This chapter engages with each of the social and environmental discourses and reflects upon how they have influenced Global Environmental Politics (GEP) and International Relations (IR) over the past twenty years. Twenty years ago, an explicit discourse of justice was largely absent from GEP research. Much IR scholarship suggests that by bringing as many nation-states together as possible, international institutions can address the increasingly globalised nature of human-environment relations and the governance challenges they pose. A political ecology approach reunites politics, economics and justice with deep green thought to produce a new environmental justice discourse. Feminist theory can offer vital and directly applicable insights for achieving environmental justice. Although not always explicitly couched in terms of justice, they highlight the need for an analysis of power and for understanding how structures of domination systematically reproduce environmental degradation. The environmental justice literature is rightly celebrated as a flexible and progressive agenda capable of problematising existing approaches to IR and the environment.
Gillard, RossFord, LucyKütting, Gabriela
Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences\Department of Social Sciences
Year of publication: 2017Date of RADAR deposit: 2018-05-31