School of Social and Political Sciences - Research Publications

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    Taking Responsibility for Climate Change
    Eckersley, RW (Melbourne University Press, 2012)
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    Multilateralism in crisis?
    ECKERSLEY, R ; Bäckstrand, K ; Lövbrand, E (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2015-11-27)
    The 2009 United Nations climate conference in Copenhagen is often represented as a watershed in global climate politics, when the diplomatic efforts to negotiate a successor agreement to the Kyoto Protocol failed and was replaced by a fragmented and decentralized climate governance order. In the post-Copenhagen landscape the top-down universal approach to climate governance has gradually given way to a more complex, hybrid and dispersed political landscape involving multiple actors, arenas and sites. The Handbook contains contributions from more than 50 internationally leading scholars and explores the latest trends and theoretical developments of the climate governance scholarship.
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    Responsibility for Climate Change as a Structural Injustice
    ECKERSLEY, R ; Gabrielson, T ; Hall, C ; Meyer, J ; Schlosberg, D (Oxford University Press, 2016-01-07)
    This chapter critically explores the political and moral challenges involved in understanding the harms of climate change as the product of structural injustices with a specific focus on political responsibility. The chapter stages a critical encounter between Iris Marion Young’s account of political responsibility, and the debate among climate justice theorists on how to assign responsibility for mitigation and adaptation to citizens and states. This encounter demonstrates the value of a hybrid approach that includes, and bridges, forward looking shared responsibility and backward looking liability models, but also reveals a major predicament. The more that structural injustices based on historical responsibility are backgrounded, the easier it becomes to reach agreements between the world’s most vulnerable and most privileged. Yet doing so accelerates the skewed distribution of climate vulnerability toward the least privileged, diminishing the common ground needed to achieve an equitable allocation of responsibility for climate change.
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    Australia is a Climate Laggard rather than Leader
    ECKERSLEY, RW ; Baldino, D ; Carr, A ; Langlois, AJ (Oxford University Press, 2014)
    The debates are informative and potentially provocative as the book is designed to encourage discussion and analytical and critical thought. For the topics discussed, there is not necessarily a "right" answer.
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    Who's Afraid of a Climate Treaty?
    Eckersley, R ; Gaita, R ; Simpson, G (Monash University Publishing, 2017)
    Is there such a thing as an ‘international law’ of which to be afraid? Can international law be seen as a coherent set of norms? Or is it, rather, something experienced radically differently by different individuals and groups in different parts of the world? And what do the different sets of international law seek to change or justify today?
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    Global Environment
    Eckersley, R ; Cox, M ; Stokes, D (Oxford University Press, 2018)
    This chapter examines how US foreign policy on environmental issues has evolved over a period of nearly five decades, from Richard Nixon to Barack Obama. It first considers the United States’ environmental multilateralism as well as environmental initiatives under Nixon, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Obama, and Donald Trump before discussing key trends and puzzles in US foreign environmental policy. It shows the United States as an environmental leader during the Cold War, but an environmental laggard in the post–Cold War period, with the Obama administration’s re-engagement in climate diplomacy as a significant exception. The chapter also explains how the larger trend of waning environmental leadership from the United States has occurred at the same time as international environmental problems, especially climate change, have increasingly moved from the periphery towards the centre of world politics.