Crisis of Global Environmental Governance

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 governanceaddresses the problematic relationship between sustainability and globalizationexplores controversies of development and environment that have led to new processes of institution buildingexamines 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.

‘We urgently need global environmental governance. For this, the 1992 Earth Summit was lamentably inadequate, and the 2002 Johannesburg World Summit was even worse. This book finally offers perspectives on governance structures for sustainable development.’Ernst Ulrich von Weizsäcker, Dean Bren School of Environmental Science and Management, University of California Santa Barbara, USA‘This is a book that asks hard questions and provides thoughtful anwers. While the world cries out for leadership or innovative collaboration involving multi-stakeholders to address the challenges of globalisation, environmental degradation and climate change, people are much less willing to address governance, both domestically and internationally, because the dysfunctionalities of our politics and economics are so entrenched. This book inconveniently opens Pandora's Box and demands our attention.’Christine Loh, CEO of think tank Civic Exchange, Hong Kong and named a Hero of the Environment by TIME 2007, ‘We urgently need global environmental governance. For this, the 1992 Earth Summit was lamentably inadequate, and the 2002 Johannesburg World Summit was even worse. This book finally offers perspectives on governance structures for sustainable development.’Ernst Ulrich von Weizsäcker, Dean Bren School of Environmental Science and Management, University of California Santa Barbara, USA ‘This is a book that asks hard questions and provides thoughtful anwers. While the world cries out for leadership or innovative collaboration involving multi-stakeholders to address the challenges of globalisation, environmental degradation and climate change, people are much less willing to address governance, both domestically and internationally, because the dysfunctionalities of our politics and economics are so entrenched. This book inconveniently opens Pandora's Box and demands our attention.’Christine Loh, CEO of think tank Civic Exchange, Hong Kong and named a Hero of the Environment by TIME 2007

Jacob Park is Assistant Professor of Business Strategy and Sustainability at Green Mountain College, Vermont, USA.Ken Conca is Professor of Government and Politics at the University of Maryland, USA.Matthias Finger is Professor of Management of Network Industries at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL), Lausanne, Switzerland.