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Knowledge and the Environment

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Advances in International Environmental Politics

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Abstract

Environmental policy debates are often permeated by claims to knowledge and expertise, perceptions of environmental risk, and scientific uncertainty. As a consequence, a growing scholarship has asked questions about how knowledge interacts with power and gains political effect in environmental affairs. Students of International Relations (IR) have primarily contributed to this analytical inquiry by examining the conditions under which scientific expert networks influence state behavior and help to foster interstate coordination on collective action problems. Speaking to liberal institutionalist analyses of environmental regime formation and implementation, this is a literature that has sought to explain how scientific expert advice informs states’ calculations of costs and benefits of different courses of action and hereby affects patterns of international behavior. Some work in this field remains informed by the rationalist ontology of neoliberalism and treats scientific knowledge as a causal factor that is exchanged by fully informed actors. While scientific information may affect outcomes of strategic situations by increasing states’ clarity about goals or ends-means relationships (Goldstein and Keohane, 1983: 3), it does not challenge the material foundations of global environmental politics.

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Authors
  1. Eva Lövbrand
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Colorado State University, USA

    Michele M. Betsill (Professor) & Dimitris Stevis (Professor) (Professor) &  (Professor)

  2. University of Waterloo, Canada

    Kathryn Hochstetler (Professor) (Professor)

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© 2014 Eva Lövbrand

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Lövbrand, E. (2014). Knowledge and the Environment. In: Betsill, M.M., Hochstetler, K., Stevis, D. (eds) Advances in International Environmental Politics. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137338976_7

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