To achieve the Paris Agreement’s temperature goal, fossil fuel production needs to undergo a managed decline. While some frontrunner countries have already begun to adopt policies and measures restricting fossil fuel supply, an outstanding question is how international cooperation in support of a managed decline of fossil fuel production could take shape. This article explores two possible pathways—one following a club model and the other more akin to a multilateral environmental agreement. Specifically, the article discusses the participants in an international agreement; the forum through which cooperation will take place; the modalities, principles, and procedures underpinning the agreement; and the incentives to induce cooperation. The article concludes that the most likely scenario at this juncture is the emergence of club arrangements covering particular fossil fuel sources and groups of actors that, over time, give rise to growing calls for a more coordinated and multilateral response.

Understanding how, why, and whether the trade-offs and tensions around simultaneous implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals are resolved both sustainably and equitably requires an appreciation of power relations across multiple scales of governance. We explore the politics and political economy of how the nexus around food, energy, and water is being governed through initiatives to promote climate-smart agriculture (CSA) as it moves from the global to the local. We combine an analysis of how these interrelationships are being governed (and ungoverned) by key global institutions with reflection on the consequences of this for developing countries that are being targeted by CSA initiatives. In particular, we look at Kenya as a country heavily dependent on agriculture, but also subject to some of the worst effects of climate change and which has been a focus for a range of bilateral and multilateral donors with their preferred visions of CSA. We draw on strands of literature in global environmental politics, political ecology, and the political economy of development to make sense of the power dynamics that characterize the multiscalar politics of how CSA is translated, domesticated, and operationalized in practice.

This article explores the ways in which the “global” governance of the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) intersects with the “local” politics of resource regimes that are enrolled in carbon markets through the production and trade in Certified Emissions Reductions (CERs). It shows how political structures and decision-making procedures set up at the international level to govern the acquisition of CERs through the Kyoto Protocol's CDM interact with and transform national and local level political ecologies in host countries where very different governance structures, political networks, and state-market relations operate. It draws on literature within political ecology and field work in Argentina and Honduras to illustrate and understand the politics of translation that occur when the social and environmental consequences of decisions made within global governance mechanisms, such as the CDM, are followed through to particular sites in the global political economy. It also shows how the outcomes in those sites in turn influence the global politics of the CDM.

This article uses the lens of accountability to explore the shifting strategies of a range of civil society groups in their engagement with key actors in the global regime on climate change. It first reviews traditional strategies aimed at increasing the ‘public accountability’ of governments and UN bodies for agreed actions on climate change. This approach is then compared with the growing tendency to pursue the accountability of private corporations with respect to climate change. These strategies aim, among other things, to promote ‘civil regulation’: that is, governance of the private sector through civil society oversight. The final part of the article reflects on the possibilities and limitations of civil society actors performing such accountability roles in the contemporary politics of climate change and suggests key challenges for future climate advocacy. It argues that success in enhancing the accountability of public and private actors on the issue of climate change has been highly uneven and reflects both the effectiveness of the strategies adopted and the responsiveness of the target actors and institutions.

The politics of natural resource access, control and exploitation assume fundamental relations of social power; they imply them and consolidate them. Environmental issues reflect broader patterns of domination and social exclusion at work in global politics which enable us to understand who benefits from the current distribution of environmental benefits and which social groups shoulder a disproportionate amount of the burden of pollution. The task, however, is not merely to identify those global structures that produce environmental inequities and injustices, but to show how, in some cases, those structures are supported and entrenched by the institutional configurations that we continue to assume are generating the solutions to environmental degradation. Towards this end, I connect debates about the global managerial class and critiques of the prevailing sustainable development historical bloc with more localized studies of the consequences of organized inequality and the strategies adopted by marginalized groups to contest their fate as victims of environmental injustice. Such an approach builds upon the project which Marian Miller began with her enquiries into the Third World in global environmental politics, emphasizing the importance of the global political economy in shaping those political relations. Political and social cleavages of race, class and gender are shown to be key to understanding the global organization of environmental inequality and justice, though it is the neglect of the first two dimensions, in particular, that forms the core concern of this paper. Their importance in understanding patterns of causation (distribution of benefit), process (access, voice, representation) and distribution (of harm) is highlighted through reference to a range of contemporary case studies in the global North and South.

This article focuses on the disjuncture between the regulatory problems generated by the rapid development of, and subsequent trade in crop “genetically modified organisms” (GMOs), and the ability of existing international governance mechanisms to manage the associated human and ecological risks. The article assesses how the globalization of economic activity is reconfiguring patterns of production, investment, regulation and political authority as they relate to the governance of biotechnology. It is argued that our collective ability to provide social and environmental protection from GMO-related risks must be understood in relation to the global economic processes which create the technology and influence the policy processes set up to manage it. This requires an enhanced understanding of the reciprocal relationships between intra- and inter-firm decision-making and global decision-making.

The starting point for a discussion of reform of the global environmental machinery has to be an inquiry into the causes of ineffectiveness of current arrangements. This article argues first that many of the criticisms made of the existing architecture are misplaced while ignoring other key faults. Second, argues that the means of operationalizing an alternative World Environment Organization (WEO) are problematic and may exacerbate existing problems, particularly for developing countries. The article focuses here more on the notion that a WEO should pursue the internalization of environmental externalities. It argues that while this goal is worth pursuing, proposals for a deal-brokering body are unlikely to make much progress in delivering it because of misplaced assumptions about both the existing political order and about the ability of a WEO to remedy current weaknesses.