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A widespread failure to recognize the social and political-economic causes of climate-related crises is an erasure of history that hides potential solutions and absolves guilty parties of responsibility. This blocking out of causality is perpetuating slow and silent violence against present and future generations. These erasures are illustrated by two short cases: the causes of famine and dislocation in the Sahel, and the causes of farmers’ suicides in India. The essay highlights the need to recognize histories of exploitation, and introduces the “Exploiter Pays Principle,” in order to deliver justice in climate policymaking.

The U.S. National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine (NASEM) 2021 report on solar geoengineering research is a political intervention in global climate politics. Although the NASEM report explicitly acknowledges the risks of unilateral research without broad-based public participation and global governance, the report minimizes these concerns by recommending that the U.S. act swiftly to establish a publicly funded national research program. By providing details for how the research program should be designed, the report contradicts its own recommendations for an inclusive and international process. By mainstreaming solar geoengineering, the report risks increasing the likelihood of international conflict and unilateral deployment, and further exacerbates delays in prioritizing other climate actions. Instead of expanding research on global manipulation of the earth’s climate, the United States, like other countries around the world, should commit to multilateral, coordinated efforts to phase out fossil fuels, advance global climate action, and invest in climate justice. © 2021 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

Interest in forest-based carbon storage has led to growth in financing for carbon forestry. Most financial strategies rest on strong assumptions which are not valid in many parts of the world. We use cases drawn from tribal forestry in the US and government forestry in India to illustrate how carbon finance relies on the presence of enforceable rights, representative and accountable institutions, clear incentives, and symmetrical power relations. In the absence of these conditions, carbon finance provides perverse incentives that undermine biodiversity and human rights without storing carbon. We suggest that for forest-based carbon storage to be successful, more attention needs to be paid to underlying political reforms, as well as to policies that are not reliant on finance.

Over the past many decades, social movements led by indigenous and other rural communities have been at the forefront of environmental stewardship. The UN has recognised these contributions by defi...

The United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas (UNDROP) is one of the most ambitious UN declarations. We analyse the policy and legal challenges of...

Histories of colonial expropriation and the nature of political and economic systems shape environmental justice struggles. However, inequality and capitalism are institutionalized very differently in different contexts and counties. This chapter advances scholarship on a comparative politics of environmental justice in diverse contexts. It draws on the tools and concepts from institutional analysis and comparative environmental politics to investigate the structuring effects of institutions while also accounting for the differences of political capabilities of main actors in society, market, and politics. The political economy of policies and institutions (PEPI) framework developed in this chapter facilitates a theoretically grounded investigation into how the key features social, economic, and political contexts, in conjunction with legal and institutional architectures, shape environmental justice advocacy, policies, programs, and outcomes. The PEPI framework makes visible the remarkably different trajectories of environmental justice movements and the political and policy interventions needed to realize the goals of environmental and climate justice in diverse contexts.

Despite the recognition that institutions matter for international development, the debates over institutional reforms tend to obscure the role of power. Neoliberal models of development are often promoted in terms of their technical merits and efficiency gains and rarely account for the multiple ways that social, economic and political power shape institutional design and institutional change. Even recent efforts to address power tend to conceptualize it too narrowly. This special issue seeks to rethink the role of power in institutional creation and change in the context of persistent neoliberalism. In the introduction, we synthesize the literature on the nature of power to develop a new conceptual framework – a power in institutions matrix – that highlights the multiple dimensions of power involved in institutional development and change. We argue that such a theoretically-informed mapping of power in institutions will enable scholars, practitioners, and citizen groups to go beyond the standard critiques in order to analyze the multifaceted effects of neoliberal institutional change. Our introduction draws on an extensive literature review as well as the special issue contributors who examine institutional change in a variety of policy sectors in Africa, South Asia, Latin America, and North America. We find that a range of diverse local, national and transnational actors, with disparate access to power, negotiate institutional changes from above and below through overt imposition of and resistance to new rules, influence of agendas, and promotion of discourses. Neoliberalism thus creates a new distributive politics. The special issue thus offers a theoretically-grounded approach for linking international and domestic power differences to the process of institutional change, with a specific focus on equity and sustainability. In a departure from the current literature’s focus on elite bargains, we showcase the efforts by less powerful groups to gain a foothold in decision-making processes.

Public goods are defined by the technical conditions of nonexclusion and nonrivalry. Nonetheless, public goods are frequently viewed in environmental policy and scholarly debates as providing strictly positive benefits (or, in the case of public ‘bads’, providing strictly negative costs). We provide a theoretical understanding of heterogeneous externalities produced by public goods to challenge this assumption, by highlighting the ways in which a single public good can simultaneously produce positive benefits for some and negative externalities for others. To demonstrate our argument, we apply the theoretical framework onto the contemporary debates over climate engineering projects proposed to mitigate climate change. Such projects inevitably harm some countries internationally and some groups intranationally such that aggregate predictions about the benefits of climate engineering are misleading without an accurate accounting for its negative externalities. Keywords: Public goods, Climate engineering, Institutional analysis, Solar radiation management

Anniversaries are times for looking forward as well as back. As we summarise below, contributions to this special issue, marking the thirtieth anniversary of Environmental Politics, does some of th...

The recent antiracist movement in the United States and beyond inspired the Sierra Club, one of the oldest and most prestigious global conservation organizations, to distance itself from its founder John Muir’s racist views. In a statement issued in July, 2020, Sierra Club’s Executive Director, Michael Brune, said, “As defenders of Black life pull down Confederate monuments across the country, we must also take this moment to reexamine our past and our substantial role in perpetuating white supremacy.”1 However, the legacies and consequences of the racist history of American environmentalism extend far beyond the words and actions of the founding fathers of European and American environmentalism.In this essay, we show that the effects of colonialism and racism are etched in the dominant philosophy, models, and institutional apparatus of global conservation. While some scholars and practitioners have offered significant critiques of the dominant approaches to global conservation, the institutional apparatus that upholds the colonial and racist legacies of conservation continues to hold tight. We show that in recent decades global conservation nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) have contributed to further strengthening of this exclusionary and repressive institutional apparatus, especially with the emergence of the phenomenon of “militarized conservation.” Moreover, the arguments about the rights of indigenous peoples and rights-based approaches to conservation are increasingly being appropriated to serve exclusionary protected-area-based approaches to conservation. We suggest that the debates over competing models of conservation demand a newer emphasis on political and institutional reforms, coupled with public accountability of major international conservation NGOs.

This essay provides a broad-based and jargon-free introduction to climate justice to foster critical thinking, engaged discussions, and profound reflections. It introduces the reader to three dimensions of justice—distributional, procedural, and recognitional justice—and shows how each relates to climate justice. A unique contribution of this essay is to identify and discuss the following three blind spots in the debates on climate justice: (1) the tendency to focus heavily on post hoc effects of climate change while ignoring the root causes of climate change that also contribute to injustices; (2) assuming incorrectly that all climate action contributes to climate justice, even though some types of climate responses can produce new climate injustices; and (3) although scholars have studied the causes of climate injustices extensively, the specific pathways to climate justice remain underdeveloped. This essay concludes by showcasing a few examples of the ongoing pursuits of climate justice, led by social justice groups, local governments, and some government agencies.

This article brings to center-stage questions of inequality within the context of contemporary theory and scholarship on the commons. We engage with the commons literature to explore how social, economic, and political inequalities affect who has access to and control over the commons. We make the following key contributions as a way to engage simultaneously and bring together different strands of the literature. One, we take stock of existing scholarship examining the commons and inequality, bringing into sharp focus the role of race, gender, caste, and class, among other dimensions of inequality. Two, we critically engage with scholarship that is pushing the boundaries of commons theory by exploring the processes of commoning or decommoning via “grabbed commons”. Three, by using the lens of commoning and linking it to the historical processes of colonization and capitalist dispossessions, we seek to foster a conversation with scholars working on emancipatory claims to the commons. Based on such a synthesis, we offer a research agenda to broaden the theoretical and empirical scope of commons scholarship, especially with the goal of building stronger bridges with critical property and environmental justice scholarship.

The Kelo river is a minor perennial tributary of the Mahanadi, and is 102 km long. It originates in the Pahad–Lude hills near Lelunga and flows south-east through a wide middle catchment north-west of Raigarh town (Chhattisgarh) and meets the Mahanadi about 19 km south-east of Raigarh at village Mahadevpali Ghat, Jharsuguda district, Orissa. At issue is the permission granted by the Chhattisgarh government (GoC) to Jindal Strips Limited, now called Jindal Steel and Power Limited (JSPL), to extract water through a combination of stop dams and intake wells from the Kelo, downstream of Raigarh town. The Kelo Bachao Sangharsh Samiti (KBSS) was constituted in 1996–97 by some of the leading activists of Raigarh. In 1998, KBSS launched a public campaign to save the Kelo by asserting people’s rights to natural resources, especially water. However, the State-wide movement against the pollution and environmental degradation caused by industrialisation is an encouraging sign. The government and JSPL forced to heed people's voices.

The 2019 COVID-19 pandemic has amplified inequalities and human rights challenges; in some states, COVID-19 policies have been introduced that further curtail human rights. Although some limits may...

Scientists, corporations, mystics, and movie stars have convinced policymakers around the world that a massive campaign to plant trees should be an essential element of global climate policy. Public dialogue has emphasized potential benefits of tree planting while downplaying pitfalls and limitations that are well established by social and ecological research. We argue that if natural climate solutions are to succeed while economies decarbonize (Griscom et al. 2017), policymakers must recognize and avoid the expense, risk, and damage that poorly designed and hastily implemented tree plantings impose on ecosystems and people.

This paper joins the debate on the relationship between inequality and the environment. Departing from the past contributions, which focused either on the theories of environmental behavior or on economic interests, this paper develops arguments about “political choice” mechanisms that help explain the linkages between inequality and national policymaking related to the establishment of protected areas. A cross-national analysis of the interactions between inequality, democracy and the legal designation of protected areas in a global sample of 137 countries shows that, ceteris paribus, the effects of inequality vary depending on the strength of democracy: in relatively democratic countries inequality is associated with less land in protected areas, whereas in relatively undemocratic countries the reverse is true. The highly significant effects of inequality undermine the democratic dividend in the arena of nature conservation.

This article argues for revisiting the institutional architecture of wildlife conservation in light of two recent trends: Increased popularity of landscape-level approaches and the recognition that conservation interventions must address longstanding questions of forest and land rights of local residents. The inquiry draws upon primary research conducted in Kanha National Park and Tiger Reserve, which is world renowned for its rich flora and fauna, but is also the site of a longstanding struggle over land rights of Adivasis, India’s indigenous people. The institutional landscape of contemporary wildlife conservation regimes, this article shows, is a product of the interlocking of socioeconomic inequalities and the dominant models of wildlife conservation. The analysis presented here follows a political economy of institutions approach, which underlines how the social, economic, and political contexts shape institutional outcomes. Findings from this analysis will inform the proposals for transformational institutional interventions aimed to meet the triple bottom line of social justice, broad-based economic development, and ecological stewardship.

This article investigates forest policies and institutions surrounding REDD+ in three heavily forested countries: India, Tanzania, and Mexico. The comparative analysis leads to three key insights. First, each of the case study countries has multiple land tenure statutes that result in different distributions of the costs and benefits of forest protection for key stakeholders. Second, land tenure regimes that offer local communities the most secure forest rights are not necessarily those associated with benefit-sharing mechanisms outlined in national REDD+ policy proposals. Third, a credible commitment by government to share REDD+ benefits with forest-dependent people is contingent on the interests of key actors involved in the policy process. Political and administrative structures that limit the power and authority of forest government bodies lead to more responsive and accountable policy outcomes.

Studies of social dilemmas consistently report higher than expected levels of cooperation, especially in the presence of appropriate institutions. At the same time, scholars have argued that institutions are manifestations of power relations. The higher than expected levels of cooperation amidst widespread power asymmetries constitute an important puzzle about the linkages between power asymmetries and the outcomes of local institutional deliberation. In this paper, I develop a microfoundation-based approach that examines incentives and imperatives to explain how power asymmetries shape individuals’ responses to institutional development and institutional change. I argue that local power asymmetries work across multiple interlinked institutional arenas. A fuller examination of the effects of power asymmetries, therefore, requires that scholars account for how interlinked institutional arenas shape strategic actions of the members and leaders within local communities.

This book shines much needed light on political leaders and the political strategies they adopted to achieve poverty alleviation. The three leaders that are the subject of this study – Chief Minist...