Walter F. Baber and Robert V. Bartlett.

Through theoretical discussions and case studies, this volume explores how processes of contestation about knowledge, norms, and governance processes shape efforts to promote sustainability through international environmental governance. The epistemic communities literature of the 1990s highlighted the importance of expert consensus on scientific knowledge for problem definition and solution specification in international environmental agreements. This book addresses a gap in this literature – insufficient attention to the multiple forms of contestation that also inform international environmental governance. These forms include within-discipline contestation that helps forge expert consensus, inter-disciplinary contestation regarding the types of expert knowledge needed for effective response to environmental problems, normative and practical arguments about the proper roles of experts and laypersons, and contestation over how to combine globally developed norms and scientific knowledge with locally prevalent norms and traditional knowledge in ways ensuring effective implementation of environmental policies. This collection advances understanding of the conditions under which contestation facilitates or hinders the development of effective global environmental governance. The contributors examine how attempts to incorporate more than one stream of expert knowledge and to include lay knowledge alongside it have played out in efforts to create and maintain multilateral agreements relating to environmental concerns. It will interest scholars and graduate students of political science, global governance, international environmental politics, and global policy making. Policy analysts should also find it useful.

On one day in 2009, in thirty-eight countries around the world, 4,000 ordinary citizens gathered to discuss the future of climate policy. This project, 'WWViews', was the first-ever global democratic deliberation – an attempt to enable ordinary people to reach informed decisions on and impact the global policy process. This book – which analyzes the experiences and lessons from this ground-breaking event – marks the beginning of a new kind of democratic politics, providing practical lessons on how to increase the impact of global deliberation projects within the media and on official policy processes. The authors explore important themes for participatory approaches from the local to the global: the role of deliberation within global governance methodology and practice participant selection; policy impacts engaging the media how policy culture affects deliberation uptake capacity building and knowledge transfer process evaluation content and argumentation analysis gender, race and class aspects. The global aims of the 'WWViews project', along with the opportunity to evaluate the same process in different national and cultural contexts, makes this a hugely valuable and informative study for all those interested in democratic deliberation and environmental governance from the small to the international scale.

International Environmental Governance reviews the contentious approaches to addressing global and transboundary environmental threats. The volume collects together the most influential and important literature on the major political approaches to dealing with these problems, their histories, major debates, and research frontiers. It is accompanied by a substantial introduction which reviews the evolution of the academic contribution to environmental governance, focusing on a wide array of international environmental problems.

This book examines the impact of current and emerging digital technologies on global environmental governance, and in particular on environmental civil society organizations. Technological innovations are constantly emerging: internet and social media platforms, blockchains, big data, and artificial intelligence are some of the most common or promising digital technologies of our times. Through case studies and the analysis of concrete applications of digital technologies, this book shows how these digital technologies can be deployed to support global environmental governance, and in particular a multi-stakeholder approach to the protection of the environment. It provides an overview of the diverse uses of these digital technologies by civil society organizations (CSOs) in global environmental governance. In this fast-changing context, the capacity of environmental CSOs to manage and benefit from digital technologies, and to produce and distribute information, can strengthen their participation in global environmental governance. Their key roles, including advocacy, monitoring, knowledge production, fundraising, nudging individual behaviors, and project implementation, greatly benefit from the use of these technologies. By examining some of the most-utilized current digital technologies and presenting some of the most prominent emerging ones, this book aims to illustrate how active civil society organizations operate, and how ICTs support some of their roles, and therefore their participation in global environmental governance. This book will appeal to scholars and students of environmental studies and politics, global governance, political sociology, geography and communication studies along with policy makers and communication specialists from the environmental community.