International institutions and structures are crucial to the management of the global environment. The present arrangements are failing to cope adequately with the scale of the task and the demands placed on them, and alternatives are urgently needed. In this second volume of World in Transition, experts in the German Advisory Council on Global Change (WGBU) analyze the problems and set out comprehensive and persuasive policies for a successful future regime. Central to the future, it argues, will be a strengthened and more effective UN Environment Programme within an alliance organized around three main objectives of assessment, organization and funding.

More than twenty years after the Bruntland Commission report, Our Common Future, we have yet to secure the basis for a serious approach to global environmental governance. The failed 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development showed the need for a new approach to globalization and sustainability. Taking a critical perspective, rooted in political economy, regulation theory, and post-sovereign international relations, this book explores questions concerning the governance of environmental sustainability in a globalizing economy. With contributions from leading international scholars, the book offers a comprehensive framework on globalization, governance, and sustainability, and examines institutional mechanisms and arrangements to achieve sustainable environmental governance. It: considers current failures in the framework of global environmental governance addresses the problematic relationship between sustainability and globalization explores controversies of development and environment that have led to new processes of institution building examines the marketization of environmental policy-making; stakeholder politics and environmental policy-making; socio-economic justice; the political origins of sustainable consumption; the role of transnational actors; and processes of multi-level global governance. This book will be of interest to students and researchers of political science, international studies, political economy and environmental studies.

Understanding Global Environmental Politics develops a new, critical approach to global environmental politics. It argues that the major power structures of world politics are deeply problematic in ecological terms, and that they cannot be easily used to resolve major environmental challenges such as global warming. Instead of simply advocating the construction of new international institutions to respond to such challenges, therefore, the book argues that the construction of alternative social and political structures in necessary.

Theoretical and empirical accounts of the role of business in shaping international environmental policies.

Aligning global governance to the challenges of sustainability is one of the most urgent environmental issues to be addressed. This book is a timely and up-to-date compilation of the main pieces of the global environmental governance puzzle. The book is comprised of 101 entries, each defining a central concept in global environmental governance, presenting its historical evolution, introducing related debates and including key bibliographical references and further reading. The entries combine analytical rigour with empirical description. The book: offers cutting edge analysis of the state of global environmental governance, raises an up-to-date debate on global governance for sustainable development, gives an in-depth exploration of current international architecture of global environmental governance, examines the interaction between environmental politics and other fields of governance such as trade, development and security, elaborates a critical review of the recent literature in global environmental governance. This unique work synthesizes writing from an internationally diverse range of well-known experts in the field of global environmental governance. Innovative thinking and high-profile expertise come together to create a volume that is accessible to students, scholars and practitioners alike.

Explores the growing role of global civil society and local environmental activism in the management and protection of the environment worldwide.

Traditional views of global environmental politics take the structures and relations of international politics as a given. Solutions to environmental problems, then, must be products of concession, negotiation, and inevitable compromise—a world of top-down planetary management. Lipschutz challenges students to question these conventional approaches. He argues that much light can be shed on global environmental degradation if we look beyond the politics of conflict and cooperation and explore environmental problems from their very "roots." Using a framework that accounts for the ontologies, material conditions, and power relations that structure global environmental problems, Lipschutz is able to more effectively question attempts to clean up the globe and sustain the world′s natural resources. Throughout the text, the author uses compelling cases to illustrate the effects of globalization and capitalism, yet is careful to make the link between the local and the global to show how we, as individuals, are both consumers of goods and producers of pollution. A powerful new approach How is the financing of a water system in Bolivia linked to long-standing forestation practices in India? Taking nothing for granted, the root causes of major global environmental problems are exposed and subjected to rigorous analysis. Lipschutz shows, for instance, how privatization operates in different global contexts with strikingly similar consequences. In what ways are liberalism and realism actually two sides of the same coin? Both make self-interest—of the individual and of the state—key operating terms. In a revealing comparison, Lipschutz explores the limits of these dominant political models to effectively frame and solve environmental problems. What kinds of political, social, and environmental practices bring about meaningful change? By emphasizing the global impacts of local actions, the text shows how attempts to control environmental problems may actually reproduce the very systems they are meant to ameliorate. Combined with practical pedagogy Rich historical background helps contextualize contemporary issues. Extensive suggested reading lists at the end of each chapter guide students to further research, while tables and figures elegantly show data and concepts. The emphasis on assessing the root causes of global environmental problems and models encourages critical thinking. Students are also encouraged to rethink their own role in the global environmental system and to get involved in effective forms of social change.

The development of an international substantive environmental right on a global level has long been a contested issue. To a limited extent environmental rights have developed in a fragmented way through different legal regimes. This book examines the potential for the development of a global environmental right that would create legal duties for all types of decision-makers and provide the bedrock for a new system of international environmental governance. Taking a problem solving approach, the book seeks to demonstrate how straightforward and logical changes to the existing global legal architecture would address some of the fundamental root causes of environmental degradation. It puts forward a draft global environmental right that would integrate duties for both state and non-state actors within reformed systems of environmental governance and a rational framework for business and industry to adhere to in order that those systems could be made operational. It also examines the failures of the existing international climate change regime and explains how the draft global environmental right could remedy existing deficits. This innovative and interdisciplinary book will be of great interest to policy-makers, students and researchers in international environmental law, climate change, environmental politics and global environmental governance as well as those studying the WTO, international trade law, human rights law, constitutional law and corporate law.

This book provides a systematic description and analysis of the development of national environmental policies in seventeen countries in terms of capacity building. It covers a broad spectrum of different types of countries, ranging from advanced industrial, newly industrializing and transition countries to developing countries, representing all continents. This allows the reader to draw conclusions about the chances of an effective global environmental policy, the interrelationship between economic and environmental development as well as the importance of globalization, new forms of governance, and democratization for sustainable development. The editors deliver a broad cross-national survey covering altogether thirty countries and focussing on the diffusion of environmental innovations, the globalization of environmental policy, and the worldwide convergence of basic environmental policy patterns.

This book is a collection of systematically prepared case studies describing the environmental policy ofthirteen countriesin terms ofcapacity-building. Capacity for environmental policy and management, as the concept is used in this volume, has been defined broadly as a society's "ability (...) to devise and implement solutions to environmental issues as part of a wider effort to achieve sustainable development" (OECD). Since the late 1960s capacity-building in environmental policy and management can be observed across the world. It may have made insufficient progress as yet from an environmentalist point of view, but it has produced some remarkable results, and not only in the industrialised world. In the first chapter we present the conceptual framework that underlies the national case studies. In the course ofour research project the authors ofthe book met together twice to discuss this framework in the light of the national experi ences and to harmonise their approaches. In this way we have tried to offer more than a collection of individual and incoherent case studies, focusing only on specific environmental problems, institutions, actors, or instruments. The idea behind this book is to give a systematic, comparative overview ofthe fundamental conditions under which environmental policies is practised in selected countries.