Climate Change And International Politics

This edited collection provides an understanding about the complex relationship between International Relations, the environment, and climate change. It details current tendencies of study, explores the most important routes of assessing environmental issues as an issue of international governance, and provides perspectives on the route forward.

John Vogler examines the international politics of climate change, with a focus on the United Nations Framework Convention (UNFCCC). He considers how the international system treats the problem of climate change, analysing the ways in which this has been defined by the international community and the interests and alignments of state governments.

This book surveys current conceptual, theoretical, and methodological approaches to global climate change and international relations. Although it focuses on the role of states, it also examines the role of nonstate actors and international organizations whenever state-centric explanations are insufficient.The book begins with a discussion of environmental constraints on human activities, the environmental consequences of human activities, and the history of global climate change cooperation. It then moves to an analysis of the global climate regime from various conceptual and theoretical perspectives. These include realism and neorealism, historical materialism, neoliberal institutionalism and regime theory, and epistemic community and cognitive approaches. Stressing the role of nonstate actors, the book looks at the importance of the domestic-international relationship in negotiations on climate change. It then looks at game-theoretical and simulation approaches to the politics of global climate change. It emphasizes questions of equity and the legal difficulties of implementing the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Kyoto Protocol. It concludes with a discussion of global climate change and other aspects of international relations, including other global environmental accords and world trade. The book also contains Internet references to major relevant documents.

A crucial question in years to come will be how states can circumvent the obstacles to improving the current climate change, problem-solving regime. These obstacles may be related to the basically anarchic logic of the international political system, the self-serving and often short-sighted motivation of national decision-makers, and - in all probability - the high costs involved in mitigating the problem of climate change.

Comparative case studies and analyses of the influence of domestic politics on countries' climate change policies and Kyoto ratification decisions. Climate change represents a “tragedy of the commons” on a global scale, requiring the cooperation of nations that do not necessarily put the Earth's well-being above their own national interests. And yet international efforts to address global warming have met with some success; the Kyoto Protocol, in which industrialized countries committed to reducing their collective emissions, took effect in 2005 (although without the participation of the United States). Reversing the lens used by previous scholarship on the topic, Global Commons, Domestic Decisions explains international action on climate change from the perspective of countries' domestic politics. In an effort to understand both what progress has been made and why it has been so limited, experts in comparative politics look at the experience of seven jurisdictions in deciding whether or not to ratify the Kyoto Protocol and to pursue national climate change mitigation policies. By analyzing the domestic politics and international positions of the United States, Australia, Russia, China, the European Union, Japan, and Canada, the authors demonstrate clearly that decisions about global policies are often made locally, in the context of electoral and political incentives, the normative commitments of policymakers, and domestic political institutions. Using a common analytical framework throughout, the book offers a unique comparison of the domestic political forces within each nation that affect climate change policy and provides insights into why some countries have been able to adopt innovative and aggressive positions on climate change both domestically and internationally.

This book looks at the major theories within the discipline of international relations, and considers how these might be able to provide accounts of the emergence of global warming as a political issue.

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

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.