Reversing the Marginalization of Global Environmental Politics in International Relations: An Opportunity for the Discipline

Abstract

Despite the increasing urgency of many environmental problems, environmental politics remains at the margins of the discipline. Using data from the Teaching, Research, and International Policy (TRIP) project, this article identifies a puzzle: the majority of international relations (IR) scholars find climate change among the top three most important policy issues today, yet fewer than 4% identify the environment as their primary area of research. Moreover, environmental research is rarely published in top IR journals, although there has been a recent surge in work focused on climate change. The authors argue that greater attention to environmental issues-including those beyond climate change-in IR can bring significant benefits to the discipline, and they discuss three lines of research to correct this imbalance.

Asset Revaluation and the Existential Politics of Climate Change

“…14.See Andonova and Mitchell 2010; Bernstein and Hoffmann 2019; Hovi, Sprinz, and Underdal 2009; Keohane and Victor 2011. On the paucity of climate research in mainstream IR, see Green and Hale 2017.…”

Navigating climate’s human geographies: Exploring the whereabouts of climate politics

“…Taking the field of political science, a recent survey by Green and Hale (2017a) of scholars of international relations (IR) finds that while most ‘IR scholars in the United States see climate change, along with conflict in the Middle East, to be the greatest global threat in the years to come just 7% of them describe their primary or even secondary research field as environmental politics…(and) fewer than 2% of the articles published in the top disciplinary journals (defined by impact factor) are on environmental subjects’. While their argument is that the marginalization of climate change is considerably less than other environmental issues, nonetheless the analysis points to a stark lack of engagement with the politics of climate change and where it does take place a particularly narrow framing of the climate issue – a result which left the authors feeling ‘shocked’ about the state of global environmental research in their discipline (Green and Hale, 2017b).…”

“…First, despite the growing variety of climate-related topics addressed, its reach remains limited beyond those areas of the discipline that are regarded as being occupied by avowed ‘environment and society’ scholars of one kind or another (Castree, 2014). No systematic survey of the type conducted for International Relations by Green and Hale (2017b) has yet been conducted, but an overview suggests that the prevalence of climate change within geography journals in other subfields remains limited. For example, there have only been 26 articles in the Journal of Economic Geography where the term ‘climate change’ appears in the abstract or the title, the first of which was published in 2002 and 20 of which have appeared since 2010.…”

Climate change and international political economy: between collapse and transformation

“…First, it has simply been a relatively marginal concern within IPE to datea blind spot in terms of 'what we focus on', in the terms set out by the editors of this Special Issue (LeBaron et al, this issue). This is amply demonstrated by Seabrooke and Young (2017), Katz-Rosene (2019) and Green and Hale (2017). Second, and more importantly, IPE's blind spot regarding climate change is that it has failed to come to grips with two absolutely fundamental shifts in climate politics in the last decade and what it means for the theory and practice of IPE.…”