Here are 49 books that Environmental Regime Effectiveness fans have personally recommended if you like
Environmental Regime Effectiveness.
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I have spent my professional life exploring the roles social institutions play in guiding interactions between humans and the natural environment in a variety of settings. Along the way, I pioneered research on what is now known as global environmental governance, devoting particular attention to issues relating to the atmosphere, the oceans, and the polar regions. Although I come from the world of scholarship, I have played an active role in promoting productive interactions between science and policy regarding matters relating to the Arctic and global environmental change.
Governance is a social function centered on steering societies toward collectively desirable outcomes.
By contrast, a government is an organization (or collection of organizations) authorized to deal with issues of governance in a particular society.
While governments are responsible for addressing needs for governance in many settings, this distinction allows us to explore situations featuring efforts to respond to needs for governance in the absence of a government.
This is a critical observation at the global level where there are many needs for governance but no world government.
It has freed the community to analyze a range of governance systems (often called regimes) dealing with matters of security, economics, and the environment, while setting aside unproductive debates about the pros and cons of efforts to create a world government.
A world government capable of controlling nation-states has never evolved. Nonetheless, considerable governance underlies the current order among states, facilitates absorption of the rapid changes at work in the world, and that direction to the challenges posed by interstate conflicts, environmental pollution, currency crises, and the many other problems to which an ever expanding global interdependence gives rise. In this study, nine leading international relations specialists examine the central features of this governance without government. They explore its ideological bases, behavioural patterns, and institutional arrangements as well as the pervasive changes presently at work within and among states. Within this…
I have spent my professional life exploring the roles social institutions play in guiding interactions between humans and the natural environment in a variety of settings. Along the way, I pioneered research on what is now known as global environmental governance, devoting particular attention to issues relating to the atmosphere, the oceans, and the polar regions. Although I come from the world of scholarship, I have played an active role in promoting productive interactions between science and policy regarding matters relating to the Arctic and global environmental change.
There is a tendency to focus on regimes as self-contained governance systems.
But in reality, there are typically more or less complex interactions between or among environmental regimes. Some regimes (e.g. the ozone regime and the climate regime) interact with one another in significant ways.
In other cases, a number of distinct regimes play influential roles in dealing with the same problem (e.g. climate change). This leads to the emergence of regime complexes regarded as sets of institutional elements that are not arranged in a hierarchical order but that all play roles in dealing with major issues like climate change.
The research challenge then is to identify conditions leading to mutually beneficial or synergistic interactions in contrast to conditions giving rise to interactions that are harmful or that produce interference in the operations of distinct regimes.
Experts investigate how states and other actors can improve inter-institutional synergy and examine the complexity of overlapping environmental governance structures.
Institutional interaction and complexity are crucial to environmental governance and are quickly becoming dominant themes in the international relations and environmental politics literatures. This book examines international institutional interplay and its consequences, focusing on two important issues: how states and other actors can manage institutional interaction to improve synergy and avoid disruption; and what forces drive the emergence and evolution of institutional complexes, sets of institutions that cogovern particular issue areas.
The book, a product of the Institutional Dimensions of…
I have spent my professional life exploring the roles social institutions play in guiding interactions between humans and the natural environment in a variety of settings. Along the way, I pioneered research on what is now known as global environmental governance, devoting particular attention to issues relating to the atmosphere, the oceans, and the polar regions. Although I come from the world of scholarship, I have played an active role in promoting productive interactions between science and policy regarding matters relating to the Arctic and global environmental change.
In Western thinking based on the ideal of the rule of law, there is a distinct preference for regimes or governance systems that are articulated in legally binding instruments negotiated by states (e.g. treaties or conventions) and that emphasize the central role of rules in the form of mandatory requirements and prohibitions.
But the key to effective governance treated as a matter of social steering is to find ways to guide or channel the behavior of those states and nonstate actors whose actions are relevant to any given need for governance.
One alternative to rule-based governance is goal-based governance or, in other words, a strategy that emphasizes setting collective goals (e.g. keeping temperature increases at the Earth’s surface to less than 1.5° C) and then launching a vigorous and coordinated effort to meet these goals within a specified period of time.
Goal-based governance is familiar at the domestic level…
A detailed examination of the UN's Sustainable Development Goals and the shift in governance strategy they represent.
In September 2015, the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Sustainable Development Goals as part of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. The Sustainable Development Goals built on and broadened the earlier Millennium Development Goals, but they also signaled a larger shift in governance strategies. The seventeen goals add detailed content to the concept of sustainable development, identify specific targets for each goal, and help frame a broader, more coherent, and transformative 2030 agenda. The Sustainable Development Goals aim to build a universal,…
I have spent my professional life exploring the roles social institutions play in guiding interactions between humans and the natural environment in a variety of settings. Along the way, I pioneered research on what is now known as global environmental governance, devoting particular attention to issues relating to the atmosphere, the oceans, and the polar regions. Although I come from the world of scholarship, I have played an active role in promoting productive interactions between science and policy regarding matters relating to the Arctic and global environmental change.
The dramatic growth in human populations and the extraordinary increase in human capacities to affect the environment has led to a transformation of the setting in which issues of environmental governance arise.
The result is the onset of a new era commonly described as the Anthropocene and the rise of the idea of Earth system governance. The biophysical conditions that control the Earth’s climate system or the diversity of life on the planet play critical roles as determinants of human well-being.
But human actions also are now critical forces in determining the character of the climate system and the future of biological diversity on the planet. There is still a need for regimes dealing with specific environmental concerns, such as transboundary air pollution, persistent organic pollutants, or the spread of plastic debris.
At the same time, there is a critical need to focus on arrangements designed to sustain key planetary…
A new model for effective global environmental governance in an era of human-caused planetary transformation and disruption.
Humans are no longer spectators who need to adapt to their natural environment. Our impact on the earth has caused changes that are outside the range of natural variability and are equivalent to such major geological disruptions as ice ages. Some scientists argue that we have entered a new epoch in planetary history: the Anthropocene. In such an era of planet-wide transformation, we need a new model for planet-wide environmental politics. In this book, Frank Biermann proposes “earth system” governance as just such…
I have been interested in the environment my entire life. I studied international environmental politics in college at the University of Michigan and in graduate school at MIT. I research and taught international environmental politics at the University of Massachusetts for 33 years. I have published extensively on global environmental governance, focusing on the role played by science, international organizations, transnational actors, and governments. I have consulted for the United Nations, and the governments of the USA, France, and Portugal.
Toward a Politics of the Planet Earth is one of the most important foundational texts in global environmental governance.
The authors recognize the urgency and scope of global environmental problems, and identify their salient properties along with developing a novel holistic approach which reflects the complexity of ecosystems.
They stress the need for scientific knowledge, the challenges to the international system from environmental threats, and the probabilistic nature of human behavior.
They also introduced the concept of an “ecological world view” which has come to inform much of global environmental governance.
"No one can possibly forsee all the changes in store for individuals, for social classes, for sovereign national communities, and for the world community as a whole. The future will surely bring many surprises. But as we speculate on these matters, the thought keeps recurring that we may just possibly be already far advanced in a historic transformation in the management of human affairs upon our increasingly crowded, denuded, depleted, and polluted planet". Thus the authors of Toward a Politics of the Planet Earth set the stage for an in-depth examination of international politics with a socio-ecological perspective. This unique…
When I first started reading about wilderness, I accepted it as an obvious thing—a place without people. That lasted a short time before I realized the enormous historical complexity of such places. Rather than places without people, without history, without politics, “wilderness” became a laboratory of American society. I tried to capture that vibrancy in my book An Open Pit Visible from the Moon where I showed all the claims various people made on one wilderness area in the North Cascades. I'm a writer, historian, and former college professor who now calls the Skagit Valley of Washington home. As much as I enjoy studying wilderness, I prefer walking through it and noticing what it teaches.
Rarely has a collection of essays inspired and perplexed me as much as this one. One chapter argues one thing; the next argues its near-opposite. And both are persuasive!After Preservation is designed to raise fundamental questions about nature, wilderness, and the Anthropocene without providing definitive answers. I didn’t close the book with answers, but I did close it knowing more, thinking harder, and questioning what I believed. If we are meant to save nature—or if we are merely meant to understand why that’s a fraught concept—we’ll need to grapple with ideas and practicalities like these authors do.
From John Muir to the Endangered Species Act, environmentalism in America has always had close to its core a preservationist ideal. Generations have been inspired by its ethos-to protect nature from the march of human development. But we have to face the facts. Accelerating climate change, rapid urbanization, agricultural and industrial devastation, metastasizing fire regimes, and other quickening anthropogenic forces all attest to the same truth: the earth is now spinning through the age of humans. After Preservation takes stock of the ways we have tried to both preserve and exploit nature to ask a direct but profound question: what…
I’m a philosopher fascinated by science and its relationship to society, who science benefits and who it harms; why scientists get some things right and some things wrong; and which scientific results make their way into the physician’s office, the courtroom, and the school textbook. Science impacts all facets of our lives: our health, our relationships with others, and our understanding of our place in our community and in the universe. I’ve spent decades investigating this relationship between science and society; these are some of the books I’ve found most influential in thinking about how we, as humans, impact the environment around us, which in turn circles back and impacts us.
This is it. The book that launched the environmental justice movement.
Scientists today frequently talk about environmental racism, about the way that harmful substances in our environments are not distributed randomly but instead disproportionately on communities of color, which in turn takes an enormous toll on the health of people living in those communities.
It was this book that forcefully made the case for seeing this phenomenon through the lens of civil rights. It exposed the widespread and systemic nature of environmental racism and made the case for responding to it with all the concepts, collective action, and policy strategies of the civil rights movement.
To be poor, working-class, or a person of colour in the United States often means bearing a disproportionate share of the country's environmental problems. Starting with the premise that all Americans have a basic right to live in a healthy environment, Dumping in Dixie chronicles the efforts of five African American communities, empowered by the civil rights movement, to link environmentalism with issues of social justice. In the third edition, Bullard speaks to us from the front lines of the environmental justice movement about new developments in environmental racism, different organizing strategies, and success stories in the struggle for environmental…
I have been teaching and researching environmental impact assessment for over 30 years and it is still a topic that excites me. After all, what could be more challenging or relevant than figuring out how to deliver sustainable development? Trying to predict the consequences of development and putting in place effective measures to prevent adverse environmental and social effects all in the context of our intriguingly messy world of science, politics, governance, and public engagement is endlessly beguiling. For example, what might sustainable mining look like? I love learning from the wisdom of others, so I hope you enjoy the books on this list as much as I have.
This book provides a fresh, accessible, and captivating account of environmental impact assessment (EIA) featuring a diverse and truly global cast of contributors with expertise across the spectrum of practice.
Marking 50 years of practice, it addresses contemporary EIA issues in an innovative and engaging manner. From the historical origins to contemporary issues such as health assessment in a post-Covid 19 world, climate change, digital impact assessment and the role of artificial intelligence, this Handbook has it all.
It captures the state of the art provided by theorists and practitioners drawn from all around the world, before outlining possible directions for the next 50 years.
Reviewing over 50 years of Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) policy-making and implementation around the world, this thought-provoking Handbook provides a comprehensive overview of the current research surrounding EIA. Presenting new trends in law and policy-making, it highlights best practices in the application of technology to impact prediction and management, procedural efficiency, decision-making and public participation.
In addition to explaining the practicalities of the EIA process, chapters delve deep into EIA's decision-making stages and methods, revealing the causes of, and solutions to, recurrent issues. Contributions from leading scholars analyse case studies from Africa, Asia, Europe, Oceania, and North and South America…
I am a researcher and professor of Planning and Urban Design at Middle East Technical University, Ankara (Turkiye). I am interested in how we can develop sustainable communities in urban and rural areas, modern and historical areas, and create a much more just world for all living beings. This question has become increasingly important for our life as uncertainties arise. New paradigms appear daily with climate change, wars, energy crises, pandemics, migrations, safety and security, growing diversity, and socio-spatial inequalities. I chose these books because they helped me think of new ways to achieve a sustainable and just world for all living beings.
This is one of my favourite books, as it provides a rigorous analysis of the environmental policy in the US from the 1970s and 2010.
It pinpoints the successes and failures of these policies at the subnational, regional, and state levels by using several case studies such as air and water pollution control, state and local climate change policy, open space preservation, urban growth, and regional ecosystem management.
What I also really like about this book is that readers can see various meanings of sustainability and understand that the concept can serve as a roadmap, which helps settlement systems evolve in a sustainable way.
This analysis of U.S. environmental policy offers a conceptual framework that serves as a valuable roadmap to the array of laws, programs, and approaches developed over the last four decades. Combining case studies and theoretical discussion, the book views environmental policy in the context of three epochs: the rise of command-and-control federal regulation in the 1970s, the period of efficiency-based reform efforts that followed, and the more recent trend toward sustainable development and integrated approaches at local and regional levels. It assesses the strengths and weaknesses of the new approaches and places these experiments within the larger framework of an…
I’m a writer, artist, and historian, and I’ve spent much of my career trying to blow up the powerful American definition of environment as a non-human world “out there”, and to ask how it’s allowed environmentalists, Exxon, and the EPA alike to refuse to take responsibility for how we inhabit environments. Along the way, I’ve written Flight Maps: Adventures with Nature in Modern America and "Thirteen Ways of Seeing Nature in LA"; co-founded the LA Urban Rangers public art collective; and co-created the “Our Malibu Beaches” phone app. I currently live in St. Louis, where I’m a Research Fellow at the Sam Fox School at Washington University-St. Louis.
An oldie but a goodie, and a classic. Cronon’s lead essay “The Trouble with Wilderness” roused ‘90s environmentalism like a brilliant party crasher—but don’t miss Richard White’s “Are You an Environmentalist or Do You Work for a Living,” Giovanna Di Chiro’s “Nature as Community,” and, well, my own “Looking for Nature at the Mall.”
In a lead essay that powerfully states the broad argument of the book, William Cronon writes that the environmentalist goal of wilderness preservation is conceptually and politically wrongheaded. Among the ironies and entanglements resulting from this goal are the sale of nature in our malls through the Nature Company, and the disputes between working people and environmentalists over spotted owls and other objects of species preservation.
The problem is that we haven't learned to live responsibly in nature. The environmentalist aim of legislating humans out of the wilderness is no solution. People, Cronon argues, are inextricably tied to nature, whether…
