Over the past five decades, the European Union (EU) has developed into the most legally and politically authoritative regional organization in the world, wielding significant influence across a wide range of issue areas. European Union and Environmental Governance focuses on the growing global role of EU environmental and sustainable development policies in Europe and around the world.

Written in a concise and accessible manner, this book introduces and examines the major European and global environmental issues, debates, and policies and provides a critical, evidence-based evaluation of the achievements and shortcomings to date in EU environmental and sustainability governance. Providing both an historical overview and a discussion of the major future legal, political and economic challenges to the realization of EU goals related to better environmental governance, the authors offer a comprehensive introduction to this key issue.

This book will be useful reading for students of global environmental politics, comparative environmental politics and policy, international organizations, European politics, and environmental studies.

This volume focuses attention on key environmental and institutional changes associated with eastern expansion of the European Union, assessing and challenging prevailing views about the outcomes and processes of this historic development. Looking at four central themes - capacity changes and limitations, the EU's mixed messages and conflicting priorities, non-state actor roles and developments, and the exchange of ideas and information - the volume shows that enlargement will change the EU, not just make it bigger, and that EU officials and programs are improving aspects of environmental policy in CEE countries even as they are making others less sustainable.
This book was previously published as a special issue of the journal" Environmental Politics."

Over the past five decades, the European Union (EU) has developed into the most legally and politically authoritative regional organization in the world, wielding significant influence across a wide range of issue areas. European Union and Environmental Governance focuses on the growing global role of EU environmental and sustainable development policies in Europe and around the world. Written in a concise and accessible manner, this book introduces and examines the major European and global environmental issues, debates, and policies and provides a critical, evidence-based evaluation of the achievements and shortcomings to date in EU environmental and sustainability governance. Providing both an historical overview and a discussion of the major future legal, political and economic challenges to the realization of EU goals related to better environmental governance, the authors offer a comprehensive introduction to this key issue. This book will be useful reading for students of global environmental politics, comparative environmental politics and policy, international organizations, European politics, and environmental studies.

In addition to environmental change, the structure and trends of global politics and the economy are also changing as more countries join the ranks of the world's largest economies with their resource-intensive patterns. The nexus approach, conceptualized as attention to resource connections and their governance ramifications, calls attention to the sustainability of contemporary consumer resource use, lifestyles and supply chains. This book sets out an analytical framework for understanding these nexus issues and the related governance challenges and opportunities.

It sheds light on the resource nexus in three realms: markets, inter-state relations, and local human security. These three realms are the organizing principle of three chapters, before the analysis turns to cross-cutting case studies including shale gas, migration, lifestyle changes and resource efficiency, nitrogen fertilizer and food systems, water and the Nile Basin, climate change and security and defense spending. The key issues revolve around competition and conflict over finite natural resources. The authors highlight opportunities to improve both the understanding of nexus challenges and their governance. They critically discuss a global governance approach versus polycentric and multi-level approaches, and the lack of those dimensions in many theories of international relations.

In addition to environmental change, the structure and trends of global politics and the economy are also changing as more countries join the ranks of the world's largest economies with their resource-intensive patterns. The nexus approach, conceptualized as attention to resource connections and their governance ramifications, calls attention to the sustainability of contemporary consumer resource use, lifestyles and supply chains. This book sets out an analytical framework for understanding these nexus issues and the related governance challenges and opportunities.

It sheds light on the resource nexus in three realms: markets, inter-state relations, and local human security. These three realms are the organizing principle of three chapters, before the analysis turns to cross-cutting case studies including shale gas, migration, lifestyle changes and resource efficiency, nitrogen fertilizer and food systems, water and the Nile Basin, climate change and security and defense spending. The key issues revolve around competition and conflict over finite natural resources. The authors highlight opportunities to improve both the understanding of nexus challenges and their governance. They critically discuss a global governance approach versus polycentric and multi-level approaches, and the lack of those dimensions in many theories of international relations.

It is increasingly clear that the world of climate politics is no longer confined to the activities of national governments and international negotiations. Critical to this transformation of the politics of climate change has been the emergence of new forms of transnational governance that cut across traditional state-based jurisdictions and operate across public and private divides. This book provides the first comprehensive, cutting-edge account of the world of transnational climate change governance. Co-authored by a team of the world's leading experts in the field and based on a survey of sixty case studies, the book traces the emergence, nature and consequences of this phenomenon, and assesses the implications for the field of global environmental politics. It will prove invaluable for researchers, graduate students and policy makers in climate change, political science, international relations, human geography, sociology and ecological economics.

In recent years the concept of the resource "nexus" has been both hotly debated and widely adopted in research and policy circles. It is a powerful new way to understand and better govern the myriad complex relationships between multiple resources, actors and their security concerns. Particular attention has been paid to water, energy and food interactions, but land and materials emerge as critical too. This comprehensive handbook presents a detailed review of current knowledge about resource nexus-related frameworks, methods and governance, including a broad set of inter-disciplinary perspectives. Written by an international group of scholars and practitioners, the volume focuses on rigorous research, including tools, methods and modelling approaches to analyse resource use patterns across societies and scales from a "nexus perspective". It also provides numerous examples from political economy to demonstrate how resource nexus frameworks can illuminate issues such as land grabs, mining, renewable energy and the growing importance of economies such as China, as well as to propose lessons and outlooks for sound governance. The volume seeks to serve as an essential reference text, source book and state-of-the-art, science-based assessment of this increasingly important topic - the resource nexus - and its utility in efforts to enhance sustainability of many kinds and implement the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals in an era of environmental and geopolitical change.

The new edition of this award-winning volume reflects the latest events in the in global environmental politics and sustainable development, while providing balanced coverage of the key institutions, environmental issues, treaties, and policies. The book highlights global environmental institutions, major state and non-state actors, and includes a wide range of cases such as climate change, biodiversity, hazardous chemicals, ozone layer depletion, nuclear energy and resource consumption.

The complexities and scope of environmental issues have not only outpaced the capacities and responsiveness of traditional political actors but also generated new innovations, constituencies, and approaches to governing environmental problems. In response, comparative environmental politics (CEP) has emerged as a vibrant and growing field of scholarly inquiry, embracing new questions and methods even as it addresses enduring questions in the broader field of comparative politics. Utilizing a range of methodological approaches, The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Environmental Politics delves into more traditional forms of CEP—the political economy of natural resources and the role of corporations and supply chains—while also showcasing new trends in CEP scholarship, particularly the comparative study of environmental injustice and intersectional inequities. Moving beyond the field's earlier work that focused on cross-national comparisons of political institutions, regulatory styles, and state-society relations, the Handbook includes approaches from political science, anthropology, sociology, geography, gender theory, law, human rights, and development studies. Moreover, the chapters highlight scholarship from a broader range of regions, and analyze the construction and diffusion of norms, rights, ethics, and ideology across the globe and through various social movements (with a focus on approaches from the Global South). Including 42 chapters, organized across 9 sections, The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Environmental Politics explores some of the most important environmental issues through the lens of comparative politics, including energy, climate change, food, health, urbanization, waste, and sustainability.

Combining the theoretical tools of comparative politics with the substantive concerns of environmental policy, experts explore responses to environmental problems across nations and political systems How do different societies respond politically to environmental problems around the globe? Answering this question requires systematic, cross-national comparisons of political institutions, regulatory styles, and state-society relations. The field of comparative environmental politics approaches this task by bringing the theoretical tools of comparative politics to bear on the substantive concerns of environmental policy. This book outlines a comparative environmental politics framework and applies it to concrete, real-world problems of politics and environmental management. After a comprehensive review of the literature exploring domestic environmental politics around the world, the book provides a sample of major currents within the field, showing how environmental politics intersects with such topics as the greening of the state, the rise of social movements and green parties, European Union expansion, corporate social responsibility, federalism, political instability, management of local commons, and policymaking under democratic and authoritarian regimes. It offers fresh insights into environmental problems ranging from climate change to water scarcity and the disappearance of tropical forests, and it examines actions by state and nonstate actors at levels from the local to the continental. The book will help scholars and policymakers make sense of how environmental issues and politics are connected around the globe, and is ideal for use in upper-level undergraduateand graduate courses.

The world of climate politics is increasingly no longer confined to the activities of national governments and international negotiations. Critical to this transformation of the politics of climate change has been the emergence of new forms of transnational governance that cut across traditional state-based jurisdictions and operate across public and private divides. This book provides the first comprehensive, cutting-edge account of the world of transnational climate change governance. Co-authored by a team of the world's leading experts in the field and based on a survey of sixty case studies, the book traces the emergence, nature and consequences of this phenomenon, and assesses the implications for the field of global environmental politics. It will prove invaluable for researchers, graduate students and policy makers in climate change, political science, international relations, human geography, sociology and ecological economics.

This volume focuses attention on key environmental and institutional changes associated with eastern expansion of the European Union, assessing and challenging prevailing views about the outcomes and processes of this historic development. Looking at four central themes -- capacity changes and limitations, the EU's mixed messages and conflicting priorities, non-state actor roles and developments, and the exchange of ideas and information - the volume shows that enlargement will change the EU, not just make it bigger, and that EU officials and programs are improving aspects of environmental policy in CEE countries even as they are making others less sustainable.
This book was previously published as a special issue of the journal Environmental Politics.