Global environmental politics is at a critical juncture as the Earth System emergency deepens. The core environmental policies and actions of governments, intergovernmental organizations, corporations, and, to a lesser extent, mainstream nongovernmental organizations are visibly failing to deescalate this emergency. In response to these failures, we argue, dispossessed individuals, Indigenous peoples, grassroots activists, and civil society campaigners are joining forces to challenge market-liberal and institutionalist thinking and initiate new ways of organizing political and social life that prioritize biological integrity and social justice: what we describe as “biojustice environmentalism from below.” Global environmental governance, meanwhile, is at a crossroads, becoming increasingly polycentric as biojustice environmentalism surges and as corporations seek to capture governance spaces through multistakeholder initiatives. How surging biojustice environmentalism in a polycentric governance landscape plays out in the coming years, we conclude, will be crucial for humanity’s ability to stem the escalating global environmental crisis.

This article analyzes the rise of precision technologies for agriculture—specifically digital farming and plant genome editing—and their implications for the politics of environmental sustainability in the agrifood sector. We map out opposing views in the emerging debate over the environmental aspects of these technologies: while proponents see them as vital tools for environmental sustainability, critics view them as antithetical to their own agroecological vision of sustainable agriculture. We argue that key insights from the broader literature on the social effects of technological change—in particular, technological lock-in, the double-edged nature of technology, and uneven power relations—help to explain the political dynamics of this debate. Our analysis highlights the divergent perspectives regarding how these technologies interact with environmental problems, as well as the risks and opportunities they present. Yet, as we argue in the article, developments so far suggest that these dynamics are not always straightforward in practice.

The agricultural input industry has become more concentrated in the wake of recently announced corporate mergers in the sector. This article examines the environmental implications of corporate concentration in the agricultural input sector and outlines the challenges of establishing effective international policy and governance on this issue. The article makes two arguments. First, corporate concentration matters for food system sustainability. Consolidation in the global seed and agro-chemical industries has been deeply entwined with the rise of industrial agriculture, which has been associated with a host of environmental problems including an increase in agro-chemical use and the loss of agricultural biodiversity. Second, although corporate concentration has important sustainability implications, there is little recognition of the potential connection between these issues in international governance measures. The article outlines a number of factors that discourage the development of policy and governance on these issues, including the lack of a clear scientific consensus on how best to promote sustainable agriculture; the weak and fragmented nature of regulatory frameworks and institutions that oversee competition policy and food system sustainability; the power of agribusiness firms to influence policy outcomes; and the complex and distanced nature of the underlying drivers of corporate concentration in the sector.

This forum article highlights three major research trends we have observed in the journal Global Environmental Politics since 2000. First, research has increasingly focused on specific and formal mechanisms of global environmental governance, contributing to more elaborate and refined methodologies that span more scales and levels of analysis. Second, research increasingly has concentrated on the rise of market-based governance mechanisms and the influence of private actors, reflecting a broader shift among policymakers toward liberal approaches to governance. Third, over this time empirical research has shifted significantly toward analyzing issues through a lens of climate change, providing valuable insights into environmental change, but narrowing the journal’s empirical focus. These trends, which overlap in complex ways, arise partly from shifts in real-world politics, partly from broader shifts in the overall field of global environmental politics (GEP), and partly from the advancing capacity of GEP theories and methodologies to investigate the full complexity of local to global governance. This maturing of GEP scholarship does present challenges for the field, however, including the ability of field-defining journals such as Global Environmental Politics to engage a diversity of critical scholarly voices and to influence policy and activism.

Recent years have seen a growing movement toward externally imposed regulations directed specifically at improving TNCs' environmental and social performance. This movement draws on a long history, and its most recent incarnation is largely a reaction to disappointment on the part of many with the results of private voluntary initiatives among global firms. A number of international level initiatives have emerged, including the UN's Global Compact and the inclusion of an environment chapter in the OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises. Because these efforts, while externally driven, are voluntary on the part of firms, there have been growing calls for a binding international treaty on corporate accountability. Industry has been extremely resistant to this idea. Many see such a treaty as vital for developing countries, as it could bolster their ability and willingness to monitor and enforce environmental regulations. This is especially important in the Global South, as these countries have seen the bulk of the negative environmental impacts of TNCs in recent decades.

Whether or not pollution havens exist in poor countries has been the subject of a great deal of debate in recent decades. This concern is warranted, as the intensity of dirty industry is rising in the developing world just as it is falling in the industrialized world. But identifying pollution havens is extremely difficult in practice. Part of the reason for this is that there are important flaws with the methods and measures used in the pollution havens literature which results in an overly narrow debate. It may be time to abandon the narrowly constructed pollution havens debate in favor of a more open-ended analysis of the linkages between global trade and investment and environmental regulation.