ABSTRACT
Critical political economy approaches to the study and practice of global environmental politics take a range of different forms, but often have as their starting point a set of questions about who governs and how, what is to be governed (and what is not) and on whose behalf (Newell 2008). Though these relate to the classic concerns of political economy: who wins, who loses, how and why, most critical accounts tend to situate global institutional arrangements established to manage the global environment within broader social relations (of class, race, and gender for example) and structures of power. This helps to clarify who is afforded environmental protection by global environmental governance, who is not, how and why. They also place relationships of power between states, business and corporations (capital), and international institutions at the heart of their analysis because these affect the nature of global action on the environment and what states are able to do (Paterson 2001). Thus, for many critical perspectives capitalism and its inequities and the organization of the global economy along neoliberal lines offer more clues to the nature and extent of responses to the environment than a narrower focus on specific features of institutions charged with managing the environment and a primary focus on the state in isolation from these social relations.
