School of Social and Political Sciences - Research Publications
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ItemGreen democracy(Taylor & Francis, 2020-09-01)
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ItemGreen Theory(Oxford University Press, 2021)This chapter explores the ways in which environmental concerns have influenced International Relations (IR) theory. It provides a brief introduction to the ecological crisis and the emergence of green theorizing in the social sciences and humanities in general, and then tracks the status and impact of environmental issues and green thinking in IR theory. It shows how mainstream IR theories, such as neorealism and neoliberalism have constructed environmental problems merely as a ‘new issue area’ that can be approached through pre-existing theoretical frameworks. These approaches are contrasted with critical green IR theories, which challenges the state-centric framework, rationalist analysis, and ecological blindness of orthodox IR theories and offer a range of new environmental interpretations of international justice, democracy, development, modernization, and security. In the case study, climate change is explored to highlight the diversity of theoretical approaches, including the distinctiveness of green approaches, in understanding global environmental change.
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ItemGreat Expectations: The United States and the Global Environment(Oxford University Press, 2022-01-10)This chapter conceptually disentangles the relationship between environmental leadership and special environmental responsibilities that attach to the US as a great power and uses this framework to assess the US’s environmental diplomacy from the 1970s to 2020. It shows that the US has never fully accepted special environmental responsibilities because they cede economic advantages to rising powers and clash with the US-sponsored liberal economic order. The chapter also challenges the conventional narrative that US environmental leadership has been in general decline since the Nixon administration’s diplomacy at Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment in 1972. It identifies the conditions that are most conducive to US environmental leadership and shows that the high point of environmental leadership was the US’s ozone diplomacy under the Reagan administration, followed by the Obama administration’s climate diplomacy, while the Biden administration’s climate diplomacy may give rise to another high point.