ABSTRACT
Environmental changes are among the greatest threats to the well-being and possibly the long-term survival of humankind, and they present profound challenges to many other species. It is therefore crucial that scholars and policy-makers do all that they can to understand the human relationship to the environment and the potential means of mitigating our impact on the planet. Much has been done to do this, but it is clear from ongoing global pollution, overuse of natural resources, and the failure of international regimes to adequately address most environmental problems, that the trend is – despite some successes – very much in the wrong direction. Species and habitats are being destroyed, water and air quality deteriorate unabated in most parts of the world, greenhouse gas emissions grow even as signs of climate change become increasingly unmistakable and dangerous – in addition to a huge range of other problems arising from industrialization and modern life. Given our failure to stop, let alone reverse, this trend, it seems reasonable and even imperative to look for new ways of understanding what is happening and why, and to find new ways for people and their governments to respond to environmental problems. The bulk of literature on environmental policy and politics has tended to
focus on various aspects of international cooperation and regimes, on one hand, and the processes of domestic environmental management and sustainable development, on another (see, for example, Lafferty and Meadowcroft 2001; Breitmeier et al. 2006). However, less attention has been given to what falls between and across the domestic and the international levels of analysis.1
There is a “level” of policy that is both internal and external to states that also deserves attention. We can call this level of policy practice (which is also a level of policy analysis) foreign policy. Foreign policy can play an important, even central, role in determining whether governments and other environmental policy actors actually take steps to address ecological problems effectively. The aim of this book is to define and explore that role. From a scholarly perspective, foreign policy is a subfield of political science
and the study of international relations. It involves the interplay between domestic forces, institutions and actors – such as democratic principles, civil society, executive and legislative power structures, government agencies, and
diplomatic personnel – and international forces, institutions and actors – such as the processes of globalization (economic, environmental, cultural), international organizations and regimes, and powerful countries, corporations, and nongovernmental organizations. As Gerner (1995: 17) observes:
