1st Edition
Routledge Handbook of Global Sustainability Governance
The Routledge Handbook of Global Sustainability Governance provides a state-of-the-art review of core debates and contributions that offer a more normative, critical, and transformatively aspirational view on global sustainability governance.
In this landmark text, an international group of acclaimed scholars provides an overview of key analytical and normative perspectives, material and ideational structural barriers to sustainability transformation, and transformative strategies. Drawing on pivotal new and contemporary research, the volume highlights aspects to be considered and blind spots to be avoided when trying to understand and implement global sustainability governance. In this context, the authors of this book debunk many myths about all-too optimistic accounts of progress towards a sustainability transition. Simultaneously, they suggest approaches that have the potential for real sustainability transformation and systemic change, while acknowledging existing hurdles. The wide-ranging chapters in the collection are organised into four key parts:
• Part 1: Conceptual lenses
• Part 2: Ethics, principles, and debates
• Part 3: Key challenges
• Part 4: Transformative approaches
This handbook will serve as an important resource for academics and practitioners working in the fields of sustainability governance and environmental politics.
Introduction: Critical and Transformative Perspectives on Global Sustainability Governance
Anders Hayden, Doris Fuchs, and Agni Kalfagianni
Part 1: Conceptual Lenses
1. Power and Legitimacy
Magdalena Bexell
2. Environmental Governance as Performance
Ingolful Blühdorn and Michael Deflorian
3. Engaging the Everyday: Sustainability as Resonance
John M. Meyer
4. Materiality and Nonhuman Agency
Tobias Gumbert
5. Worlding Global Sustainability Governance
Cristina Yumie Aoki Inoue, Thais Lemos Ribeiro, and Ítalo Sant' Anna Resende
Part 2: Ethics, Principles, and Debates
6. Justice
Agni Kalfagianni, Andrea K. Gerlak, Lennart Olsson, and Michelle Scobie
7. Representation of Future Generations
Peter Lawrence
8. The 'Good Life' and Protected Needs
Antonietta Di Giulio and Rico Defila
9. Post-Eurocentric Sustainability Governance: lessons from the Latin American Buen Vivir experiment
Julien Vanhulst and Adrián E. Beling
10. Responsibility
Luigi Pellizzoni
11. Religion
Katharina Glaab
12. Sufficiency
Anders Hayden
Part 3. Key Challenges
13. North-South Inequity and Global Environmental Governance
Chukwumerjie Okereke
14. Growth and Development
Kerrin Higgs
15. The Mining Dilemma
Thomas Princen
16. Financialising Nature
Jennifer Clapp and Phoebe Stephens
17. Environmental Countermovements: Organised Opposition to Climate Change Action in the United States
Robert Brulle and Melissa Aronczyk
18. A Critique of Techno-Optimism: Efficiency Without Sufficiency is Lost
Samuel Alexander and Jonathan Rutherford
19. Consumer Values and Consumption
Naomi Krogman
20. The Population Challenge
Diana Coole
Part 4: Transformative Approaches
21. Beyond Magical Thinking
Michael Maniates
22. Democracy in The Anthropocene
Aysem Mert
23. Living Well within Limits: the Vision of Consumption Corridors
Doris Fuchs
24. Beyond GDP: The Economics of Well-being
Dirk Philipsen
25. Beyond A-Growth: Sustainable Zero Growth
Steffen Lange
26. Work-Time Reduction for Sustainable Lifestyles
Jörgen Larsson, Jonas Nässén, and Erik Lundberg
27. Decarbonisation
Richard Lane
28. Localism, Sharing, and Care
Karen Litfin
Conclusion: Global Sustainability Governance – Really?
Doris Fuchs, Anders Hayden, and Agni Kalfagianni
Biography
Agni Kalfagianni is Associate Professor at the Copernicus Institute of Sustainable Development, University of Utrecht, The Netherlands.
Doris Fuchs is Professor of International Relations and Sustainable Development and speaker of the Center for Interdisciplinary Sustainability Research at the University of Muenster, Germany.
Anders Hayden is Associate Professor of Environmental Politics in the Department of Political Science at Dalhousie University, Canada.
"The heating planet and species extinction are now widely recognised existential threats to global sustainability (outside the US Republican Party) but the vast majority of policy responses ‘take the world order as a given and try to find solutions within established parameters’. This volume brings together a swathe of radical alternatives to the status quo, ranging from new planetary ethics to rethinking democracy, facing challenges from North-South inequality to financialisation, and proposing new approaches from consumption corridors to sustainable zero-growth – and many more. A timely and scholarly snapshot of a fast-moving crisis and the transformative responses it requires." — Ian Gough, Visiting Professor, London School of Economics, UK
"The Routledge Handbook of Global Sustainability Governance brings much needed critical attention to the theories, ethics, conduct and practice of sustainability governance. Addressing vital questions of how to bring about transformations towards a more humane and sustainable society, I recommend it for its timeliness, breadth of coverage, and the quality of scholarship from both established and more junior academics." — Peter Newell, Professor of International Relations, University of Sussex, UK
"The Routledge Handbook of Global Sustainability Governance brings together a set of essays that provide an essential guide to these turbulent times. Providing fresh thinking on key concepts and principles from power to responsibility, justice to ethics and questions of growth, sufficiency and what the good life entails, this handbook asks us to examine what transformative governance of our global challenges will entail. Working through a range of key problematics, including resource extraction, financialisation, consumption and population, this is indeed a Handbook for our current condition, one which will allow us to explore and interrogate how we have come to govern our environmental challenges towards particular ends and where the possibilities lie for shifting course." — Harriet Bulkeley, Professor in the Department of Geography at Durham University, UK
"This volume is notable for its transformative perspective, challenging longstanding rhetoric around sustainability to suggest new thinking that directly confronts the need for deep changes in response to the planetary crisis. The contributions not only identify alternative pathways for societies and governance, but also critically engage their ethical implications. With sustainability thinking once again on the rise with the advent of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals to guide global policy, the critical interventions of this volume are especially timely and important." — Steven Bernstein, Professor of Political Science, and Co-Director of the Environmental Governance Lab, University of Toronto, Canada
