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 Description: A series of crises unfolded in the latter part of the first decade of the 21st Century which combined to exacerbate already profound conditions of global economic inequality and poverty in the world’s poorest countries. In 2007, the unsound lending practices that caused a collapse in the US housing market ushered in a broader economic crisis that reverberated throughout the global financial system...read more

Product Description: In recent years, international trade in toxic waste and hazardous technologies by firms in rich industrialized countries has emerged as a routine practice. Many poor countries have accepted these deadly imports but are ill equipped to manage the materials safely...read more

Product Description: The social and environmental performances of big enterprises are increasingly coming under regulatory regimes that aim to reassert social control over them to improve their social obligations. In practice, corporate social responsibility (CSR) has its limitations for long term sustainability...read more

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Product Description: With the adoption of a World Bank-sponsored structural adjustment programme in the mid-1980s, Guinea underwent a dramatic change in its economic and agricultural policies. The country's experience over the past decade illustrates some of the most pressing problems encountered by African countries pursuing economic reform...read more