Environmental Politics

This book explores the legal and political issues that underlie the campaign for animal rights and the opposition to it. Addressing ethical questions about ownership, protection against unjustified suffering, and the ability of animals to make their own choices free from human control, its chapters offer numerous different perspectives on animal rights and animal welfare. They show that whatever one's ultimate conclusions, the relationship between human beings and nonhuman animals is being fundamentally rethought. The book offers a modern treatment of that rethinking.

When policies of or activities within one country and generation cause deleterious consequences for those of other nations and later generations, they can constitute serious injustices. Hence, anthropogenic climate change poses not only a global environmental threat, but also one to international and intergenerational justice. The avoidance of such injustice has been recognized as a primary objective of global climate policy, and this book aims to comprehend the nature of this objective–to explore how climate change raises issues of international and intergenerational justice and to consider how the design of a global climate regime might these aims into account. Enlisting conceptual tools from ethics as well as legal and political theory, it treats justice as concerned with equity and responsibility and considers how each is undermined by climate change but might be incorporated into climate policy. Various theoretical problems in applying norms of equity and responsibility across borders, over time, and to nations for their greenhouse emissions are considered, and responses are given to these challenges. Finally, an outline for a global climate policy that adequately incorporates norms of justice is articulated and defended, along with a case for procedural fairness in policy development processes. Demonstrating how political theory can usefully contribute toward better understanding the proper human response to climate change as well as how the climate case offers insights into resolving contemporary controversies within political theory, the book offers a case study in which the application of normative theory to policy allows readers to better understand both.

Ecological citizenship cannot be fully articulated in either liberal or civic republican terms. It is, rather, an example and an inflection of ‘post‐cosmopolitan’ citizenship. Ecological citizenship focuses on duties as well as rights, and its conception of political space is not the state or the municipality, or the ideal speech community of cosmopolitanism, but the ‘ecological footprint’.

Ecological citizenship contrasts with fiscal incentives as a way of encouraging people to act more sustainably, in the belief that the former is more compatible with the long‐term and deeper shifts of attitude and behaviour that sustainability requires. This book offers an original account of the relationship between liberalism and sustainability, arguing that the former's commitment to a plurality of conceptions of the good entails a commitment to so‐called ‘strong’ forms of the latter.

How to make an ecological citizen? The potential of formal high school citizenship education programmes is examined through a case study of the recent implementation of the compulsory citizenship curriculum in the UK.

Global climate change challenges standard theories of moral accountability. Many of us take it for granted that we ought to cooperate to tackle it, but where does this requirement come from? Climate change does very great harm, to our fellow humans and to the non-human world, but no one causes it on their own and it isn’t the result of intentionally collective action. What, moreover, should each of us be doing in the absence of effective global-level cooperation? Is there anything we can do, as individuals, that will leave us able to live with ourselves? This book responds to these challenges. It makes the moral case for collective action on climate change by appealing to moralized collective self-interest, collective ability to aid, and an expanded understanding of collective responsibility for harm. On top of these, it argues that collective action is something we owe to ourselves, as moral agents, because without it we are left facing marring choices. In the absence of collective action, it is argued that the primary individual duty is to promote such action, with a supplementary duty to aid victims directly. The argument is not that we should not be cutting our own emissions: this can be a necessary part of bringing about collective action or alleviating harm. However, such ‘green’ lifestyle choices cannot be straightforwardly defended as duties in their own right, and they should not take priority over trying to bring about collective change.

The global governance of climate change is in flux. Conventional strategies of addressing climate change through universal, interstate negotiations—the most prominent of which is the Kyoto Protocol—have been stymied by the gaps that exist between the negotiating powers of states, rendering such initiatives stagnant and ineffectual. In response, a number of new actors and processes have begun to challenge the traditionally exclusive authority of nation-states to create rules and manage environmental problems via multi-national treaties. Dozens of innovative climate response initiatives, or “governance experiments,” have emerged at multiple levels of politics and across multiple jurisdictions: individuals, cities, states/provinces, corporations, and even new multilateral initiatives. This book explains how and why these new governance experiments have emerged, drawing upon a database of such initiatives to ascertain how these initiatives fit together and how they influence what is defined as environmental governance. In assessing the relational impact of these initiatives (whether they complement each other or clash; whether they can be scaled up or down; and whether they can be expanded beyond their current jurisdictional and geographic boundaries), the book provides insight into whether this experimentation is likely to result in an effective response to climate change. Additionally, it draws broader conclusions about how we understand global governance, addressing questions of how we understand authority and what we accept as modes of rule-making in global political spaces.

The basic task of this book is to explore what, exactly, is meant by ‘justice’ in definitions of environmental and ecological justice. It examines how the term is used in both self-described environmental justice movements and in theories of environmental and ecological justice. The central argument is that a theory and practice of environmental justice necessarily includes distributive conceptions of justice, but must also embrace notions of justice based in recognition, capabilities, and participation. Throughout, the goal is the development of a broad, multi-faceted, yet integrated notion of justice that can be applied to both relations regarding environmental risks in human populations and relations between human communities and non-human nature.

When constructing environmental policies in democratic regimes, there is a need for a theory that can be used not only by academics but also by politicians and activists. So why has the major part of environmental ethics failed to penetrate environmental policy and serve as its rationale? Obviously, there is a gap between the questions that environmental philosophers discuss and the issues that motivate environmental activists. Avner de‐Shalit attempts to bridge this gap by combining tools of political philosophy with questions of environmental ethics and environmental politics. He defends a radical position in relation to both environmental protection and social policies, in order to put forward a political theory, which is not only philosophically sound, but also relevant to the practice of environmental activism. The author argues that several directions in environmental ethics can be at odds with the contemporary political debates surrounding environmental politics. He then goes on to examine the environmental scope of liberalism, communitarianism, participatory democracy, and socialism, and concludes that while elements of liberalism and communitarianism may support environmental protection, it is participatory democracy and a modified version of socialism that are crucial for protecting the environment.

Over the last thirty years, the European Union (EU) has created a system of environmental governance in Europe. With a large number of legislative measures, the EU's environmental policy is broad in scope, extensive in detail, and often stringent in effect. Environmental governance also extends to the ways in which decision-making on environmental policy has become institutionalised within Europe, both at the level of the EU itself and in the practices of the member states. This book seeks to understand this new system of environmental governance both at the European level and at the level of member states. It argues that the system is multi-level, horizontally complex, evolving, and incomplete. Locating developments at the European level in theories of European integration, it goes on to examine the extent of convergence and divergence in environmental policy among six member states: Germany, Spain, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom. It then looks at the operation of the system of environmental governance through an examination of policy case studies before examining the wider political significance of these developments.

In this first ever theoretical treatment of the environmental justice movement, David Schlosberg demonstrates the development of a new form of ‘critical’ pluralism, in both theory and practice. Taking into account the evolution of environmentalism and pluralism over the course of the century, Schlosberg argues that the environmental justice movement and new pluralist theories now represent a considerable challenge to both conventional pluralist thought and the practices of the major groups in the US environmental movement. Much of recent political theory has been aimed at how to acknowledge and recognize, rather than deny, the diversity inherent in contemporary life. In practice, the myriad ways people define and experience the ‘environment’ has given credence to a form of environmentalism that takes difference seriously. The environmental justice movement, with its base in diversity, its networked structure, and its communicative practices and demands, exemplifies the attempt to design political practices beyond those one would expect from a standard interest group in the conventional pluralist model. The book is arranged in four parts: I. Environmentalism and Difference: The Pluralist Challenge (two chapters); II. Critical Pluralism in Theory (two chapters); III. Environmental Justice: Critical Pluralism in Practice (two chapters); and IV. Conclusion (one chapter).

Contributors to this edited book consider the normative issues at stake in the relationship between environmental sustainability and social justice. If future generations are owed justice, what should we bequeath them? Is ‘sustainability’ an appropriate medium for environmentalists to express their demands? Is environmental protection compatible with justice within generations? Is environmental sustainability a luxury when social peace has broken down? The contested nature of sustainable development is considered––is it a useful concept at all any longer? Is it reconcilable with capital accumulation? Liberal––particularly Rawlsian––and socialist notions of justice are tested against the demands of sustainability, and policy instruments for sustainability––such as environmental taxation––are examined for their distributive effects.