Each day, agriculture becomes more highly integrated into an increasing number of industries. Agriculture has never been only about food; cotton, tobacco, and other nonfood agricultural commodities (not to speak of spices and luxury foods, such as sugar and coffee) have for centuries been important to livelihoods and the economy. Yet, thanks to developments in biotechnology, the scope of agriculture is broadening quickly, and it may expand significantly in the coming years.

This article makes a case for centering animal life in conceptions of environmental, agrarian, and dietary change. It begins with a brief discussion of the extinction spasm and defaunation and suggests that envisaging landscapes of animal “ghosts” might help to evoke the ecological impoverishment this entails. Landscapes of ghosts are then set against the soaring populations of animals in industrial livestock production, stressing both the extensive biophysical implications and the intensive interspecies relations of these systems, in which individual animals can be seen to be reduced to little more than fungible “things.” The core argument is that the fast-changing conditions of both wild and domesticated animals, and their interrelationships, are an important and often underappreciated aspect of global agrarian, and efforts to confront this course are fundamental to prospects for a more sustainable world.

Desirable responses to global environmental challenges are increasingly being characterized as requiring transformational social change. Keeping pace with this growing imperative, discourses of resilience are shifting away from an emphasis on durability toward more progressive themes. After briefly revisiting the interdisciplinary origin of social-ecological resilience, some lingering concerns about its theoretical underpinnings and practical implications are raised. With the theme of transformational change in mind, two sets of questions are posed—aiming to stimulate discussion of resilience as a boundary object, and resilience in practice. The first set of questions is intended to draw attention to differences between analysis and normativity in resilience discourses, as well as to how this plays out across different scales. The latter questions problematize the predominance of localism in resilience discourses and seek to advance the critique of its inherent neoliberalism.

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.

This article contributes to comparative environmental politics by integrating comparative analysis with debates about ontological politics as well as science and technology studies. Comparative environmental analysis makes two tacit assumptions: that the subject of comparison (e.g., an environmental policy framework) is mobile and can be detached from its contexts; and that studying this subject in more than one location can identify its diffusion and implementation anywhere. These assumptions are sites of ontological politics by predetermining (or restricting) environmental outcomes. Environmental analysis needs to consider how its own comparative acts might reify supposedly global frameworks rather than acknowledging how different localities appropriate and give meaning to them in diverse ways. The concept of civic epistemologies illustrates how domestic politics are organized around supposedly global concepts, rather than how global concepts diffuse around the world, as illustrated here by a comparative analysis of the United Nations’ Green Economy Initiative.

This article considers the role of generalization in comparative case studies, using as exemplars the contributions to this special issue on climate change politics. As a research practice, generalization is a logical argument for extending one’s claims beyond the data, positing a connection between events that were studied and those that were not. No methodological tradition is exempt from the requirement to demonstrate a compelling logic of generalization. The article presents a taxonomy of the logics of generalization underlying diverse research methodologies, which often go unstated and unexamined. I introduce the concept of resonance groups, which provide a causeway for cross-system generalization from single case studies. Overall the results suggest that in the comparative study of complex political systems, case study research is, ceteris paribus , on par with large-N research with respect to generalizability.

This forum places CEE at COP10 in the context of wider theoretical debates about global environmental governance. This special issue enhances our understanding of governance by examining how ideas travel and develop at meetings before they become the official documents and announcements that are the more common foci of such papers. The articles in this issue of GEP open up the ‘black box’ of decision-making and allow us to gain a better understanding of global environmental governance, in theory and in practice. These articles are firmly in line with International Political Economy approaches, allowing us to reflect on how regulations can mirror and deepen existing global inequalities, revealing the continuing power of epistemic communities, and demonstrating the important role of ideas. The special issue allows us insight into how global conventions work, how alliances are formed, how particular ideas emerge, and crucially, how alternatives are rendered silent and invisible.