Focusing on cultural values and norms as they are translated into politics and policy outcomes, this book presents a unique contribution in combining research from varied disciplines and from both the developed and developing world. This collection draws from multiple perspectives to present an overview of the knowledge related to our current understanding of climate change politics and culture. It is divided into four sections – Culture and Values, Communication and Media, Politics and Policy, and Future Directions in Climate Politics Scholarship – each followed by a commentary from a key expert in the field. The book includes analysis of the challenges and opportunities for establishing successful communication on climate change among scientists, the media, policy-makers, and activists. With an emphasis on the interrelation between social, cultural, and political aspects of climate change communication, this volume should be of interest to students and scholars of climate change, environment studies, environmental policy, communication, cultural studies, media studies, politics, sociology.
Since it first appeared, this book has achieved a classic status. It remains the only work that looks in detail at the political issues posed by global warming. This new edition has been thoroughly updated and provides a state-of-the-art discussion of the most testing issue humanity faces this century.
The Politics of Climate Change provides a critical analysis of the political, moral and legal response to climate change in the midst of significant socio-economic policy shifts. Evolving from original EC commissioned research, this book examines how climate change was put on the policy agenda, with the evolution of the United Nations Framework Convention and subsequent Conference of Parties. The international team of contributors devote in-depth chapters to: * climate change policies of different nations * reductions of greenhouse gas emmissions * legal aspects of external competence and moral obligatons * the political significance of the European experience within the wider global perspectives of America and Asia.
"Climate change differs from any other problem that, as collective humanity, we face today. If it goes unchecked, the consequences are likely to be catastrophic for human life on earth. Yet for most people, and for many policy-makers too, it tends to be a 'back of the mind' issue. ... [This book] argues controversially, we do not have a systematic politics of climate change. Politics-as-usual won't allow us to deal with the problems we face, while the recipes of the main challenger to orthodox politics, the green movement, are flawed at source." - cover.
Why are some countries more willing and able than others to engage in climate change mitigation? The Domestic Politics of Global Climate Change compiles insights from experts in comparative politics and international relations to describe and explain climate policy trajectories of seven key actors: Brazil, China, the European Union, India, Japan, Russia, and the United States. Using a common conceptual framework, the authors find that ambitious climate policy change is limited by stable material parameters and that governmental supply of mitigation policies meet (or even exceed) societal demand in most cases. Given the important roles that the seven actors play in addressing global climate change, the book’s in-depth comparative analysis will help readers assess the prospects for a new and more effective international climate agreement for 2020 and beyond.
This book brings together diverse perspectives concerning uncertainty and climate change in India. Uncertainty is a key factor shaping climate and environmental policy at international, national and local levels. Climate change and events such as cyclones, floods, droughts and changing rainfall patterns create uncertainties that planners, resource managers and local populations are regularly confronted with. In this context, uncertainty has emerged as a "wicked problem" for scientists and policymakers, resulting in highly debated and disputed decision-making. The book focuses on India, one of the most climatically vulnerable countries in the world, where there are stark socio-economic inequalities in addition to diverse geographic and climatic settings. Based on empirical research, it covers case studies from coastal Mumbai to dryland Kutch and the Sundarbans delta in West Bengal. These localities offer ecological contrasts, rural–urban diversity, varied exposure to different climate events, and diverse state and official responses. The book unpacks the diverse discourses, practices and politics of uncertainty and demonstrates profound differences through which the "above", "middle" and "below" understand and experience climate change and uncertainty. It also makes a case for bringing together diverse knowledges and approaches to understand and embrace climate-related uncertainties in order to facilitate transformative change. Appealing to a broad professional and student audience, the book draws on wide-ranging theoretical and conceptual approaches from climate science, historical analysis, science, technology and society studies, development studies and environmental studies. By looking at the intersection between local and diverse understandings of climate change and uncertainty with politics, culture, history and ecology, the book argues for plural and socially just ways to tackle climate change in India and beyond.
This highly topical collection, edited by two accomplished academics, explores how environmental science and energy policy relate to international politics and policy. This complex and essentially interdisciplinary subject has been the core about which academics have fiercely debated and, as yet, unsuccessfully reached satisfactory negotiations. The editors interpret the politics of climate change as being driven less by scientific understanding than by disguised interests and deeply believed norms. The carefully selected papers in this volume both analyse and advocate policies that claim to be directed towards 'combating man-made global warming' and hence 'save the planet'.
Although the science of climate change is well-established and there are well-known policy instruments that could significantly reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions without prohibitive economic costs, political obstacles to more determined action remain despite heightened concern among mainstream politicians and the public. This book analyses the political dynamics of climate policy in affluent democracies from a number of different theoretical angles in order to improve our understanding of which political strategies would be likely to enable national governments to make deep cuts in GHG emissions while avoiding significant political damage. The authors argue that different conceptual and logical theories highlight different features of political situations. Describing the politics of climate policy in this way will result in different conceptual, logical views of this phenomenon. And to some extent the inferences drawn from such differing views about the nature of political obstacles to more vigorous action on climate change - and the best ways of overcoming them - will also be different. Singly and together, these analyses reveal a more detailed, nuanced view of the political options open to activist governments. This book was previously published as a special issue of Environmental Politics.
Scientific research on climate change has given rise to a variety of images picturing climate change. These range from colorful expert graphics, model visualizations, photographs of extreme weather events like floods, droughts or melting ice, symbols like polar bears, to animated and interactive visualizations. Climate change graphics have not only increased knowledge about the subject, they have begun to influence popular awareness of global weather events. The status of climate pictures today is particularly crucial, as global climate change as a long-term process cannot be seen. When images are widely distributed, they are able to shape how the world is thought about and seen. It is this implicit basic assumption of the power of images to influence reality that this book addresses: today's images might become the blueprint for tomorrow's realities. »Image Politics of Climate Change« combines a wide interdisciplinary range of perspectives and questions, treated here in sixteen interdisciplinary case studies. The author's specializations include both visual practice and theory: in the fields of climate sciences, computer graphics, art, curating, art history and visual studies, communication and cultural science, environmental and science & technology studies. The close interlinking of these viewpoints promotes in-depth insights into issues of production and analysis of climate visualization.
Accustomed to understanding security primarily a matter spatial exercise in distancing and boundary making on the part of states and their military alliances to secure borders and institutions from outside threats, the nations of the world have so far given a short shrift to the gravity of environmental degradation as a factor or catalyst of intrastate or interstate conflict, or at worst, a security threat to entire humanity until the shafts of retaliatory responses of the infuriated climate change to the cloddish and brutish power of the rich industrialized nations to destroy it by its emission of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, pointed toward man menacing with funereal and cascading consequences of global warming. Thus, climate change, which has so far been on the fringe of human concern, or in American President s view a myth or a hoax, has catapulted into the center stage of great political flare up among the nations of the world on the issue of apportioning the responsibility on rich industrialized nations or the populous South to mitigate the dangers of climate change, which seems to be mired in the contradiction between North s advocacy of inequity in having uncontested access to the atmosphere as carton sinks, and equity while disabusing the atmosphere of the carbon debris. Not walking on trodden furrows, this book expatiates on the desideratum of a paradigm shift from faith in the Newtonian mechanistic view of the universe to a faith in the profundity of Eastern wisdom and new insights presently found in science, which see both nature and human beings as warp and woof woven beautifully into the divine tapestry.
Christian Downie's historical look at the negotiating behavior of the United States and the European Union during international efforts to implement a meaningful climate change treaty, go a long way toward explaining why current negotiations are bogged down. His findings about the impact of domestic politics on international negotiations should not be overlooked. The only way we will able to move to a new set of enforceable and meaningful greenhouse gas reduction commitments is to understand why past approaches have not worked.' - Lawrence Susskind, Harvard Law School, US 'This is an enormously well-researched study that addresses an important hitherto-unanswered problem of negotiations. Usually single instances are analyzed but what about serial negotiations that return again and again to the subject, where the parties change position in their course? Downie tells us how this happens and in the process, enriches our understanding of negotiation. I enjoyed reading this book.' - I. William Zartman, The Johns Hopkins University, US The Politics of Climate Change Negotiations describes the successes and failures of protracted international negotiations and most importantly, examines the lessons they hold for the future. Drawing on more than 100 interviews with climate change insiders, including former ministers, chief negotiators and presidential advisers, Christian Downie presents a rare inside account of why states agree to what they do and why they change their position in long negotiations. He also identifies eight strategies that others can use to influence the most powerful states in the world. This book will be invaluable to academics and students working in the fields of international relations, political science, negotiation studies and global environmental politics. It will be of equal value to diplomats, policymakers and various non-governmental organizations that seek to influence international negotiations. Contents Part I: International Negotiations and Theoretical Background 1. Introduction 2. Histories and Theories of International Negotiations Part II: The Case Studies 3. Toward Berlin 1993 - 1995: Environmental Interests and a Tentative Agreement 4. From Berlin to Kyoto 1995 - 1997: Rising Opposition to Environmental Interests 5. From Kyoto to The Hague 1998 2000: Shifting Political Dynamics and a Question of Ratification Part III: Empirical Findings and Theoretical Implications 6. Discussion: The Behaviour of the US and the EU in the International Climate Change Negotiations 7. Toward an Understanding of Prolonged International Negotiations References
