Earthly Politics

Globalisation today is as much a problem for international harmony as it is a necessary condition of living together on our planet. Increasing interconnectedness in ecology, economy, technology, and politics has brought nations and societies into ever closer contact, creating acute demands for co-operation. Earthly Politics argues that in the coming decades global governance will have to accommodate differences even as it obliterates distance, and will have to respect many aspects of the local while developing institutions that transcend localism. This book analyses a variety of environmental-governance approaches that balance the local and the global in order to encourage new, more flexible frameworks of global governance. On the theoretical level, it draws on insights from the field of science and technology studies to enrich our understanding of environmental-development politics. On the pragmatic level, it discusses the design of institutions and processes to address problems of environmental governance that increasingly refuse to remain within national boundaries. The cases in the book display the crucial relationship between knowledge and power.

"The authors have undertaken nothing less than tracing and evaluating the links between global governance and environmental politics, with a clear-cut and original stress upon the ways in which local and global dynamics interact. Their conceptualization of these interactions is especially compelling, partly because the links are so crucial to the ways in which environmental issues are subjected to governance but mainly because they probe the links in highly creative and persuasive ways. Their stress on the relevance of science and knowledge, as well as their emphasis on the need to include the local in any analysis of global environmental problems, are recurrent themes that render the book especially distinctive." --James N. Rosenau, University Professor of International Affairs, George Washington University

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