Understanding Global Environmental Politics Domination, Accumulation, Resistance

by Paterson, Matthew

• ISBN13: 9780333968550
• ISBN10: 0333968557
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2001-12-14
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

This book develops a new, critical approach to global environmental politics. Instead of simply advocating the construction of new international institutions to respond to such challenges, it argues that the construction of alternative social and political structures is necessary. After an examination of policy-making surrounding sea defenses, which challenges the notion that political institutions are neutral regarding environmental change, it examines the political dynamics of car culture and of the meat-centered fast food industry.

Author Biography

Matthew Paterson is Lecturer in International Relations at Keele University.

Table of Contents

Preface	vii
Acknowledgements	ix
Introduction: Understanding Global Environmental Politics	1	(10)
Realism, Liberalism and the Origins of Global Environmental Change	11	(24)
Introduction	11	(1)
The realist and liberal global environmental change research agenda	12	(11)
The causes of global environmental change in realist and liberal IR theory	23	(6)
Towards a structural account of global environmental change	29	(4)
Conclusion	33	(2)
The 'normal and mundane practices of modernity': Global Power Structures and the Environment	35	(31)
Green politics and International Relations	35	(5)
Global power structures and global environmental politics	40	(14)
Development and the production of global environmental change	54	(4)
Conclusions	58	(8)
Space, Domination, Development: Sea Defences and the Structuring of Environmental Decision-Making	66	(29)
Projects of domination	66	(8)
Development and the origins of sea defences	74	(3)
Structuring environmental decision-making	77	(17)
Conclusions	94	(1)
Car Trouble	95	(23)
Introduction	95	(4)
Autohegemony	99	(11)
Cars and environmental change	110	(1)
Cars and the IR of the environment	111	(2)
Challenging car culture	113	(5)
Fast Food, Consumer Culture and Ecology	118	(23)
Introduction: McLibel	118	(5)
McDonaldisation: McDonald's as modernity and modernisation	123	(7)
Meat	130	(5)
The speed of fast food	135	(3)
Conclusions: resisting `McDonaldisation'	138	(3)
Conclusion: Globalisation, Governance and Resistance	141	(21)
Global civil society and global environmental governance	141	(4)
Globalisation and global environmental politics	145	(4)
Resistance and transformation	149	(4)
Toward a sustainable world?	153	(9)
Notes	162	(13)
Bibliography	175	(21)
Index	196