Global environmental politics has thus emerged as a rich and diverse area of scholarship.Īs the field of global environmental politics has matured, growing numbers of scholars have sought to map the contours of the field and offer histories of the evolution of scholarship. Finally, efforts to address the consequences of environmental problems have raised controversial ethical and distributive-justice questions that have produced an important philosophical literature within global environmental politics. The widespread potential for massive economic, political, and ecological dislocation from the consequences of global environmental problems as well as from the potential policies to address those problems have led scholars to study global environmental politics from every paradigm within international relations as well as drawing on research in numerous other disciplines. In addition, because environmental problems typically do not respect borders, they pose challenges for international cooperation, which has thus produced a growing literature on global environmental governance.
The very long timeframes of both the consequences of environmental problems as well as the efforts to address them create a number of governance challenges given the much shorter political timeframes of politicians and diplomats. This fact has produced a wide-ranging scholarship on the relationships between science and policy. Global environmental problems frequently involve substantial scientific complexity and ambiguity.
Global environmental problems present many unique challenges and have thus spawned a range of subfields of study. The focus in this article will be on global environmental politics research that falls primarily within the larger field of international relations. The interdisciplinary approach makes it difficult to define the boundaries in this rather immense field of study. It has emerged as a center of interdisciplinary work that integrates research from a range of fields, including geography, economics, history, law, biology, and numerous others. It was only in the 1980s and into the 1990s that global environmental politics began to establish itself as a distinct field with its own dedicated journals and publishers, and the focus of study expanded to include global environmental problems such as ozone depletion, climate change, biodiversity loss, deforestation, and desertification. However, much of the literature prior to the 1980s related specifically to resource extraction and development issues.
As early as the mid-19th century, scholars wrote about the role of natural resources in global security and political economy. Global environmental politics is a relatively new field of study within international relations that focuses on issues related to the interaction of humans and the natural world.
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