Trajectories in Environmental Politics

This book explores the dominant framings and paradigms of environmental politics, the relationship between academic analysis and environmental politics, and reflects on the first thirty years of the journal, Environmental Politics.

The book has two purposes. The first is to identify and discuss the key themes that have driven scholarship in the field of environmental politics over the last three decades, and to highlight how this has also led to oversights and silences, and the marginalisation of important forms of analysis and thought. As several chapters in the book explore, problem-solving frameworks have increasingly taken away space from more radical systemic challenge and critique, as the key themes of environmental politics have become ever more central to the field of politics as a whole – and as our understandings of social and environmental crisis become ever clearer and more urgent. The second purpose of the volume is to map out a series of new and developing agendas for environmental politics.

The chapters in this volume focus foremost on questions of justice, materiality, and power. Discussing state violence, multispecies justice, epistemic injustice, the circular economy, NGOs, parties, green transition, and urban climate governance, they call above all for greater attention to intersectionality and interdisciplinarity, and for centering key insights about power relations and socio-economic inequalities into increasingly widespread, yet also often depoliticised, topics in the study of environmental politics.

The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Environmental Politics.

Graeme Hayes is Reader in Political Sociology at Aston University, UK. His research focuses on environmental social movements, civil disobedience, and the criminal trials of activists. His most recent book is Breaking Laws: Violence and Civil Disobedience in Protest (2019). He is an editor of Environmental Politics, and Consulting Editor for Social Movement Studies.

Sikina Jinnah is Associate Professor of Environmental Studies at UC Santa Cruz, USA. Her research on global environmental politics focuses on climate change, climate engineering, and the intersection of trade and environmental policy. Her most recent book is Greening through Trade: How American Trade Policy is Linked to Environmental Protection Abroad (2020). She is an editor of Environmental Politics.

Prakash Kashwan is Associate Professor of Political Science and Co-Director of the Research Program on Economic and Social Rights, Human Rights Institute, University of Connecticut, Storrs, USA. He is the author of Democracy in the Woods: Environmental Conservation and Social Justice in India, Tanzania, and Mexico (2017), and an editor of Environmental Politics.

David M. Konisky is Professor of Public and Environmental Affairs at Indiana University, USA. His research focuses on U.S. environmental politics and policy, regulation, federalism, environmental justice, and public opinion. He edited the Handbook of US Environmental Policy (2020) and is an editor of Environmental Politics.

Sherilyn MacGregor is Reader in Environmental Politics at the University of Manchester, UK. Her research focuses on the relationships between environmental (un)sustainability and social inequality, applying insights from ecofeminist and other critical political theories. She is Editor of the Handbook of Gender and Environment (Routledge, 2017) and an editor of Environmental Politics.

John M. Meyer is Professor in the Department of Politics at Humboldt State University, USA. His current work explores the intersection between climate politics and the political potentials and dangers of populism. Meyer is the author of the award-winning Engaging the Everyday: Environmental Social Criticism and the Resonance Dilemma (2015). He is Editor-in-chief of Environmental Politics.

Anthony R. Zito is Professor of European Public Policy at Newcastle University, UK. He has been an editor of Environmental Politics for ten years. His research focuses on environmental governance and European Union decision-making. He has authored and co-edited numerous journal articles and volumes including The Future of European Union Environmental Politics and Policy (Routledge, 2020).