Product Description

This comprehensive and accessible text fills the need for a political economy view of global environmental politics, focusing on the ways key economic processes affect environmental outcomes. It examines the main actors and forces shaping global environmental management, particularly in the developing world. Moving beyond the usual academic emphasis on international agreements and institutions, it strives to integrate debates within the real world of global policy and the academic world of theory.

The book maps out an original typology of four contrasting worldviews of environmental change -- those of market liberals, institutionalists, bioenvironmentalists, and social greens -- and uses these as a framework to examine the links between the global political economy and ecological change. This typology not only helps students understand and participate in debates about these worldviews but also provides a common language for students and instructors to discuss the issues across the social sciences. The book covers globalization and its consequences for the environment; the evolution of global discourse and global environmental governance; wealth, poverty, and consumption; the impact on the environment of global trade and trade agreements; transnational corporations and differential environmental standards; and the environmental effects of international financing, including multilateral lending and aid and bilateral and private finance. Brief, illustrative case studies appear throughout the text.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #98157 in Books
• Published on: 2005-04-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 351 pages

Review
"Paths to a Green World is a rare achievement: succinct yet comprehensive, clear and balanced without removing the passion and controversy from the issues. The authors thoughtfully present and elaborate on four worldviews, or paths to environmental protection, and then trust their readers to make their own choices. In a time when polarization or blandness seems to prevail in political life, this important book promotes tolerance and respect based upon a commitment to understanding the values and arguments of others."
--Karen Liftin, Department of Political Science, University of Washington

"Paths to a Green World provides the most theoretically sophisticated and sustained study to date on the relationship between economic globalization and environmental well-being. Rather than write a diatribe, Clapp and Dauvergne present conflicting views on this relationship and, in doing so, call on each of us to appreciate the diversity of environmental thought and probe our own understandings to work humbly yet urgently for a more sustainable global future."
--Paul Wapner, School of International Service, American University

"For students and scholars of environmental politics, Jennifer Clapp and Peter Dauvergne have made transparent what is often opaque: What do people believe and why? This book provides the insights and understandings necessary to separate the data from the noise, and makes clear how the same environmental information can lead to such divergent conclusions and policies. Paths to a Green World is sure to become an essential text in both environmental studies and political science."
--Ronnie Lipschutz, Professor of Politics, University of California, Santa Cruz

About the Author
Jennifer Clapp is Associate Professor of Environmental and Resource Studies and Chair of the International Development Studies Program at Trent University, Ontario, Canada.

Peter Dauvergne is Professor of Political Science and Canada Research Chair in Global Environmental Politics at the University of British Columbia. He is the author of the award-winning Shadows in the Forest: Japan and the Politics of Timber in Southeast Asia (MIT Press, 1997), and the coauthor (with Jennifer Clapp) of Paths to a Green World: The Political Economy of the Global Environment (MIT Press, 2005).

Customer Reviews

Basis for dialogue
Many people are working diligently on environmental issues, but they often disagree because they don't see the world the same way. The authors classify those who are serious about building sustainability into four worldviews -- market liberals, institutionalists, bioenvironmentalists, and social greens. The classification may be somewhat arbitrary, but by clarifying the values and positions of each group, the authors make a major contribution to improving dialogue among those who think that environmental cures will come from different directions.

Economic Theory for Environmental Policy
This potentially powerful book exhibits several weaknesses that will probably prevent it from realizing its potential influence. Fundamentally, the breakthrough of this study is the application of political economy theory to environmentalism. (Political economy focuses on the power relations that influence the production and consumption of resources, while striving to determine the role of control - thus combining the strengths of economics and political science while avoiding the inherent reductionism of both.) This leads to very informative results for the layperson who is interested in how environmental policy works, with in-depth coverage of a great many different aspects of economic theory and how they influence the politics of environmental policy formation. Another bonus of this book is its global coverage of influential environmental leaders and organizations on the international stage.

Unfortunately, there is a severe structural problem with this book's overall argument, as the authors parse knowledgeable environmentalists into four arbitrary categories - market liberals, institutionalists, bioenvironmentalists, and social greens - though there is deficient empirical support for the definitions of these four categories, or reasonable evidence that any concerned person would fit neatly into any one (or several) of the definitions. The authors actually admit to this limitation freely and state that the categorization is only meant for discussion purposes. Fair enough, but the entire book is structured strictly on the unproven existence of those four categories anyway, with each chapter introducing an issue and applying it to the supposed belief systems of each category. Another major structural problem with this book is its descriptive objectivity, making it almost entirely a compilation of existing information (though informatively presented, it should be noted), missing many opportunities for strong arguments. Thus, the book becomes an increasingly unreadable list of definitions, statistics, and acronyms with no compelling conclusions. Most fundamentally, the thinking environmental activist would find it difficult to make use of this book's information, except as background knowledge for understanding the motivations of differently-thinking allies. Environmental policy makers on the international stage could make more use of the theoretical information here, but whether the book was truly written for them, and how they could be inspired to make use of it, remain unclear. [~doomsdayer520~]