Earthly Politics: Local and Global in Environmental Governance

Front Cover
Sheila Jasanoff, Marybeth Martello
MIT Press, 2004 M03 19 - 376 pages
Globalization today is as much a problem for international harmony as it is a necessary condition of living together on our planet. Increasing interconnectedness in ecology, economy, technology, and politics has brought nations and societies into even closer contact, creating acute demands for cooperation. Earthly Politics argues that in the coming decades global governance will have to accommodate differences even as it obliterates distance, and will have to respect many aspects of the local while developing institutions that transcend localism.

This book analyzes a variety of environmental-governance approaches that balance the local and the global in order to encourage new, more flexible frameworks of global governance. On the theoretical level, it draws on insights from the field of science and technology studies to enrich our understanding of environmental-development politics. On the pragmatic level, it discusses the design of institutions and processes to address problems of environmental governance that increasingly refuse to remain within national boundaries.

The cases in the book display the crucial relationship between knowledge and power—the links between the ways we understand environmental problems and the ways we manage them—and illustrate the different paths by which knowledge-power formations are arrived at, contested, defended, or set aside. By examining how local and global actors ranging from the World Bank to the Makah tribe in the Pacific Northwest respond to the contradictions of globalization, the authors identify some of the conditions for creating more effective engagement between the global and the local in environmental governance.

From inside the book

Contents

Heaven and Earth The Politics of Environmental Images
31
Knowing and Ruling
53
Imperial Science Imperial Nature Environmental Knowledge for the World Bank
55
Resisting Empire Globalism Relocalization and the Politics of Knowledge
81
The Local the Global and the Kyoto Protocol
103
When Global Is Local Negotiating Safe Use of Biotechnology
127
Globalism and National Politics
149
Transnational Locals Brazilian Experiences of the Climate Regime
151
Merchants of Diversity Scientists as Traffickers of Plants and Institutions
217
Knowledge Communities
239
Knowing the Urban Wasteland Ecological Expertise as Local Process
241
Negotiating Global Nature and Local Culture The Case of Makah Whaling
263
Patching Local and Global Knowledge Together Citizens Inside the US Chemical Industry
285
Ordering Environments Regions in European International Environmental Cooperation
309
Knowledge and Governance
335
About the Authors
351

Localizing Global Change in Germany
173
Social Movements and Environmental Democratization in Thailand
195

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Page 28 - Agenda 21 and the non-legally binding authoritative Statement of Principles for a Global Consensus on the Management, Conservation and Sustainable Development of all Types of Forests were adopted.

About the author (2004)

Sheila Jasanoff is Pforzheimer Professor of Science and Technology Studies at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government. She is the author of Designs on Nature: Science and Democracy in Europe and the United States and other books and the coeditor of Earthly Politics: Local and Global in Environmental Governance (MIT Press, 2004).

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