to provide the panacea of green economic growth that they promise, nor adequately address issues of social and environmental justice. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Environmental foreign policy is fraught with examples of states rhetorically affirming international action to address environmental threats and accepting international commitments that are never met in practice. This situation raises troubling questions for the study of environmental foreign policy. This is particularly true in the case of developed states, which typically possess the resources to comply with international agreements if there is sufficient political will. Why have developed states been willing to undertake commitments without fulfilling them? The foreign policy establishments of states value national reputations for fulfilling international obligations. Most states are thus reluctant to take on commitments that cannot be met. One frequent explanation is that governments undertake international commitments in good faith but then fail to fulfill them due to domestic political obstacles. While this is certainly true in some cases, this paper argues that governments frequently utilize environmental foreign policy as a symbolic tool to rally important domestic constituents and/or to signal priorities to other international actors. These commitments are often undertaken with full knowledge that they are unlikely to be met completely. After reviewing the reasons that environmental foreign policy lends itself to this sort of signaling, the paper focuses on three brief case studies to illustrate the strategy and effects of this signaling process: the use of climate change commitments by the European Union, the involvement of East European countries in the Long-Range Transboundary Air Pollution negotiations, and the use of climate change by Margaret Thatcher during the late 1980s. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Does news coverage of environmental issues shape U.S. environmental foreign policy? Our theory is that the influence of news coverage on environmental policy depends on whether or not the news coverage of the particular environmental issue is tied to an actual event. By themselves, environmental issues tend to be abstract and are therefore less likely to promote the level of public concern that would force policy makers to make the issue a top priority. However, when environmental problems like global warming are connected to major news events, like hurricanes, heat waves and droughts, they gain the salience necessary to raise public concern about the issue which in turn encourages and often pressures the government to address the problem. To test this hypothesis, this study includes a time series analysis of the relationship between television news coverage of global warming both with and without connection to extreme weather events, public opinion about global warming and government attention to this problem. Here we consider both attention, in the form of congressional hearings on pertinent environmental issues, and action, in this case, government funding of research on environmental issues. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A fundamental causal aspiration of international environmental policymaking and associated social movements is to bring about change in the policies and institutions that shape human-environment interactions. Yet the transformation toward more sustainable resource use also requires a measure of stability in the new institutional arrangements, to ensure cumulative institutional strengthening across multiple political administrations, to undertake policy experimentation and lesson learning, to build social constituencies, and to tackle management problems (e.g., forestry, fisheries, watershed management) that require stewardship over long time horizons. Institutional stability is an especially acute concern in the chronically unstable political and economic environments of developing and transition economies. This paper takes stock of the state of our knowledge about institutional stability and change in different national settings, drawing on disparate research literatures on policy agenda-setting and implementation, social revolution and state-building, institutional economics, democratic consolidation, and common-pool resource regimes. The goal is to produce an analytic framework that can facilitate cumulative, cross-national research on the evolution of institutions for environmental management. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cross-national policy convergence is a widely recognized and analyzed empirical phenomenon in international relations and comparative political science literature. Hitherto many studies picked out one particular cause and assessed its effects on domestic policy changes and cross-national policy convergence, while neglecting others. This paper takes a more holistic perspective by integrating several conceivable mechanisms in the analysis and exploring their interactions. Drawing on studies from international relations as well as comparative political science this paper first of all introduces the analytical framework encompassing three distinct mechanisms which have so far been identified in the relevant literature to contribute to cross-national policy convergence: diffusion, harmonization and imposition. On a broad empirical basis of more than twenty environmental policies and instruments the paper subsequently explores observable interactions between these mechanisms and those interactions' effects on cross-national policy convergence. On the one hand, the paper identifies circumstances when diffusion, harmonization and imposition are likely to reinforce and complement each other and, thus, significantly increase the prospect of cross-national policy convergence. On the other hand, the paper identifies conditions when diffusion, harmonization and imposition are likely to constrain each other and, thus, hindering the emergence of cross-national convergence. In conclusion, the results show that the understanding of processes contributing to cross-national policy convergence is significantly improved when taking into account the interactions of diffusion, harmonization and imposition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports on the research design, methods, and core findings of a four-year comparative research program that covered nine international bureaucracies in the field of global environmental policy: The Managers of Global Change (MANUS) project. Thi ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The politics in “international environmental politics” is widely assumed to be a human activity. Although it is very much a politics “about” the environment or “about” particular nonhuman entities, politics is not understood to be something that humans ev ..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]

Diffusion of policies and institutions is becoming an increasingly relevant topic in the study of environmental politics and policies. However, the manner of dealing with diffusion is often inadequate. Many studies ignore diffusion effects altogether or take them for granted without estimating the degree of diffusion. This, however, results in inefficient and misleading conclusions. In this paper I argue that the logic of analysis needs to be modified in order to incorporate diffusion into our research models. Previous approaches in anthropology trying to solve Galton's problem in social research might offer a solution here. Drawing upon the history of anthropologists' ideas political scientists might be able to deal with diffusion in a more appropriate manner. In this paper I build on my previous studies (see for instance IO 60 (2):401-431) and apply the method of spatial lags to the area of environmental policy. This is an appropriate research field for the question at hand because it is a new policy which is exposed to domestic as well as international pressures. I estimate the effects of diffusion in two different ways. On the one hand, I focus on the level of carbon emissions as an indicator for the development of air pollution policies of the OECD countries. On the other hand, I analyze the introduction of environmental institutions in the OECD countries. By focusing on outcome and output variables the paper will give a comprehensive overview of diffusion patterns in environmental policies. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper takes up the question of how multi-level governance arrangements emerge through a case study of environmental politics in the Mercosur free trade area. Overall, governance continues to be more concentrated at the national level in Mercosur than in the European Union, where the concept of multi-level governance was first observed in practice and described in theory. By mapping emerging practices and actors and noting on-going gaps in Mercosur?s environmental politics, this paper will contribute to understanding more general causes and consequences of such new governance arrangements. Several case studies ? of the politics of GMOs and transportation infrastructures ? will help to develop key concepts and arguments. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite increasing deterioration of the world?s biosphere, exemplified by dramatic existing and future potential impacts of human-induced climate change, most theoretical/explanatory work within global environmental politics shies away from reflecting on its own implications for developing new initiatives or policy prescriptions. Instead, most scholarship explicitly or implicitly accepts that broad scale transformation, such as changes in societal values and/or political parties are prerequisites for major shifts to sound environmental policy choices. This unreflective theorizing and linear thinking about policy change are both problematic for addressing a class of environmental problems, of which climate change is emblematic, where even those who support ameliorative action also explicitly contribute to the problem. Such problems must be treated differently than, say, explaining policy choices and options regarding the Iraq war or logging in national forests, where traditional interest-based approaches more readily apply.For problems such as climate change, where individual and community choices are complex and contradictory, a new epistemological orientation is needed that delivers greater attention to understanding what policy choices act best to ?constrain our future selves.? For instance, many voters will support an environmental protection policy, such as saving the Northern Spotted Owl, even though they know that doing so will increase the price of forest products sometime in the future. But when faced with an immediate decision to purchase more costly eco-certified timber versus cheaper non-certified lumber, the same individuals will choose the latter. This tendency, which behavioral economists have empirically documented and termed ?hyperbolic discounting,? provides the beginning to our conceptual efforts to develop policy-relevant theory. We move along this path by drawing on the work on ?forward reasoning? and path dependency in political science, economics and sociology that identifies the phenomenon in which what appear to be small and insignificant choices can produce profound impacts on future choices, human behavior and problem definitions. While most work on path dependency has been used by historical institutionalists to explain ?undesirable? policy outcomes (e.g., Jacob Hacker's analysis of why the United States lacks a universal health care system), we argue that these same theoretical insights, but applied by looking ?forward? rather than ?backward?, can be harnessed to understand what mechanisms might produce environmental benefits, such as reducing our greenhouse gas emissions. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper asks whether environmental activists in the Arab region should work within the framework of given political structures via problem-solving policy mechanisms, or seek to challenge these structures by agitating for structural reforms. Specifically, it takes the takes the curious formation of two Green Parties in Lebanon to explore this question in depth, and argues that the rationale behind their creation, as well as their rivalry for what seems to be a common constituency, reflect evolving theoretical and practical debates in the region concerning reform, democratization, and citizenship. As such, the creation of such parties must be seen within the larger context of environmentalism in the Arab region on the one hand; and the shifting national and international power structures on the other. The paper explores both the possibilities and limitations inherent in the relationships environmentalists in the region have formed with policy-makers and government officials, as well as with international organizations, donor agencies, and civil society groups. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper will discuss the various sets of theories on which we can draw to construct better theories of global environmental politics, particularly drawing on the concepts of issue framing, norm construction, and the interaction of environmental NGOs and coalitions, business actors, media, and publics as political structural elements in the multi-level games that produce global environmental regimes, policy, and practice, within a global political economy. While neo-realists have tended to focus on security issues, and neo-liberals on economic issues, both have addressed the question of conflict and cooperation in the environmental area. Both neo-realist and neo-liberal regime theory have tried to explain how global environmental regimes have developed or been implemented. Theories of hegemonic leadership and, more recently, nonhegemonic cooperation and transnational activist networks, have helped us focus on the interaction of states and international and transnational organizations. This paper will draw on these theories, as well as theories of the global commons and common property resource regimes, of sustainable development, and of norm construction and social learning, including the role of scientists and epistemic communities, that have helped to frame our thinking about global environmental politics. It will argue that a theory of global environmental politics could also usefully incorporate two-level games theory and work from organizational public-policy-making, interest group theory, and the older foreign-policy making literature. It will attempt to situate global environmental politics within the broader question of the international political economy. ..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]

Contrary to studies arguing that environmentalism in developing countries often draws on progressive nationalism, communitarianism, or on sustainable development agendas, we attempt to also investigate how right-wing nationalism may significantly hybridize and then alter environmentalist politics in Eastern Europe. To do so, we seek to analyze protest repertoires and discursive frames in two high-profile instances of Romanian environmental activism: the campaign against ?pre-orange? Ukraine's construction of a canal (the Bastroe canal) that cuts through part of the UNESCO-protected wildlife refuge of the Danube Delta and the campaign against the cyanide-based mining of gold ores in Rosia Montana (Western Carpathians). In the case of the Bastroe canal, we show how widely-shared ideological resources of East European nationalism that had been toned down by the European integration discourse were deployed to successfully mobilize the largest and the most media-savvy environmental social movement in post-communist Romania. By contrast, in the case of Rosia Montana, the predominance of progressive framing strategies such as community preservation and sustainable development led to weak mobilization, despite the transnational nature of the campaign and despite the much more evident harmful effects of cyanide-based mining. Our data come from three major Romanian newspapers, government statements, NGO websites, blogs and interviews with major players. ..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]