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.

The palm oil industry is increasingly certifying its activities as “sustainable,” “responsible,” and “conflict-free.” This trend does not represent a breakthrough toward better governance, this article argues, but primarily reflects a business strategy to channel criticism toward “unsustainable” palm oil, while promoting the value for protecting rain forests of corporate social responsibility, international trade, industrial production, and industry-guided certification. Illegalities and loopholes riddle certification in Indonesia and Malaysia, the two main sources of certified palm oil; at the same time, palm oil imports are rising in markets not demanding certification. Across the tropics, oil palm plantations linked to deforestation and human rights abuses are continuing to expand as companies navigate weak governance rules, and as sales shift across markets and inside global supply chains. Theoretically, this analysis advances the understanding of why and how the power of business is rising over the narratives and institutions of global agricultural governance.

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.

One of the biggest challenges for global environmental governance is “the problem of consumption.” The task involves far more than simply influencing what consumers choose, use, and discard. It requires a concerted effort to address the systemic drivers—including advertising, economic growth, technology, income inequality, corporations, population growth, and globalization—that shape the quantities, costs, and distribution of consumer goods. Current efforts to green consumption are “improving” management on many measures, such as per unit energy and resource use. Yet, this essay argues, such “progress” needs to be seen in the context of a rising global population and rising per capita consumption, where states and companies displace much of the costs of consumption far from those who are doing most of the consuming. This raises many questions about the value of sub-global measures for evaluating the environmental effectiveness of efforts to govern consumption. It also suggests the need for more global cooperation to mitigate the ecological effects of consumption. Current international initiatives such as the Marrakech process to draft a 10-Year Framework on “sustainable production and consumption,” however, will need to go well beyond simply promoting efficiencies, new technologies, and a greening of household consumption. Researchers in global environmental politics can assist here by probing even further into the complexity of governing the drivers and consequences of consumption, then working to thread these findings into the international policy process.

Private consumption expenditures are now more than 4 times higher than in 1960. The globalization of ever-more growth and consumption has come, however, at a price: global chains of cause-and-effect that obscure social, environmental and ethical responsibility. The result in practice is a global order that accepts the deaths of millions of young people in dangerous and unhealthy environments as tragic, but largely unavoidable, accidents of economic progress. The history of what most call traffic “accidents” is revealing. The hope at the 1896 inquest into the first “accidental death” was this would never happen again. But hope is not action. Today, traffic injures as many as 50 million and kills over one million people ever year. It is, however, no accident that tragedies like these are “accidents” rather than “sacrifices,” as such language softens criticism of the moral, social and ecological crises arising from the current global consumptive order.

More than six million people die of cancer every year. Over the next two decades, the World Health Organization predicts global cancer rates will rise to 10 million deaths annually. What is the impact of the global political and economic processes of environmental change on cancer rates? Why, given the strong intuitive reasons to worry about the carcinogenic effects of global environmental change, is there so little research on this topic? What is the political role of science, corporations, nongovernmental organizations and international institutions on cancer research and cancer rates? What is the impact of global patterns of trade, financing, production and consumption on research and rates? This article charts the current social science literature on cancer and global environmental change with the hope of encouraging scholars of global environmental politics to pursue a new research agenda around questions like these.