| Publication |
2011.
|
| Summary/Abstract |
There are few issue areas within international relations in which the policy realm has followed the scholarship quite as quickly or as far as in the area of the environment. After simple identification of the existence and causes of existing environmental problems, both scholarship and policy initially focused on formal institutional approaches for addressing these problems, and both have expanded that focus to include greater consideration of informal approaches, expansion of the environmental issues considered, and concentration on the importance of nonstate actors. Critical scholarship, the one area of scholarship with little connection to policy, calls attention to the interests, power structures, and assumptions that underlie environmental behavior and suggests that small-scale improvements over business-as-usual are misleading and even counterproductive. But most environmental politics scholarship has drawn direct influence from, and contributed to, policy pertaining to the environment. Ultimately, it is likely that both scholarship and policy have been strengthened by this close connection, but at the same time, both have perhaps been narrowed by it as well, so that some important issues or approaches have been understudied. While there are advantages to the close relationship in this subfield between scholarship and policy, there may be some advantages in the future to encouraging some distance between the two, even for those ultimately concerned about the fate of the global environment.
|