BiblioVault - Books about Green Politics

Green Politics and Global Trade

NAFTA and the Future of Environmental Politics

John J. Audley

Georgetown University Press, 1997

Environmental groups for the first time formalized their role in shaping U.S. and international trade policy during their involvement in NAFTA negotiations. John J. Audley identifies the political forces responsible for forging this new intersection of trade and environment policy during NAFTA negotiations, analyzes the achievements of the environmentalists, and explores their prospects for influencing future trade policy.

The need to reconcile the conflicting paradigms of economic expansion through free trade and that of limited sustainable development played a significant part in the political debate. Reluctant to acknowledge any relationship between these two principles, traditional trade policy actors were forced to include environmental interest groups in negotiations when the latter seriously threatened the treaty by aligning themselves with other anti-NAFTA interest groups, particularly labor. Other environmental groups worked with trade advocates to secure compromises in the agreement. The final bill included unprecedented environmental provisions, but not without serious infighting within the environmentalist community.

Drawing on his access to private as well as public documents exchanged among participants, Audley explores the interactions among the political actors. He explains how political compromises between environmental groups and trade policy elites came about, focusing in particular on the roles played by eleven national environmental organizations. In identifying their accomplishments, he concludes that although the environmentalists won some procedural changes, they failed to modify the norm of unfettered growth as the guiding principle of U.S. trade policy.

The first book to probe the role that environmental politics play in trade policy, this volume offers new insights into the political effectiveness of environmental organizations.

[more]

Green Politics in China

Environmental Governance and State-Society Relations

Joy Y Zhang and Michael Barr

Pluto Press, 2013

Based on interviews with members of grassroots organisations, media and government institutions, Green Politics in China provides an in-depth and engaging account of the novel ways in which Chinese society is responding to its environmental crisis, using examples rarely captured in Western media or academia.

Joy Y. Zhang and Michael Barr explain how environmental problems are transforming Chinese society through new developments such as the struggle for clean air, low-carbon conspiracy theories, new forms of public fund raising and the international tactics of grassroots NGOs. In doing so, they challenge static understandings of state-society relations in China.

Green Politics in China is an illuminating and detailed investigation which provides crucial insights into how China is both changing internally and emerging as a powerful player in global environmental politics.

[more]

The Promise of Green Politics

Environmentalism and the Public Sphere

Douglas Torgerson

Duke University Press, 1999

Politics today is dominated by business news and the stock market. But those in support of green politics ask whether human profit should continue to be the bottom line of political deliberations or if it is time for the interests of the natural world to combine with or even displace the interests of business. In The Promise of Green Politics Douglas Torgerson offers a survey of different schools of ecological thought, discusses their implications for the larger political sphere, and advances a three-dimensional concept of politics that emphasizes ethics and discourse as well as strategy.
Arguing that the environmental movement has the potential to contribute to contemporary developments in political theory and social action by changing discursive practices both at the grassroots level and along the corridors of power, Torgerson draws on the theories of Hannah Arendt and others to advocate a performative type of political debate that values multiple opinions and is not always oriented toward reaching a single conclusion. Torgerson argues that in a world stuck in administrative and scientific gridlock, the theatrical, comic aspects of green politics are as important as other, more goal-oriented, aspects. Gestures of the carnivalesque—such as protestors sleeping in hammocks slung from trees targeted for destruction or funeral processions held for dying rivers—could be the key to the creation of what Torgerson refers to as a “green public sphere,” one that promises a reconfiguration of the relationship between human creativity and the natural world. While offering a number of concrete policy suggestions, his focus remains on the complexity and heterogeneity of green thinking and on the transformative promise implicit in green politics. In creating new ways to speak about the environment, Torgerson argues, the green movement offers a creative way to reconsider many larger issues of political theory and action.
The Promise of Green Politics will serve as a gateway to new thinking about green politics and the emerging possibilities of a diverse and vital green public sphere. As such, it will be valued by those interested in environmental and public policy, political theory, social activism, and the future of political action.

[more]