ABSTRACT
Are established economic, social and political practices capable of dealing with the combined contemporary crises of climate change and intensifying economic inequality and global economic disruption? Will falling back on those wisdoms that have prefigured individual crises help identify ways forward, or simply reconfigure risk so that it may reappear in another guise in the future? This volume argues that the combination of global environmental change and the global economic downturn provides an opportunity for critical thinking and policy formulation by highlighting the co-dependence of socio-political and ecological processes. Crisis in this understanding signifies a point of instability in predominant structures, a precursor to impending threat, but importantly also an opportunity for the consideration and emergence of alternatives. Our starting point is a concern for global environmental change, which remains in the foreground of analysis, but we argue cannot be understood without engaging also with the drivers and consequences of current economic rounds of restructuring.
