Global Environmental Challenges: Perspectives from the South - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1551118203 ISBN 13: 9781551118208

Publisher: Broadview Press, 2008

Synopsis

In Global Environmental Challenges, a collection of experts examines globalization's multiple effects on the environments of countries in the Global South, and how they are addressed both domestically and internationally. As the process of globalization continues to unfold, several questions arise: What new environmental challenges has globalization brought to countries in the Global South? Has the international environmental agenda had an effect on the politics and policy of these countries? And finally, to what extent have international civil society actors influenced environmental management? Contributors here address these central questions by presenting eleven case studies from the Global South. In addressing these questions, Global Environmental Challenges examines the complex relationship between environmental management, development, and globalization.

About this title

About the Author

Jordi Díez is an associate professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Guelph.

O.P. Dwivedi is University Professor Emeritus at the University of Guelph. He was bestowed with the Order of Canada in 2005, Canada's highest civilian honour, and has published widely on bureaucratic management as well as the environment, including co-editing Administrative Culture in a Global Context (de Sitter, 2005) and Sustainable Development in Canada: National and International Perspectives (Broadview Press, 2001).

Review

The idea that globalization negatively affects the environment is an unexamined truism for many people. This timely book takes up that claim and assesses it with a series of case studies from the Global South, covering a number of countries whose environmental politics is scarcely known. Both Jordi Diez's theoretical overview and the country chapters reach the same conclusion: globalization clearly brings many negative environmental consequences and challenges to the Global South. However, globalization also has provided some of the tools to address those problems. This set of claims will surely stir debate, but the well-researched country chapters provide compelling evidence for them. This book is a must-read for anyone who wants to understand the countries whose handling of the globalization dilemma will determine the shape of much of 'our common future.'

(Kathryn Hochstetler, University of New Mexico)

This book brings together an impressive collection of scholars working on environmental challenges facing the Global South in an age of globalization. With rich and in-depth analysis from across the regions of the Global South, each chapter examines not only the uneven environmental impacts of globalization but also the mobilization of civil society to respond to these challenges. With its focus on Southern perspectives on these issues, this book makes an important contribution to the literature on global environmental policy and politics.

(Jennifer Clapp, Environment and Resource Studies, University of Waterloo)

This book not only discusses the link between the economy and its impact on the environment, but it also provides readers with examples of the specific challenges that this transformation of the world economy, globalization, raises for eleven developing countries. Its most outstanding feature is that it regards the debate on globalization and the environment from the perspective of developing countries (Global South) while managing to avoid the oversimplified view of globalization as the villain and the environment in developing countries as the victim. The book is not only of great interest to experts on the world economy, and academics concerned with the environment, but will also appeal to readers who are not necessarily specialists in the economy, the environment, or globalization.

(Vicente Ugalde, El Colegio de Mexico)

Edition details

• Publisher: Broadview Press
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 1551118203
• ISBN 13: 9781551118208
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 328
• Editor: Diez Jordi, Dwivedi O.P.