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The Oxford Handbook of COMPARATIVE ENVIRONMENTAL POLITICS
The Oxford Handbook of COMPARATIVE ENVIRONMENTAL POLITICS
Edited by
JEANNIE SOWERS
STACY D. VANDEVEER and ERIKA WEINTHAL
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above.
You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2022049850
ISBN 978–0–19–751503–7
DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780197515037.001.0001
Printed by Integrated Books International, United States of America
Jeannie Sowers, Stacy D. VanDeveer, and Erika Weinthal
PART I STATES AND ENVIRONMENTAL
1. The Environmental State and Its Limits
James Meadowcroft
2. California’s Environmental Policy Leadership
David Vogel
3. Assessing 30 Years of Neoliberal Environmental Management in Chile: Effective, Democratic or Neither?
Javiera Barandiarán
4.
Kathryn Hochstetler
5. National Climate Mitigation Policy in Europe
Paul Tobin and Louise Wylie
6. Governing Flood and Climate Risks in the Netherlands and Hungary: A Comparative Analysis
Elizabeth A. Albright
7. The Politics of Climate Disasters, Social Inequality, and Perceptions of Government Assistance
Isabella Alcañiz and Ana Ivelisse Sanchez-Rivera
8. Implementation of International Environmental Law: A Comparative Perspective 141
Maria Ivanova, Natalia Escobar-Pemberthy, Anna Dubrova, and Candace Famiglietti
9. Comparative International Fisheries Management 166
Elizabeth R. DeSombre
PART II METHODS AND CONCEPTUAL CONSIDERATIONS
10. Interpretive Methodologies, Quantitative Methods, and Comparative Environmental Politics 187
J. Samuel Barkin, V. Miranda Chase, and Saskia van Wees
11. Ethnography in Comparative Environmental Politics: Insights from the Water and Waste Fields
Raul Pacheco-Vega
200
12. An Intersectional Exploration of Climate Institutions 223
Annica Kronsell, Gunnhildur Lily Magnusdottir, Nanna Rask, and Benedict E. Singleton
13. Gender and Comparative Environmental Politics: Examining Population Debates Through Gender Lenses 240 Nicole Detraz
PART III MOVEMENTS AND ACTIVISM
14. Environmental Justice, Climate Justice, and Animal Liberation Movements: Confronting the Problems of Social Difference 263
David N. Pellow
15. Civil Society, Networks, and Contention Around Environmental Issues
Jen Iris Allan and Jennifer Hadden
16. Time and Place in Climate Activism: Three Urgency-Induced Debates
Joost de Moor
281
299
17. The Comparative Politics of Environmental Activism in Russia: Strategic Adaptation to Authoritarianism 317
Laura A. Henry
18. Anglo Fears: Rejection of Climate Change and Anglo Anxiety 335
Peter J. Jacques
19. Civil Disobedience, Sabotage, and Violence in US Environmental Activism 356
Joseph M. Brown
PART IV MARKETS AND FIRMS IN COMPARATIVE ENVIRONMENTAL POLITICS
20. Territory, Private Authority, and Rights: The Place of Land Rights in Sustainable Agriculture and Forest Certification 377
22. Continuity and Change in Carbon Market Politics 417 Carley Chavara, Christian Elliott, Matthew Hoffmann, and Matthew Paterson
PART V ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE AND RIGHTS
23. The Comparative Politics of Environmental Justice 437
Kemi Fuentes-George
24. Critical Perspectives on Representation, Equity, and Rights: Developing a Comparative Politics of Environmental Justice 456
Kimberly R. Marion Suiseeya
25. Globalization of Environmental Justice: A Framework for Comparative Research 475 Prakash Kashwan
26. Rights of Nature: Institutions, Law, and Policy for Sustainable Development 499
Craig M. Kauffman
27. Implementing Environmental Rights: Reviewing the Evidence from Research and Practice 518
Joshua C. Gellers and Chris Jeffords
28. Gendering the Human Right to Water in the Context of Sustainable Development 538
Farhana Sultana
PART VI NATURAL RESOURCES AND POLITICAL ECONOMY
29. Green Industrial Policy in Comparative Perspective: Supporting Renewable Energy Industry Development in Emerging Economies 559
Joanna I. Lewis
30. Natural Resources and the Politics of Distribution 577
Mohannad Al-Suwaidan and Nimah Mazaheri
31. Temporality, Limited Statehood, and Africa’s Abandoned Mines 592
W. R. Nadège Compaoré and Nathan Andrews
32. Illegal Wildlife Trade in the Mekong: The Interplay of Actors, Legal Governance, and Political Economy 609
Songkhun Nillasithanukroh, Ekta Patel, Edmund Malesky, and Erika Weinthal
PART VII THE POLITICS OF ENERGY TRANSITIONS
33. Fracked Taxpayers and Communities: Shale Economics in the US and Argentina 633
Shanti Gamper-Rabindran
34. Renewable Energy, Energy Poverty, and Climate Change: Opportunities and (Many) Challenges 658
Michaël Aklin
35. Renewable Energy Supply Chains and the Just Transition 679
Dustin Mulvaney
36. The Rise and Fall of Fossil Fuels: Two Moments in the Energy History of the Middle East and Their Global Consequences 696
Dan Rabinowitz
PART VIII CITIES AND SUSTAINABILITY
37. Cities and the Environment in Africa: An Agency-Centered Research Agenda 711
Christopher Gore
38. Reclaiming the Circular Economy: Informal Work and Grassroots Power 730
Manisha Anantharaman
39. Urban Climate Adaptation: Discontents and Alternative Politics 751
Eric Chu and Linda Shi
PART IX ENVIRONMENTS, RESOURCES, AND VIOLENCE
40. War and Environmental Politics: A Comparative Perspective 775
Jeannie Sowers and Erika Weinthal
41. Climate and Conflict: Lessons from the Syria Case 797
Marwa Daoudy
42. The Integration of Conservation and Security: Political Ecologies of Violence and the Illegal Wildlife Trade 814
Rosaleen Duffy and Francis Massé
About the Contributors
Michaël Aklin, Department of Political Science, University of Pittsburgh
Elizabeth A. Albright, Nicholas School of the Environment, Duke University
Isabella Alcañiz, Department of Government and Politics, University of Maryland
Jen Iris Allan, School of Law and Politics, Cardiff University
Mohannad Al-Suwaidan, The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University
Manisha Anantharaman, Justice, Community, and Leadership, Saint Mary’s College of California
Nathan Andrews, Department of Political Science, McMaster University
Javiera Barandiarán, Department of Global Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara
J. Samuel Barkin, Department of Conflict Resolution, Human Security, and Global Governance, University of Massachusetts Boston
Tim Bartley, Department of Sociology, Washington University in St. Louis
Joseph M. Brown, Department of Political Science, University of Massachusetts Boston
V. Miranda Chase, Department of Political Science, San Diego State University
Carley Chavara, Department of Political Science, University of Toronto
Eric Chu, Department of Human Ecology, University of California Davis
Marwa Daoudy, Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University
Joost de Moor, Department of Political Science, Stockholm University
Elizabeth R. DeSombre, Department of Environmental Studies, Wellesley College
Nicole Detraz, Department of Political Science, University of Memphis
Anna Dubrova, Department of Conflict Resolution, Human Security, and Global Governance, University of Massachusetts Boston
Rosaleen Duffy, Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Sheffield
Christian Elliott, Department of Political Science, University of Toronto
Natalia Escobar-Pemberthy, Department of International Business, Universidad EAFIT
Candace Famiglietti, Department of Conflict Resolution, Human Security, and Global Governance, University of Massachusetts Boston
Kemi Fuentes-George, Department of Political Science & Environmental Studies, Middlebury College
Shanti Gamper-Rabindran, Graduate School of Public and International Affairs, University of Pittsburgh
Joshua C. Gellers, Department of Political Science and Public Administration, University of North Florida
Christopher Gore, Department of Politics and Public Administration, Toronto
Metropolitan University
Jennifer Hadden, Department of Government and Politics, University of Maryland
Laura A. Henry, Department of Government and Legal Studies, Bowdoin College
Kathryn Hochstetler, Department of International Development and Political Science, London School of Economics
Matthew Hoffmann, Department of Political Science, University of Toronto
Maria Ivanova, School of Public Policy and Urban Affairs, Northeastern University
Peter J. Jacques, School of Politics, Security, and International Affairs, University of Central Florida
Chris Jeffords, Department of Economics, Indiana University of Pennsylvania
Prakash Kashwan, Environmental Studies Program, Brandeis University
Craig M. Kauffman, Department of Political Science, University of Oregon
Annica Kronsell, School of Global Studies, Gothenburg University
Joanna I. Lewis, Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University
Gunnhildur Lily Magnusdottir, Department of Political Science, Malmö University
Edmund Malesky, Department of Political Science, Duke University
Francis Massé, Department of Geography and Environmental Sciences, Northumbria University
Nimah Mazaheri, Department of Political Science, Tufts University
James Meadowcroft, Department of Political Science, Carleton University, Canada
Dustin Mulvaney, Environmental Studies Department, San José State University
W. R. Nadège Compaoré, Department of Political Science, University of Toronto Mississauga
Songkhun Nillasithanukroh, Department of Political Science, Duke University
Raul Pacheco-Vega, Methods Lab, Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales (FLACSO) Sede México
Ekta Patel, Nicholas School of the Environment/Sanford School of Public Policy, Duke University
Matthew Paterson, Department of Politics, University of Manchester
David N. Pellow, Department of Environmental Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara
Dan Rabinowitz, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Tel-Aviv University
Nanna Rask, School of Global Studies, University of Gothenburg
Ana Ivelisse Sanchez-Rivera, Department of Government and Politics, University of Maryland
Linda Shi, Department of City and Regional Planning, Cornell University
Benedict E. Singleton, School of Global Studies, University of Gothenburg
Jeannie Sowers, Department of Political Science, University of New Hampshire
Kimberly R. Marion Suiseeya, Department of Political Science, Northwestern University
Farhana Sultana, Department of Geography, Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, Syracuse University
Paul Tobin, Department of Politics, University of Manchester
Hamish van der Ven, Department of Wood Science, University of British Columbia
Stacy D. VanDeveer, Department of Conflict Resolution, Human Security, and Global Governance, University of Massachusetts Boston
Saskia van Wees, Department of Political Science, University of Florida
David Vogel, Department of Political Science, Haas School of Business, UC Berkeley, California
Erika Weinthal, Nicholas School of the Environment, Duke University
Louise Wylie, Department of Politics, University of Manchester
Introduction
The Scope and Diversity of Comparative Environmental Politics
Jeannie Sowers, Stacy D. VanDeveer, and Erika Weinthal
Comparative environmental politics (CEP) is a vibrant field of scholarship and practice that addresses a range of environmental issues facing communities, non-state actors, and nation-states. It draws not only on the disciplinary study of politics and policy but, as this volume shows, also is enriched by interdisciplinary insights from anthropology, geography, sociology, law, and development studies. In contrast to global environmental politics, comparative environmental politics has a broader geographic and thematic reach, drawing upon experiences of most of the world’s population with diverse environmental issues. The intensifying climate crisis and the deepening burden of pollution and ecological destruction has accentuated structural inequalities associated with poverty, gender, caste, race, and region. This volume thus reflects increased scholarly interest in environmental rights, environmental mobilization and movements, and non-state forms of political engagement. Moreover, contestation and regulation of environmental issues can no longer be relegated to the margins of formal politics anywhere. As James Meadowcroft’s contribution to this volume notes, some version of the “environmental state” is here to stay, and the governance of environmental issues is increasingly recognized as central to political economy, political theory, political behavior, and political institutions.
In the decade since Steinberg and VanDeveer (2012) published Comparative Environmental Politics (MIT Press), CEP scholarship has embraced new questions and methods even as it seeks to address enduring questions in the broader field of comparative politics. This volume brings together cutting-edge research that tackles important environmental issues around the world using a range of theoretical and methodological approaches. We include leading scholars in particular areas of research and include new voices to offer innovative perspectives from multiple disciplines on emerging challenges and debates in the field of CEP. The chapter authors seek to capture current controversies and debates in their areas of interest and to make an original argument about how their work fits more broadly into the study of CEP. The aims of this volume are two-fold: to illustrate some of the main theoretical debates and critical thematic issues that have emerged in the field and to include a
broad cross-section of scholars. All the chapters, regardless of their country focus or comparative research design, take on the challenging task of synthesizing what they see as the state of art in their respective thematic areas and indicating where additional research could yield fruitful inquiry.
Scope and Method in Comparative Environmental Politics
Comparative politics is characterized by the enduring importance of domestic institutions, actors, and political processes, and situates these in broader transnational and regional developments. In contrast to some of the dominant framings in international relations, which emphasize the homogenizing impacts of the global economy and global governance, comparative politics is concerned with examining variation and diversity as well as commonalities. Methods and approaches employed in the field are equally diverse, in ongoing conversation with a variety of social science traditions and developments.
The contributors to this volume illustrate the diverse strands that characterize the field of comparative politics. Some authors focus on an in-depth case study of a single country or subnational jurisdiction (such as a US state), drawing on significant fieldwork and indepth knowledge of domestic political dynamics and state–society relations. This method has long generated some of the most insightful research in comparative politics and is well represented in this volume in the chapters by David Vogel on California’s environmental leadership, Javiera Barandiarán on the effects of Chile’s neoliberalism on environmental governance, Laura Henry on the effects of Russia’s turn to authoritarianism on environmental activism, Marwa Daoudy on drought and conflict in Syria, Joseph Brown on strategies of civil disobedience in US environmentalism, and Isabella Alcañiz and Ana Ivelisse SanchezRivera exploring whom voters blame in the wake of Hurricane Maria’s devastating impacts on Puerto Rico.
Other chapters employ an explicitly comparative framework across two or more political contexts to explain causes of variation in environmental policy formation, organizational capacity, public opinion, and social movement advocacy. These include Christopher Gore’s chapter on urban environmental politics in several African cities, Shanti Gamper-Rabindran’s chapter on fracking in the United States and Argentina, Songkhun Nilliasithanukroh et al. on illegal wildlife trade in the Mekong Basin countries, Elizabeth Albright’s contribution comparing flood risk management in the Netherlands and Hungary, Prakash Kashwan’s comparison of advocacy for environmental justice in India and the United States, and the intersectional analysis of four Swedish governmental agencies that include mandates to address climate change by Annica Kronsell et al.
Other authors examine comparative environmental performance across a much broader number of cases. These range from looking at the implementation of climate mitigation policies across European countries, as in the chapter by Paul Tobin and Louise Wylie, to comparing the effectiveness of the approximately 20 interstate regional fisheries management organizations established for various fish stocks and marine regions in Beth
DeSombre’s chapter. Maria Ivanova et al. use a dataset of 13 countries that includes cases from the Global North and the Global South to analyze variation in implementing multilateral environmental treaties and, in doing so, undermine notions that environmental performance is confined to high-income countries. In addition, Peter Jacques’s contribution explores why and how climate science denialism remains so robust in “Anglo” countries such as Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
Yet other chapters draw on traditions of political theory, gender theory, and human rights to explore normative claims and new ways to conceive of environmental rights and obligations to humans and non-humans. David Pellow, for instance, argues that climate, environment, and animal liberation movements can engage in more deeply intersectional practice by emulating the radical institutional reforms called for by anti-racism and abolitionist movements. Nicole Detraz uses a gender lens to explore discourses associated with debates about the global human population as they play out in the US context, seeking to problematize and interrogate them. Farhana Sultana argues that a gender perspective is essential to understand the various dimensions of the human right to water. Eric Chu and Linda Shi critique dominant climate adaptation discourses in urban planning, providing examples of alternatives that would more adequately meld climate adaptation and environmental justice concerns.
The study of CEP, as shown above, is not limited to scholars working in the discipline of political science. Indeed, the field draws on the much broader sweep of environmental studies to ask questions about power, governance, and distribution of human welfare with insights from anthropology, geology, urban studies, and sociology. The contributions of these disciplines in broadening the contours of environmental politics include the chapters by Christopher Gore on urban environmental anthropology, Manisha Anantharaman on ethnographies of informal work and the circular economy in India, and Raul Pacheco-Vega on employing ethnographic methods to study water and waste.
Several chapters in this volume call for more consideration of underutilized approaches in both method and methodology. Notably, the chapter by Barkin et al. challenges CEP scholars to engage in more “methodological creativity” by employing interpretive epistemology alongside quantitative methods, a relatively rare combination in the field.
In exploring trends over the past decade, the Handbook highlights the growth in scholarship about a broader range of countries and regions than the initial focus on Europe and the United States, with growth in coverage of “developing” countries, authoritarian states, and the Global South. Important work on globally influential countries such as Brazil, China, South Africa, and India is growing rapidly, as is work that compares cases in the Global South and grapples thematically with issues of great salience to a broader range of countries. In this volume, the expanded geographic scope is well captured in contributions that draw on extensive fieldwork and field knowledge of non-Western contexts. These include the chapters by Barandiarán on Chile, Alcañiz and Sanchez-Rivera on Puerto Rico, Pacheco-Vega on Mexico, Henry on Russia, Kashwan on India, Kauffman on Ecuador, al-Suwaidan and Mazaheri on rentier states in the Persian Gulf, also examined in the chapter by Rabinowitz, Songhkhun et al. on the Mekong Basin, Gore on African cities, Anantharaman on India, Daoudy on Syria, and Duffy and Massé on South Africa. This trend is also seen in comparative studies of energy transitions and industrial policy in lowand middle-income countries (e.g., Hochstetler 2021; Lewis, this volume).
Furthermore, comparative regional studies, for example of Africa and Latin America, are also on the rise. Beyond simply including more of the world’s states and societies in CEP scholarship, however, this work is increasingly recognized as theory-generating and not just testing theoretical propositions developed elsewhere. In other words, conceptual and theoretical frameworks constructed and developed mostly via social science research in and about Europe and North America are being challenged, augmented, or replaced by scholarship about the rest of the world. For example, Kate Neville’s (2021) work develops a framework for understanding contestation and resistance to energy projects based on her research in Kenya’s Tana Delta and Canada’s Yukon and deploying scholarship from social mobilization theories and political economy. Kathy Hochstetler’s book (2021) analyzes renewable energy outcomes across countries based on her comparative work on Brazil and South Africa. Hochstetler’s contribution to this volume argues that CEP scholarship should continue to interrogate and de-center the North–South binary in comparative politics scholarship. She also argues that environmental politics scholars should engage more with the classic questions and analytical tools of comparative politics scholarship.
The Handbook also finds new trends in CEP scholarship, particularly in more explicit attention to the comparative study of environmental injustice and intersectional inequities. Environmental hazards are often distributed unequally, reflecting entrenched relationships of inequality and exclusion based on class, caste, racial, gender, citizenship, tribal, and Indigenous ascriptions (see contributions by Compaoré and Andrews, Aklin and Bartley, for example). The unequal distribution of environmental hazards and increased vulnerability to these hazards based on lack of adequate access to healthcare, basic services, and civic representation, among other factors, can be understood as a form of “slow violence” (Nixon 2011). These injustices include colonial origins of land and biodiversity conservation (e.g. chapters by Duffy and Massé, and Fuentes-George), the siting of landfills near communities of color, and lack of access to clean water and air (Marion Suiseeya). Meanwhile Sowers and Weinthal’s chapter draws our attention to the many human rights violations from the growing inclination of military combatants to target and destroy civilian and environmental infrastructure. Globally, the field of environmental justice and rights has examined the role of environmental defenders and activists in protecting the environment and community livelihoods. It has also explored new forms of law and jurisprudence that call into questions patterns of economic growth and consumption, putting forward the rights of nature. Gellers and Jeffords’s contribution seeks to take stock of evidence about whether and under what conditions the increasingly diverse set of “environmental rights” produce meaningful outcomes in implementation.
The question of environmental injustice extends beyond simply that of humans to non-humans. Because politics, broadly understood, is usually considered a domain of collective human action, political science has not embraced animals, plants, insects, and other nonhumans as subjects and agents, as an influential strand of environmental history has done. David Pellow’s chapter argues that scholars and activists should consider how to build upon discursive and conceptual linkages between movements for racial, environmental, climate, and animal justice. The overlaps between considerations of nonhumans, along with claims for the “rights of nature” and struggles against environmental racism are well articulated in the chapters by Kemi Fuentes-George and Craig Kauffman. These chapters outline an important set of questions for CEP scholars moving forward.
Dustin Mulvaney’s contribution links these discussions and CEP research to the growing “just energy transitions” literature.
The remainder of this chapter introduces the major themes of each section by putting the chapters within it in dialogue with each other. We also note where specific chapters speak to important issues raised in other sections.
Part I: States, Domestic Political Institutions, and Policymaking
The nation-state is the traditional locus of environmental policymaking, and Part I takes stock of advances in studies of state policy and practice. The chapters explore the growth and scope of environmental regulation in various countries, the turn to neoliberalism, and recent rollbacks in environmental regulation under right-populist regimes, as in Chile. The contributions also examine subnational variation in effectiveness, particularly in federal systems, and the impact of domestic politics on broader environmental issues and the design and implementation of international environmental regimes. Variations in state capacity and legacies of state formation shape both supranational and subnational forms of environmental governance.
James Meadowcroft’s “The Environmental State and Its Limits” asks us to reflect on the accomplishments, the very demonstrable limits, and the continuing potential of decades of effort to “green” states since the 1960s. Air pollution issues and regulation in wealthier countries offer illustrative examples of substantial environmental achievements in many countries, alongside persistent failures to grapple with the ecological and human health challenges. Meadowcroft traces the construction of contemporary understandings of the “environment” and the parallel idea that states are responsible for various forms of environmental protection through attempts to regulate various undesirable outcomes. While such regulation is often “ratcheted up” over time, involving changing scientific and technical understandings alongside political activism and advocacy, the limits of this approach are manifest in the long list of current air pollution-related environmental challenges. Meadowcroft challenges researchers and practitioners to ask questions about the potential of environmental states to move beyond regulating adverse impacts toward a focus on transforming production and consumption in more sustainable directions.
David Vogel’s chapter, “California’s Environmental Policy Leadership,” focuses on one of the globe’s leading environmental policy entities: the US state of California. He explores several dimensions of California’s environmental leadership and the impact of this leadership well beyond California’s borders, with particular attention to energy, climate change, air pollution, and chemicals regulation. This work connects the California “case” to US and comparative environmental federalism and adds to scholarship comparing national and subnational public sector leaders and political processes around the globe (e,g., Selin and VanDeveer 2015).
Javiera Barandiarán’s contribution takes us to Chile, focusing on how neoliberal ideas, assumptions, and goals are embedded in environmental policies through state institutions and constitutional provisions. Her work, which deploys scholarship from the
interdisciplinary field of science and technology studies, explores relationships between the state, science, society, and nature—in part via attention to markets for scientific knowledge and the persistent impacts on the credibility and perceived independence of scientific knowledge creation engendered by neoliberal policies. Barandiaran contrasts Chile’s neoliberal constitutional principles, and the neoliberal democracy’s “umpire state” these helped create, with Ecuador’s 2008 constitutional reforms that attempt to center Indigenousinformed concepts of “good living.” She calls for more research attention to diverse civic epistemologies institutionalized in states and societies and what impacts these have on environmental rights, policies, and the organization and influence of scientific knowledge.
The next contribution, “National Climate Mitigation Policy in Europe” by Paul Tobin and Louise Wylie, focuses on the well-studied and dynamic area of European climate politics. They note that Europe’s reputation for climate change policy leadership often masks huge variance in stringency, content, consistency, and impacts of national climate change policies across European states. Furthermore, a series of political, economic, and public health crises in Europe since 2010 differentially impacted national climate policymaking. They argue that the frequent focus on climate leaders—and the simple notion that other states are laggards—obscures substantial political variance and complexity. It also hides the unequal impacts of climate change on marginalized populations and obscures the host of actors beyond the state engaged in climate policymaking.
Kathryn Hochstetler’s chapter takes the critique of simplistic binaries between environmental leaders and laggards far beyond Europe. She argues that the persistent division in much environmental politics scholarship between countries in the Global South and the Global North does not serve well either the study of the environment or of comparative politics. A small number of advanced industrialized countries still dominate the environmental literature, while the vast diversity of environmental ambitions, outcomes, and politics in the Global South remains understudied. As she argues, “The understudy of most of the world’s countries, most of which are developing countries, and the understudy of critical comparative politics topics in them means that we too often work with negative concepts once we move outside the advanced industrialized world.” Ascribed deficits in state capacity, financing, and leadership all too often figure in lieu of robust comparative analysis of developing countries. Moreover, the conceptual divide between North and South narrows research agendas in both. Many environmental studies of the Global South continue to focus on such topics as conservation and natural resources rather than exploring the politics of pressing environmental issues regarding cities, service provision, sanitation, and the political system more broadly, although this is changing as some of the chapters in the volume attest. Moreover, studies in and of the Global South increasingly figure prominently in the comparative scholarship on environmental movements and rights, as also demonstrated in the Handbook. Hochstetler further notes that moving beyond and away from assuming a North–South conceptual divide enables comparative scholarship on the rise of populist parties, democratic backsliding, and political polarization that characterize polities such as the United States, Brazil, Hungary, and Turkey.
The next two chapters analyze how policy responses to natural disasters—floods and hurricanes—are shaped by both domestic and transnational factors. Elizabeth Albright’s contribution is a historically informed comparative assessment of climate and flood risk management in the Netherlands and Hungary. Despite substantial differences in geography and political history and institutions, she finds substantial similarities between the
two states’ approaches as both move to reconceptualize and manage flood risks through climate change adaptation lenses. In fact, catastrophic flooding in both countries in the 2000s seems to have pushed states in similar discursive and policy directions and produced similar challenges in terms of reforming and integrating policy approaches across a host of domestic institutions. She also finds barriers to civil society engagement in these policy areas in both countries.
Isabella Alcañiz and Ana Ivelissse Sanchez-Rivera’s chapter, “Climate Disasters, Inequality and Perceptions of Government Assistance,” focuses on the question of who citizens believe is responsible for post-disaster relief and the failures in relief and recovery after a disaster. This focus on post-disaster responsibility attribution draws on experiences following three damaging hurricanes in 2017, with a particular focus on the aftermath of Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico. The chapter, moreover, shows that additional research is needed to understand the comparative politics of climate disasters, given the likely influence of governance structures, partisanship, ideology, and social and economic inequity.
The last two chapters in this section explore how international and regional environmental governance is shaped by domestic capacities and institutional arrangements. Maria Ivanova and her coauthors focus the comparative analysis on states’ implementation of the multilateral environmental agreements (MEAs) they have signed and ratified. The chapter assesses implementation efforts in 13 countries, from the Global North and the Global South, related to four MEAs focused on hazardous waste, persistent organic pollutants, wetlands, and trade in endangered species. Their analysis deploys a database index of MEA implementation that includes information about measures taken by states (and reported by states) regarding national policies, regional collaboration, and data collection and management. Their work demonstrates that, contrary to oft-seen generalizations about countries in the Global South, several such countries perform extremely well—including Rwanda and Vietnam. The authors argue that there is substantial, often overlooked, environmental leadership potential among states in the Global South.
Beth DeSombre’s chapter applies comparative analysis to interstate organizations called regional fisheries management organizations (RFMOs). About 20 RFMOs have been negotiated by states to improve the management of high seas fisheries (fisheries that otherwise are beyond state jurisdiction). Some RFMOs focus on specific fish, such as tuna, halibut, or pollock, in a particular oceanic region (e.g., the Pacific or the Bering Sea), while others seek to regulate multiple fisheries for a region (such as the Mediterranean). The organizations vary in terms of the organization of scientific knowledge, voting procedures, decision rules, monitoring, and enforcement processes. As DeSombre outlines, RFMO regulatory variation is substantial, as is the effectiveness of said regulation across RFMOs.
Part II: Methods and Conceptual Considerations
Since CEP scholars embrace a wide array of qualitative and quantitative methodological choices, we have included a section in the Handbook that focuses specifically on
methods to illuminate the rich methodological diversity and pluralism of the field. Methods used by CEP scholars range from ethnographic field research and archival studies to network analysis and large-N statistical studies. Increasingly, research is carried out in collaboration and partnership with communities, as described by many of the chapters on environmental justice and Indigenous rights. The chapters in the Handbook highlight the broad array of methods deployed to tackle questions relevant to the field of CEP.
The chapter by J. Samuel Barkin, V. Miranda Chase, and Saskia van Wees argues that CEP should interrogate the common assumption that quantitative methods are associated with comparative inference questions while interpretive questions are associated with qualitative methods. These methodological associations, they argue, simply do not have a robust epistemological basis. The chapter, “Interpretive Methodologies, Quantitative Methods and Comparative Environmental Politics,” offers two illustrative case studies of the effective use of quantitative methods for interpretive research without embedding those methods in epistemological positivism. One case examines patterns of environmental performance and foreign policy in India and China while the other explores efforts by Indigenous and traditional communities in the Amazon Basin to oppose dam construction that negatively impacts their communities. The chapter closes by offering important distinctions between method, methodology, and epistemology. Instead, it calls for approaches grounded in methodological pluralism, reflectivity, and creativity, approaches that refuse to blithely assume simplistic connections between particular methods and epistemologies.
Raul Pacheco-Vega’s contribution focuses our attention on the merits of ethnographic research methods and contributions of these to CEP, with reference to studying vulnerable communities. Pacheco-Vega defines ethnography as “the systematic observation of populations and communities with the intention of learning about the cultural inner workings of a societal group.” His chapter draws on research related to bottled water consumption and informal waste picking to illustrate aspects of how ethnographic research can be designed and carried out and some of the contributions it can make to CEP.
Annica Kronsell and her three coauthors’ chapter embarks on an intersectional exploration of climate change institutions in Sweden. Using documentary analysis and interviews they explore how a set of social issues are understood in four Swedish governmental climate institutions—the Environmental Protection Agency, the Traffic Agency, the Energy Agency, and the Innovation Agency. While social issues are widely recognized, they are lower in priority than technological innovation and economic incentives and difficult to integrate with these dominant orientations. The authors advocate the use of more feminist and intersectional approaches in the study of CEP.
Nicole Detraz’s contribution, “Gender and Comparative Environmental Politics,” also illustrates the value of deploying gendered and feminist lenses in CEP. Detraz finds that population discourses, particularly those associated with climate change, often continue to rely on rigid gender norms and problematic assumptions about which people or communities in society are framed as environmental saviors and which as environmental problems. While population discourses may have shifted away from early, more extreme rhetorics, she calls on social scientists to critically examine their own use of language and reflect on their roles in promulgating discourses that cast marginalized women as environmental burdens, potentially impeding environmental and gender justice.
Part III: Movements and Activism in
Comparative Environmental Politics
Central to comparative politics and environmental politics is the study of social movements and political activism. Environmental activism, in particular, has manifested itself in many ways across the world depending on different institutional and historical contexts and has involved different coalitions of actors. CEP has long explored how people mobilize around specific issue areas and influence environmental outcomes. Regime type can, for example, influence the creation and form of environmental organizations and movements; authoritarian countries like Russia are increasingly putting restrictions on nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), forcing them to register as foreign agents (see Henry). CEP has also highlighted processes by which domestic and international environmental NGOs forge alliances to tackle environmental problems, as was the case in Kazakhstan (Weinthal and Watters 2010). In democracies, environmental movements may morph into political parties, or environmental NGOs may build coalitions with different political parties to further their agendas. Chapters in this section showcase different repertoires of action for addressing the climate crisis and environmental injustices across a range of political spaces.
David Naguib Pellow’s chapter explores tensions between social movements focused on climate and environmental justice and those centered on animal liberation, two areas of CEP scholarship to which he has contributed substantially. The chapter explores warfare and militarization as phenomena and cases with common, dire short- and long-term consequences for humans (especially marginalized communities) and other species. Such consequences illustrate the potential common interests of environmental and multispecies justice and the creation of “deeply intersectional” movements. Pellow concludes with a fascinating discussion of what he calls “multispecies abolition democracy”—a concept rooted in the work of W. E. B. Du Bois. “As much as prison and slavery abolitionists have articulated powerful narratives of freedom for people oppressed by institutions that cage and restrict their mobility, that political project is incomplete without a consideration of the fuller range of beings—nonhumans—who are also caged and consumed by structural violence,” he writes. In pushing scholars of comparative environmental politics to consider the welfare of other species, Pellow argues that abolitionists and radical reformers for racial and social justice offer a repertoire of language and practice that can inspire deeper and broader commitments to “multispecies” justice.
The contribution by Jennifer Allan and Jennifer Hadden explores civil society participation in CEP, asking questions about what the growing size, diversity, and complexity of civil society networks means for scholarship. Their examination of environmental civil society over time argues that growing complexity within civil society networks, with respect to outcomes and impacts, and growing contention within civil society pose several challenges to contemporary scholarship. They highlight a need for further cross-national comparative research that includes more of the developing world and engages debates about legitimacy and private authority, topics on which both have written extensively.
Joost de Moor focuses our attention on “Time and Place in Climate Activism.” The climate movement has been fundamentally shaped by the temporality of climate change: namely, many of its consequences are or will be inevitable and irreversible, making urgency a
central, increasing, and driving force in climate movements. Because time is partially socially constructed, its meanings and implications are contested within climate activism, impacting aspects of politics, strategy, and goals. Time is also contextual. What might seem a future threat that can be managed by more privileged places and communities is already an unfolding catastrophe for disadvantaged communities. Framing and deploying urgency within climate politics shapes and reshapes climate activism across time, space, and scale.
The chapter by Laura Henry asks how environmental NGOs continue their activism under conditions of increasing authoritarian governance. Henry’s chapter explores the Russian experience, from the 1990s post-Soviet year through the 2020s. She explains conditions in the 1990s that allowed for the emergence of Russian environmental NGOs and charts the increasing hostility of the Russian state to these NGOs, which undermined some of the very conditions that facilitated their emergence, such as initially allowing and then banning foreign financial support. As Russia became a more centralized, authoritarian, and repressive political regime, Russian environmentalists adapted their strategies and activism, as social movement theory might predict. She thus argues that we should not overlook new forms of activism that could emerge even as previous forms are repressed or forestalled.
Peter Jacques’s “Anglo Fears” focuses our attention on the comparative politics of climate denial across borders. His work demonstrates that broad-based, politicized rejection of climate science is a well-funded and well-organized counter movement to oppose global and national climate movements and forestall climate mitigation policies. The chapter focuses on the United States and the United Kingdom as the most important host countries for the organized counter movement as they center and help export climate denialism in Australian, Canadian, and South African politics (among others). Jacques demonstrates that climate denialism is primarily an Anglo effort, connected to anxieties about losing long-held privileges and ways of life.
Joseph Brown’s chapter, “Civil Disobedience, Sabotage and Violence in US Environmental Activism,” explores the diversity of tactics used by environmental activists and traces debates within environmental movements about when to escalate from legal, accommodationist strategies to more confrontational, yet still largely nonviolent approaches. He draws examples primarily from the United States but also from Canada and other countries in which activists sought to halt logging in old-growth forests, delay and cancel fossil fuel pipelines, and hinder whaling vessels. These campaigns were often characterized by broad coalitions of activists and stepwise escalation in tactics when legal and political challenges to state and corporate decisionmaking proved insufficient. Environmental movements have systematically eschewed violence, defined by Brown as causing harm to people without their consent, but smaller groups have embraced civil disobedience, nonviolent struggle, and, less frequently, sabotage (“ecotage” in the language of EarthFirst!). Violence, he shows, has been far more frequently employed against environmental activists, particularly those engaging in nonviolence civil disobedience.
Part IV: Markets and Firms in Comparative Environmental Politics
CEP has understood firms—whether private or state-owned—to be central actors in generating environmental outcomes, often with a focus on corporate interests in shaping
institutions. Firms and corporations often circumvent state-led regulations and instead push for voluntary governance mechanisms, including certification schemes to promote sustainability outcomes, for example. While environmental groups have frequently promoted eco-labels and certification schemes to expand information and transparency for consumers about products that they buy and consume, companies across sectors and countries have understood the value of such certification schemes and labels. CEP scholars have examined the use of private regulation in promoting more sustainable development and environmental management. Some comparative research has focused on what makes some third-party certifiers more credible than others (Starobin and Weinthal 2010). Extractive industries have increasingly relied on private regulation and certification schemes, especially in countries with weak governance or where the state has opted to decentralize policy and regulation for the extractive sector.
Tim Bartley, in his chapter on “Territory, Private Authority, and Rights,” examines these questions in relation to sustainable agriculture and forestry certifications. Such marketbased solutions ask corporations rather than states to address the environmental and social impacts of corporate extractive policies. As a result, transnational sustainability standards are increasingly contested, especially when they come into conflict with Indigenous customary practices. Bartley’s chapter compares forest certification in Indonesia and China to illuminate the tension that ensues when private sustainability standards encounter other land claims and shows how these conflicts vary across different institutional contexts. The chapter furthermore highlights the application of “free and prior informed consent” for sustainability standards to Indigenous land.
Hamish van der Ven, in his chapter on “Comparing Voluntary Sustainability Standards,” continues to unpack what CEP scholars know about voluntary sustainability standards as well as what is missing in our knowledge toolkit. Van der Ven undertakes a survey of the literature that compares two or more voluntary standards, covering forestry, fisheries, and organic produce. In doing so, he finds a range of methods employed in the literature as well as regional biases. Furthermore, as the comparative literature on sustainability standards fails to focus on environmental impacts, van der Ven argues for a new research agenda that will support CEP scholars in addressing the many weaknesses he identifies in the certification and standards literature.
Another area of CEP research on markets and firms has to do with market-based approaches in lieu of state-led governance mechanisms for addressing “wicked” environmental problems. While states have voiced their collective support for climate action at the international level with the signing of the Paris Agreement, much of the actual work on addressing climate change is decentralized to states. Here, too, market-based approaches are being introduced at the national level as a means for states to meet their Nationally Determined Contributions (NDC). Yet comparative politics tells us that states have unequal capacities to meet their NDCs as well as different institutional structures that shape their policy choices at the national level. Carley Chavara, Christian Elliot, Matthew Hoffman, and Matthew Paterson, in their chapter on “Continuity and Change in Carbon Market Politics,” investigate the variation in domestic institutions and political economies across five cases—the European Union, China, Canada, South Korea, and Indonesia—to explain developments in carbon markets. While the chapter highlights the transnational diffusion of policy ideas across different institutional contexts, it also suggests that strategies to decentralize climate policy through a focus on carbon markets may prevent countries from introducing more sweeping programs to reduce carbon emissions.
Part V: Environmental Justice and Rights
The chapters in Part V offer a deep dive into questions of environmental justice and rights. In doing so, authors apply a comparative lens to ask, “What is environmental justice and rights”? While scholars concur that there is a “normative commitment to justice” (Marion Suiseeya) and that environmental justice is concerned with a range of issues ranging from climate justice to food justice, the chapters here investigate under what circumstances environmental rights make a difference (Gellers and Jeffords), how communities struggle to protect their communities’ well-being and the environment (Marion Suiseeya), and claims for the rights of nature in which ecosystems are subjects with rights (Kauffman). Permeating scholarship on environmental justice and rights within CEP are calls for action to rectify the exclusions of marginalized populations from decisions about the costs and benefits of natural resource use and the siting of polluting activities that affect their communities and livelihoods. In many instances, governments in both industrialized and industrializing regions have purposefully perpetuated racist policies that incentivized environmental harms and extraction in communities of color.
The CEP literature on environmental justice and rights, as highlighted in this Handbook, recognizes that justice manifests itself in different ways depending on different institutional contexts and different types of environmental struggles. In some parts of the world, communities and activists are fighting for access to clean water and air and reducing exposure to toxic wastes when large polluting industries are sited in their communities, or they are fighting to prevent the construction of large dams that could erase their ancestral homelands and cause forced displacement. In other parts of the world, activists are fighting to protect forests upon which their livelihoods depend and protect land being appropriated by large agro-conglomerates for export crops. Frontline environmental justice communities, as Marion Suiseeya notes in Fiji, for example, are increasingly at risk from existential threats such as climate change. Authors in this handbook forcefully argue through a comparative lens that environmental justice and environmental rights require rectifying situations in which human beings are deprived of rights to clean and healthy environments.
Kemi Fuentes-George’s chapter on environmental justice highlights the comparative dimensions of justice central to environmental and social struggles across the world. While the language of environmental justice and environmental racism has manifested itself in a particular context pertaining to the struggles of largely Black and Hispanic communities in the American South, Fuentes-George shows that these concepts help to capture broader social justice struggles and activism in New Zealand, Mexico, Jamaica, and Brazil, among other places. He draws on a wide range of cases, which include fossil fuel extraction in industrialized countries and agricultural development in the Global South, to illustrate how socioeconomically marginalized communities continue to pay the costs for a global economic system premised on economic growth and consumption. One important takeaway from Fuentes-George’s chapter is a “critique of ‘colorblind’ mainstream environmentalism,” which has not overcome “racist and ecologically unsustainable policies.”
The chapters also shed light on the different means and mechanisms by which groups pursue justice across and within different countries. Some political systems have increasingly adopted rights-based approaches for rectifying injustices incurred by many groups
over decades in which natural resources, for example, were appropriated for use by the state or the private sector. Fuentes-George, in his chapter, proposes mechanisms to “promote and democratize information” and include “marginalized participation in policymaking” to facilitate a more just and sustainable environment. Kim Marion Suiseeya, in her chapter on “Critical Perspectives on Representation, Equity, and Rights,” adds another dimension to our understanding of environmental justice by treating environmental justice as a driver rather than as an unintended outcome of the policy and political process. Marion Suiseeya asks whether theories of environmental racism and discriminatory siting can help to explain environmental justice politics across a range of countries. Her chapter makes the case that environmental justice is a “political phenomenon,” and that environmental injustice varies by specific context. The chapter draws attention to the local dimensions of environmental injustice while demonstrating connections to a global environmental justice movement and the role of activists in building networks across different environmental justice movements. She further examines how environmental justice is operationalized and defined in practice.
In like manner, Prakash Kashwan seeks to further a formal comparative environmental justice approach in his chapter on “Globalization of Environmental Justice.” Recognizing that the roots of environmental justice are widespread, Kashwan offers a systematic comparison of how environmental justice is manifested in the environmental politics of different countries. Through an in-depth comparison of environmental justice advocacy in the United States and India, the chapter highlights the political economy of institutions in shaping the scope and form of the environmental justice movements.
Several chapters discuss the expansion of basic rights to non-human living things, as has been the case in the Ecuadorian 2008 Constitution or the 2010 Law of the Rights of Mother Earth in Bolivia (e.g. chapters by Fuentes-George, Kauffman). Craig Kauffman’s chapter on “Rights of Nature: Institutions, Law, and Policy for Sustainable Development” expands on the legal strategy of including “Rights of Nature” provisions in domestic and international policy arenas. Through an extensive comparative review, Kauffman sheds light on the relationship between Rights of Nature (RoN) and human rights and the ensuing implications for rethinking our understanding of sustainable development as ecological sustainability. The intersectionality with Indigenous rights has profound implications for past modes of economic development, as has been the case in Ecuador, where the government canceled mining concessions to protect the Cofán’s community rights (see Kauffman).
Given the proliferation of environmental rights, as documented in the chapters in this section, Gellers and Jeffords offer a roadmap forward for assessing the conditions under which environmental rights are producing meaningful outcomes. The global environmental politics field has struggled with defining effectiveness; at times effectiveness has meant solving an environmental problem, whereas at other times it has meant compliance with an international environmental regime (Young 1994). In similar manner, CEP scholars may not agree on what is meant by efficacy. Gellers and Jeffords open a discussion regarding implementation of human and non-human rights to consider examples ranging from the impacts of expanding access to improved water sources and sanitation facilities to the practice of democratic participation. They ask CEP scholars to ponder situations where protecting rights of nature might hamper the welfare of populations if people were
no longer able to access a water body for drinking water, for instance. Overall, their chapter pushes the research agenda on RoN to adopt evidence-based approaches for evaluating rights-based forms of environmental protection.
Farhana Sultana’s chapter, “Gendering the Human Right to Water in the Context of Sustainable Development,” highlights the intersectional and gendered aspects of rights and justice on the ground as applied to the human right to water. Sultana argues that rights are linked and cannot be disaggregated precisely because they are co-constitutive of a broader set of issues pertaining to sustainable development and social justice. Sultana explains why gendering the human right to water is critical for achieving a more just and inclusive future. For example, Sultana shows how advancing women’s human right to water helps to empower women and gender minorities and how, when governments fail to facilitate these rights, they reduce other rights to dignity and well-being for women and girls.
Overall, the chapters offer new paths to address climate change, mass extinction, and environmental destruction through calls for expanding rights to marginalized communities and ecosystems, arguing that conventional environmental laws, policies, and regulations are inadequate. Most notably, these chapters highlight the insights from CEP, in which global environmental governance is increasingly rooted in the domestic politics of states. This is particularly the case because domestic law should not only address the demands and grievances of communities harmed by extractive policies, but also should recognize ecosystems as subjects in the fight to prevent global environmental destruction and the climate crisis. Rights of nature are also important in changing global economic institutions that have prioritized the commodification of nature (e.g., Kauffman’s chapter).
Part VI: Natural Resources and Comparative Political Economy
Comparative politics, and specifically the subfield of comparative political economy, has long analyzed how variations in state–business relations impact development trajectories and the evolution of specific economic sectors. States around the world continue to actively shape the supposedly “invisible hand” of the market through a variety of industrial policies. Joanna Lewis’s chapter, “Green Industrial Policy After Paris,” examines how states pursue “green” industrial policies designed to create opportunities for the domestic production of renewable energy technologies. The rapid uptake of renewable energies is essential to limit global warming, yet industrial policies that protect domestic markets can also create distortions and inefficiencies that limit innovation and slow the uptake of new technologies. Joanna Lewis shows how many countries—both advanced industrial economies and “developing” countries—have experimented with a wide range of industrial policies, including local content requirements, tax and other financial incentives, domestic certifications and standards, research and development funds, and state auctions and contracts for wind and solar projects. She argues that China stands out for its early and highly effective strategy of fostering a domestic wind and solar photovoltaic (PV) industry by deploying green industrial policies, despite friction with the World Trade Organization, the United States, and foreign renewable energy companies as a result. India has proved less successful in breaking
into the solar market, partly because it confronts global and domestic markets in which Chinese solar PV exports remain cheaper than other alternatives.
Mohanned Al-Suwidan and Nimah Mazaheri’s chapter on “Natural Resources and the Politics of Distribution” explores the various ways in which revenues collected by states from the sale of natural resources like oil and gas can be distributed to the population. In doing so they revisit some of the assumptions made in the extensive comparative politics literature on rentier states and the so-called resource curse. They highlight that, because of variations in state capacity, regime type, citizen needs and preferences, and resource ownership, universal prescriptions on how to manage natural resource rents are misplaced. Instead, they called for enhanced empirical comparative research on distributive policies, including sourcing more accurate data through community surveys, geospatial mapping, and close attention to the potentially adverse outcomes of policy innovations.
Several chapters in this section highlight the importance of analyzing environmental issues not just across spatial scales, but also across various timescales. The chapter “Temporality, Limited Statehood, and Africa’s Abandoned Mines,” by W. R. Nadège Compaoré and Nathan Andrews, asks us to consider what happens after large, open pit mines in sub-Saharan Africa close and are abandoned by the international firms that contracted with states to run the mines. The chapter highlights how domestic regulation, international frameworks, and contracts between international mining firms and states all “silence” the issue of mine closure by simply not including provisions for environmental accountability after the mines close. Instead, they note that firms, states, and development agencies continue to embrace mining as a development strategy despite its dismal record of social and environmental harm.
The chapter by Songkhun Nillasithanukroh, Ekta Patel, Edmund Malesky, and Erika Weinthal, “Illegal Wildlife Trade in the Mekong: The Interplay of Actors, Legal Governance, and Political Economy,” analyzes the political economy of the illegal wildlife trade in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. Rather than invoking “weak enforcement” or “weak state capacity” in explaining the growing trade in wildlife despite formal laws and international treaties such as CITES, the authors analyze the political economy of wildlife supply chains (i.e., suppliers who poach and harvest wildlife, middlemen who handle transport and trade, and consumers of illegal wildlife commodities such as ivory and rhino horns). The authors examine attempts to curtail trade in illegal wildlife through outright bans, regulating hunting in protected areas, legalizing farms for captive breeding of endangered species such as turtles and crocodiles, and other means. They argue that, by addressing the incentives created by legal loopholes, jurisdictional overlap, criminalization, low wages for enforcement officers, and pervasive corruption across the supply chain, the Mekong Basin countries could achieve more effective interventions to limit trade in illegal wildlife.
Part VII: The Politics of Energy Transitions
Part VII’s focus on the politics of energy transitions examines how different states have responded to climate change through investing in alternative energy sources. In the early
