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The Oxford Handbook of
COMPARATIVE
ENVIRONMENTAL
POLITICS
The Oxford Handbook of
COMPARATIVE
ENVIRONMENTAL
POLITICS
Edited by
J E A N N I E S OW E R S
STAC Y D. VA N D EV E E R
and
E R I KA W E I N T HA L
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers
the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education
by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University
Press in the UK and certain other countries.
Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press
198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America.
© Oxford University Press 2023
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in
a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the
prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted
by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction
rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the
above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the
address above.
You must not circulate this work in any other form
and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2022049850
ISBN 978–0–19–751503–7
DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780197515037.001.0001
Printed by Integrated Books International, United States of America
Contents
About the Contributors xi
Introduction: The Scope and Diversity of Comparative

Environmental Politics 1
Jeannie Sowers, Stacy D. VanDeveer, and
Erika Weinthal
PA RT I STAT E S A N D E N V I RON M E N TA L
P OL IC I E S I N C OM PA R AT I V E P E R SP E C T I V E
1. The Environmental State and Its Limits 23

James Meadowcroft
2. California’s Environmental Policy Leadership 43
David Vogel
3. Assessing 30 Years of Neoliberal Environmental Management in
Chile: Effective, Democratic or Neither? 57
Javiera Barandiarán
4. Environment and Development: Crossing the Divide Between
Global South and Global North 81
Kathryn Hochstetler
5. National Climate Mitigation Policy in Europe 93
Paul Tobin and Louise Wylie
6. Governing Flood and Climate Risks in the Netherlands and
Hungary: A Comparative Analysis 109
Elizabeth A. Albright
7. The Politics of Climate Disasters, Social Inequality, and
Perceptions of Government Assistance 127
Isabella Alcañiz and Ana Ivelisse Sanchez-Rivera
vi Contents
8. Implementation of International Environmental Law: A

Comparative Perspective 141
Maria Ivanova, Natalia Escobar-Pemberthy,
Anna Dubrova, and Candace Famiglietti
9. Comparative International Fisheries Management 166
Elizabeth R. DeSombre
PA RT I I M E T HOD S A N D C ON C E P T UA L
C ON SI DE R AT ION S
10. Interpretive Methodologies, Quantitative Methods, and

Comparative Environmental Politics 187
J. Samuel Barkin, V. Miranda Chase, and Saskia van Wees
11. Ethnography in Comparative Environmental Politics: Insights
from the Water and Waste Fields 200
Raul Pacheco-Vega
12. An Intersectional Exploration of Climate Institutions 223
Annica Kronsell, Gunnhildur Lily Magnusdottir,
Nanna Rask, and Benedict E. Singleton
13. Gender and Comparative Environmental Politics: Examining
Population Debates Through Gender Lenses 240
Nicole Detraz
PA RT I I I M OV E M E N T S A N D AC T I V I SM
14. Environmental Justice, Climate Justice, and Animal Liberation

Movements: Confronting the Problems of Social Difference 263
David N. Pellow
15. Civil Society, Networks, and Contention Around
Environmental Issues 281
Jen Iris Allan and Jennifer Hadden
16. Time and Place in Climate Activism: Three Urgency-Induced
Debates 299
Joost de Moor
Contents vii
17. The Comparative Politics of Environmental Activism in Russia:

Strategic Adaptation to Authoritarianism 317
Laura A. Henry
18. Anglo Fears: Rejection of Climate Change and Anglo Anxiety 335
Peter J. Jacques
19. Civil Disobedience, Sabotage, and Violence in US
Environmental Activism 356
Joseph M. Brown
PA RT I V M A R K E T S A N D F I R M S I N
C OM PA R AT I V E E N V I RON M E N TA L
P OL I T IC S
20. Territory, Private Authority, and Rights: The Place of Land

Rights in Sustainable Agriculture and Forest Certification 377
Tim Bartley
21. Comparing Voluntary Sustainability Standards: Blindspots,
Biases, and Pathways Forward 398
Hamish van der Ven
22. Continuity and Change in Carbon Market Politics 417
Carley Chavara, Christian Elliott,
Matthew Hoffmann, and Matthew Paterson
PA RT V E N V I RON M E N TA L J U S T IC E
A N D R IG H T S
23. The Comparative Politics of Environmental Justice 437

Kemi Fuentes-George
24. Critical Perspectives on Representation, Equity, and Rights:
Developing a Comparative Politics of Environmental Justice 456
Kimberly R. Marion Suiseeya
25. Globalization of Environmental Justice: A Framework for
Comparative Research 475
Prakash Kashwan
viii Contents
26. Rights of Nature: Institutions, Law, and Policy for Sustainable

Development 499
Craig M. Kauffman
27. Implementing Environmental Rights: Reviewing the Evidence
from Research and Practice 518
Joshua C. Gellers and Chris Jeffords
28. Gendering the Human Right to Water in the Context of
Sustainable Development 538
Farhana Sultana
PA RT V I NAT U R A L R E S OU RC E S
A N D P OL I T IC A L E C ON OM Y
29. Green Industrial Policy in Comparative Perspective: Supporting

Renewable Energy Industry Development in Emerging
Economies 559
Joanna I. Lewis
30. Natural Resources and the Politics of Distribution 577
Mohannad Al-Suwaidan and Nimah Mazaheri
31. Temporality, Limited Statehood, and Africa’s Abandoned Mines 592
W. R. Nadège Compaoré and Nathan Andrews
32. Illegal Wildlife Trade in the Mekong: The Interplay of Actors,
Legal Governance, and Political Economy 609
Songkhun Nillasithanukroh, Ekta Patel,
Edmund Malesky, and Erika Weinthal
PA RT V I I T H E P OL I T IC S OF
E N E RG Y T R A N SI T ION S
33. Fracked Taxpayers and Communities: Shale Economics in

the US and Argentina 633
Shanti Gamper-Rabindran
34. Renewable Energy, Energy Poverty, and Climate Change:
Opportunities and (Many) Challenges 658
Michaël Aklin
Contents ix
35. Renewable Energy Supply Chains and the Just Transition 679
Dustin Mulvaney
36. The Rise and Fall of Fossil Fuels: Two Moments in the Energy
History of the Middle East and Their Global Consequences 696
Dan Rabinowitz
PA RT V I I I C I T I E S A N D SU STA I NA B I L I T Y
37. Cities and the Environment in Africa: An Agency-Centered

Research Agenda 711
Christopher Gore
38. Reclaiming the Circular Economy: Informal Work and
Grassroots Power 730
Manisha Anantharaman
39. Urban Climate Adaptation: Discontents and Alternative Politics 751
Eric Chu and Linda Shi
PA RT I X E N V I RON M E N T S , R E S OU RC E S ,
A N D V IOL E N C E
40. War and Environmental Politics: A Comparative Perspective 775

Jeannie Sowers and Erika Weinthal
41. Climate and Conflict: Lessons from the Syria Case 797
Marwa Daoudy
42. The Integration of Conservation and Security: Political Ecologies
of Violence and the Illegal Wildlife Trade 814
Rosaleen Duffy and Francis Massé
Index 831
About the Contributors
Michaël Aklin, Department of Political Science, University of Pittsburgh

Elizabeth A. Albright, Nicholas School of the Environment, Duke University
Isabella Alcañiz, Department of Government and Politics, University of Maryland
Jen Iris Allan, School of Law and Politics, Cardiff University
Mohannad Al-Suwaidan, The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University
Manisha Anantharaman, Justice, Community, and Leadership, Saint Mary’s College of
California
Nathan Andrews, Department of Political Science, McMaster University
Javiera Barandiarán, Department of Global Studies, University of California, Santa
Barbara
J. Samuel Barkin, Department of Conflict Resolution, Human Security, and Global
Governance, University of Massachusetts Boston
Tim Bartley, Department of Sociology, Washington University in St. Louis
Joseph M. Brown, Department of Political Science, University of Massachusetts Boston
V. Miranda Chase, Department of Political Science, San Diego State University
Carley Chavara, Department of Political Science, University of Toronto
Eric Chu, Department of Human Ecology, University of California Davis
Marwa Daoudy, Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University
Joost de Moor, Department of Political Science, Stockholm University
Elizabeth R. DeSombre, Department of Environmental Studies, Wellesley College
Nicole Detraz, Department of Political Science, University of Memphis
Anna Dubrova, Department of Conflict Resolution, Human Security, and Global
Rosaleen Duffy, Department of Politics and International Relations, University of
Sheffield
Christian Elliott, Department of Political Science, University of Toronto
Natalia Escobar-Pemberthy, Department of International Business, Universidad EAFIT
xii About the Contributors
Candace Famiglietti, Department of Conflict Resolution, Human Security, and Global

Kemi Fuentes-George, Department of Political Science & Environmental Studies,
Middlebury College
Shanti Gamper-Rabindran, Graduate School of Public and International Affairs,
University of Pittsburgh
Joshua C. Gellers, Department of Political Science and Public Administration, University
of North Florida
Christopher Gore, Department of Politics and Public Administration, Toronto
Metropolitan University
Jennifer Hadden, Department of Government and Politics, University of Maryland
Laura A. Henry, Department of Government and Legal Studies, Bowdoin College
Kathryn Hochstetler, Department of International Development and Political Science,
London School of Economics
Matthew Hoffmann, Department of Political Science, University of Toronto
Maria Ivanova, School of Public Policy and Urban Affairs, Northeastern University
Peter J. Jacques, School of Politics, Security, and International Affairs, University of
Central Florida
Chris Jeffords, Department of Economics, Indiana University of Pennsylvania
Prakash Kashwan, Environmental Studies Program, Brandeis University
Craig M. Kauffman, Department of Political Science, University of Oregon
Annica Kronsell, School of Global Studies, Gothenburg University
Joanna I. Lewis, Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University
Gunnhildur Lily Magnusdottir, Department of Political Science, Malmö University
Edmund Malesky, Department of Political Science, Duke University
Francis Massé, Department of Geography and Environmental Sciences, Northumbria
University
Nimah Mazaheri, Department of Political Science, Tufts University
James Meadowcroft, Department of Political Science, Carleton University, Canada
Dustin Mulvaney, Environmental Studies Department, San José State University
W. R. Nadège Compaoré, Department of Political Science, University of Toronto
Mississauga
Songkhun Nillasithanukroh, Department of Political Science, Duke University
About the Contributors xiii
Raul Pacheco-Vega, Methods Lab, Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales

(FLACSO) Sede México
Ekta Patel, Nicholas School of the Environment/Sanford School of Public Policy, Duke
University
Matthew Paterson, Department of Politics, University of Manchester
David N. Pellow, Department of Environmental Studies, University of California, Santa
Barbara
Dan Rabinowitz, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Tel-Aviv University
Nanna Rask, School of Global Studies, University of Gothenburg
Ana Ivelisse Sanchez-Rivera, Department of Government and Politics, University of
Maryland
Linda Shi, Department of City and Regional Planning, Cornell University
Benedict E. Singleton, School of Global Studies, University of Gothenburg
Jeannie Sowers, Department of Political Science, University of New Hampshire
Kimberly R. Marion Suiseeya, Department of Political Science, Northwestern University
Farhana Sultana, Department of Geography, Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public
Affairs, Syracuse University
Paul Tobin, Department of Politics, University of Manchester
Hamish van der Ven, Department of Wood Science, University of British Columbia
Stacy D. VanDeveer, Department of Conflict Resolution, Human Security, and Global
Saskia van Wees, Department of Political Science, University of Florida
David Vogel, Department of Political Science, Haas School of Business, UC Berkeley,
California
Erika Weinthal, Nicholas School of the Environment, Duke University
Louise Wylie, Department of Politics, University of Manchester
Introdu c t i on
The Scope and Diversity of Comparative
Environmental Politics
Jeannie Sowers, Stacy D. VanDeveer,

and Erika Weinthal
Comparative environmental politics (CEP) is a vibrant field of scholarship and practice

that addresses a range of environmental issues facing communities, non-state actors, and
nation-states. It draws not only on the disciplinary study of politics and policy but, as this
volume shows, also is enriched by interdisciplinary insights from anthropology, geography,
sociology, law, and development studies. In contrast to global environmental politics, com-
parative environmental politics has a broader geographic and thematic reach, drawing
upon experiences of most of the world’s population with diverse environmental issues. The
intensifying climate crisis and the deepening burden of pollution and ecological destruc-
tion has accentuated structural inequalities associated with poverty, gender, caste, race, and
region. This volume thus reflects increased scholarly interest in environmental rights, en-
vironmental mobilization and movements, and non-state forms of political engagement.
Moreover, contestation and regulation of environmental issues can no longer be relegated
to the margins of formal politics anywhere. As James Meadowcroft’s contribution to this
volume notes, some version of the “environmental state” is here to stay, and the governance
of environmental issues is increasingly recognized as central to political economy, political
theory, political behavior, and political institutions.
In the decade since Steinberg and VanDeveer (2012) published Comparative Environmental
Politics (MIT Press), CEP scholarship has embraced new questions and methods even as
it seeks to address enduring questions in the broader field of comparative politics. This
volume brings together cutting-edge research that tackles important environmental issues
around the world using a range of theoretical and methodological approaches. We include
leading scholars in particular areas of research and include new voices to offer innovative
perspectives from multiple disciplines on emerging challenges and debates in the field of
CEP. The chapter authors seek to capture current controversies and debates in their areas
of interest and to make an original argument about how their work fits more broadly into
the study of CEP. The aims of this volume are two-fold: to illustrate some of the main the-
oretical debates and critical thematic issues that have emerged in the field and to include a
2 Jeannie Sowers, Stacy D. VanDeveer, and Erika Weinthal
broad cross-section of scholars. All the chapters, regardless of their country focus or com-
parative research design, take on the challenging task of synthesizing what they see as the
state of art in their respective thematic areas and indicating where additional research could
yield fruitful inquiry.
Scope and Method in Comparative

Comparative politics is characterized by the enduring importance of domestic institutions,

actors, and political processes, and situates these in broader transnational and regional
developments. In contrast to some of the dominant framings in international relations,
which emphasize the homogenizing impacts of the global economy and global govern-
ance, comparative politics is concerned with examining variation and diversity as well as
commonalities. Methods and approaches employed in the field are equally diverse, in on-
going conversation with a variety of social science traditions and developments.
The contributors to this volume illustrate the diverse strands that characterize the field
of comparative politics. Some authors focus on an in-depth case study of a single country
or subnational jurisdiction (such as a US state), drawing on significant fieldwork and in-
depth knowledge of domestic political dynamics and state–society relations. This method
has long generated some of the most insightful research in comparative politics and is well
represented in this volume in the chapters by David Vogel on California’s environmental
leadership, Javiera Barandiarán on the effects of Chile’s neoliberalism on environmental gov-
ernance, Laura Henry on the effects of Russia’s turn to authoritarianism on environmental
activism, Marwa Daoudy on drought and conflict in Syria, Joseph Brown on strategies of
civil disobedience in US environmentalism, and Isabella Alcañiz and Ana Ivelisse Sanchez-
Rivera exploring whom voters blame in the wake of Hurricane Maria’s devastating impacts
on Puerto Rico.
Other chapters employ an explicitly comparative framework across two or more political
contexts to explain causes of variation in environmental policy formation, organizational
capacity, public opinion, and social movement advocacy. These include Christopher Gore’s
chapter on urban environmental politics in several African cities, Shanti Gamper-Rabindran’s
chapter on fracking in the United States and Argentina, Songkhun Nilliasithanukroh et al.
on illegal wildlife trade in the Mekong Basin countries, Elizabeth Albright’s contribution
comparing flood risk management in the Netherlands and Hungary, Prakash Kashwan’s
comparison of advocacy for environmental justice in India and the United States, and the
intersectional analysis of four Swedish governmental agencies that include mandates to
address climate change by Annica Kronsell et al.
Other authors examine comparative environmental performance across a much broader
number of cases. These range from looking at the implementation of climate mitigation
policies across European countries, as in the chapter by Paul Tobin and Louise Wylie, to
comparing the effectiveness of the approximately 20 interstate regional fisheries man-
agement organizations established for various fish stocks and marine regions in Beth
Introduction 3
DeSombre’s chapter. Maria Ivanova et al. use a dataset of 13 countries that includes cases
from the Global North and the Global South to analyze variation in implementing mul-
tilateral environmental treaties and, in doing so, undermine notions that environmental
performance is confined to high-income countries. In addition, Peter Jacques’s contribution
explores why and how climate science denialism remains so robust in “Anglo” countries
such as Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
Yet other chapters draw on traditions of political theory, gender theory, and human
rights to explore normative claims and new ways to conceive of environmental rights and
obligations to humans and non-humans. David Pellow, for instance, argues that climate,
environment, and animal liberation movements can engage in more deeply intersectional
practice by emulating the radical institutional reforms called for by anti-racism and aboli-
tionist movements. Nicole Detraz uses a gender lens to explore discourses associated with
debates about the global human population as they play out in the US context, seeking to
problematize and interrogate them. Farhana Sultana argues that a gender perspective is
essential to understand the various dimensions of the human right to water. Eric Chu and
Linda Shi critique dominant climate adaptation discourses in urban planning, providing
examples of alternatives that would more adequately meld climate adaptation and environ-
mental justice concerns.
The study of CEP, as shown above, is not limited to scholars working in the discipline
of political science. Indeed, the field draws on the much broader sweep of environmental
studies to ask questions about power, governance, and distribution of human welfare with
insights from anthropology, geology, urban studies, and sociology. The contributions of
these disciplines in broadening the contours of environmental politics include the chapters
by Christopher Gore on urban environmental anthropology, Manisha Anantharaman on
ethnographies of informal work and the circular economy in India, and Raul Pacheco-Vega
on employing ethnographic methods to study water and waste.
Several chapters in this volume call for more consideration of underutilized approaches
in both method and methodology. Notably, the chapter by Barkin et al. challenges CEP
scholars to engage in more “methodological creativity” by employing interpretive episte-
mology alongside quantitative methods, a relatively rare combination in the field.
In exploring trends over the past decade, the Handbook highlights the growth in schol-
arship about a broader range of countries and regions than the initial focus on Europe and
the United States, with growth in coverage of “developing” countries, authoritarian states,
and the Global South. Important work on globally influential countries such as Brazil,
China, South Africa, and India is growing rapidly, as is work that compares cases in the
Global South and grapples thematically with issues of great salience to a broader range of
countries. In this volume, the expanded geographic scope is well captured in contributions
that draw on extensive fieldwork and field knowledge of non-Western contexts. These in-
clude the chapters by Barandiarán on Chile, Alcañiz and Sanchez-Rivera on Puerto Rico,
Pacheco-Vega on Mexico, Henry on Russia, Kashwan on India, Kauffman on Ecuador,
al-Suwaidan and Mazaheri on rentier states in the Persian Gulf, also examined in the
chapter by Rabinowitz, Songhkhun et al. on the Mekong Basin, Gore on African cities,
Anantharaman on India, Daoudy on Syria, and Duffy and Massé on South Africa. This
trend is also seen in comparative studies of energy transitions and industrial policy in low-
and middle-income countries (e.g., Hochstetler 2021; Lewis, this volume).
Furthermore, comparative regional studies, for example of Africa and Latin America,
are also on the rise. Beyond simply including more of the world’s states and societies
in CEP scholarship, however, this work is increasingly recognized as theory-generating
and not just testing theoretical propositions developed elsewhere. In other words, con-
ceptual and theoretical frameworks constructed and developed mostly via social science
research in and about Europe and North America are being challenged, augmented, or
replaced by scholarship about the rest of the world. For example, Kate Neville’s (2021)
work develops a framework for understanding contestation and resistance to energy
projects based on her research in Kenya’s Tana Delta and Canada’s Yukon and deploying
scholarship from social mobilization theories and political economy. Kathy Hochstetler’s
book (2021) analyzes renewable energy outcomes across countries based on her compar-
ative work on Brazil and South Africa. Hochstetler’s contribution to this volume argues
that CEP scholarship should continue to interrogate and de-center the North–South
binary in comparative politics scholarship. She also argues that environmental politics
scholars should engage more with the classic questions and analytical tools of compara-
tive politics scholarship.
The Handbook also finds new trends in CEP scholarship, particularly in more explicit
attention to the comparative study of environmental injustice and intersectional inequities.
Environmental hazards are often distributed unequally, reflecting entrenched relationships
of inequality and exclusion based on class, caste, racial, gender, citizenship, tribal, and
Indigenous ascriptions (see contributions by Compaoré and Andrews, Aklin and Bartley,
for example). The unequal distribution of environmental hazards and increased vulner-
ability to these hazards based on lack of adequate access to healthcare, basic services,
and civic representation, among other factors, can be understood as a form of “slow vio-
lence” (Nixon 2011). These injustices include colonial origins of land and biodiversity con-
servation (e.g. chapters by Duffy and Massé, and Fuentes-George), the siting of landfills
near communities of color, and lack of access to clean water and air (Marion Suiseeya).
Meanwhile Sowers and Weinthal’s chapter draws our attention to the many human rights
violations from the growing inclination of military combatants to target and destroy ci-
vilian and environmental infrastructure. Globally, the field of environmental justice and
rights has examined the role of environmental defenders and activists in protecting the
environment and community livelihoods. It has also explored new forms of law and juris-
prudence that call into questions patterns of economic growth and consumption, putting
forward the rights of nature. Gellers and Jeffords’s contribution seeks to take stock of evi-
dence about whether and under what conditions the increasingly diverse set of “environ-
mental rights” produce meaningful outcomes in implementation.
The question of environmental injustice extends beyond simply that of humans to
non-humans. Because politics, broadly understood, is usually considered a domain of
collective human action, political science has not embraced animals, plants, insects, and
other nonhumans as subjects and agents, as an influential strand of environmental his-
tory has done. David Pellow’s chapter argues that scholars and activists should consider
how to build upon discursive and conceptual linkages between movements for racial,
environmental, climate, and animal justice. The overlaps between considerations of non-
humans, along with claims for the “rights of nature” and struggles against environmental
racism are well articulated in the chapters by Kemi Fuentes-George and Craig Kauffman.
These chapters outline an important set of questions for CEP scholars moving forward.
Introduction 5
Dustin Mulvaney’s contribution links these discussions and CEP research to the growing
“just energy transitions” literature.
The remainder of this chapter introduces the major themes of each section by putting the
chapters within it in dialogue with each other. We also note where specific chapters speak
to important issues raised in other sections.
Part I: States, Domestic Political

Institutions, and Policymaking
The nation-state is the traditional locus of environmental policymaking, and Part I takes
stock of advances in studies of state policy and practice. The chapters explore the growth
and scope of environmental regulation in various countries, the turn to neoliberalism, and
recent rollbacks in environmental regulation under right-populist regimes, as in Chile. The
contributions also examine subnational variation in effectiveness, particularly in federal
systems, and the impact of domestic politics on broader environmental issues and the de-
sign and implementation of international environmental regimes. Variations in state ca-
pacity and legacies of state formation shape both supranational and subnational forms of
environmental governance.
James Meadowcroft’s “The Environmental State and Its Limits” asks us to reflect on the
accomplishments, the very demonstrable limits, and the continuing potential of decades
of effort to “green” states since the 1960s. Air pollution issues and regulation in wealthier
countries offer illustrative examples of substantial environmental achievements in many
countries, alongside persistent failures to grapple with the ecological and human health
challenges. Meadowcroft traces the construction of contemporary understandings of the
“environment” and the parallel idea that states are responsible for various forms of envi-
ronmental protection through attempts to regulate various undesirable outcomes. While
such regulation is often “ratcheted up” over time, involving changing scientific and tech-
nical understandings alongside political activism and advocacy, the limits of this approach
are manifest in the long list of current air pollution-related environmental challenges.
Meadowcroft challenges researchers and practitioners to ask questions about the poten-
tial of environmental states to move beyond regulating adverse impacts toward a focus on
transforming production and consumption in more sustainable directions.
David Vogel’s chapter, “California’s Environmental Policy Leadership,” focuses on one
of the globe’s leading environmental policy entities: the US state of California. He explores
several dimensions of California’s environmental leadership and the impact of this leader-
ship well beyond California’s borders, with particular attention to energy, climate change,
air pollution, and chemicals regulation. This work connects the California “case” to US and
comparative environmental federalism and adds to scholarship comparing national and
subnational public sector leaders and political processes around the globe (e,g., Selin and
VanDeveer 2015).
Javiera Barandiarán’s contribution takes us to Chile, focusing on how neoliberal
ideas, assumptions, and goals are embedded in environmental policies through state
institutions and constitutional provisions. Her work, which deploys scholarship from the
interdisciplinary field of science and technology studies, explores relationships between

the state, science, society, and nature—in part via attention to markets for scientific know-
ledge and the persistent impacts on the credibility and perceived independence of scientific
knowledge creation engendered by neoliberal policies. Barandiaran contrasts Chile’s neo-
liberal constitutional principles, and the neoliberal democracy’s “umpire state” these helped
create, with Ecuador’s 2008 constitutional reforms that attempt to center Indigenous-
informed concepts of “good living.” She calls for more research attention to diverse civic
epistemologies institutionalized in states and societies and what impacts these have on en-
vironmental rights, policies, and the organization and influence of scientific knowledge.
The next contribution, “National Climate Mitigation Policy in Europe” by Paul Tobin
and Louise Wylie, focuses on the well-studied and dynamic area of European climate pol-
itics. They note that Europe’s reputation for climate change policy leadership often masks
huge variance in stringency, content, consistency, and impacts of national climate change
policies across European states. Furthermore, a series of political, economic, and public
health crises in Europe since 2010 differentially impacted national climate policymaking.
They argue that the frequent focus on climate leaders—and the simple notion that other
states are laggards—obscures substantial political variance and complexity. It also hides the
unequal impacts of climate change on marginalized populations and obscures the host of
actors beyond the state engaged in climate policymaking.
Kathryn Hochstetler’s chapter takes the critique of simplistic binaries between environ-
mental leaders and laggards far beyond Europe. She argues that the persistent division in
much environmental politics scholarship between countries in the Global South and the
Global North does not serve well either the study of the environment or of comparative
politics. A small number of advanced industrialized countries still dominate the environ-
mental literature, while the vast diversity of environmental ambitions, outcomes, and pol-
itics in the Global South remains understudied. As she argues, “The understudy of most
of the world’s countries, most of which are developing countries, and the understudy of
critical comparative politics topics in them means that we too often work with negative
concepts once we move outside the advanced industrialized world.” Ascribed deficits in
state capacity, financing, and leadership all too often figure in lieu of robust comparative
analysis of developing countries. Moreover, the conceptual divide between North and South
narrows research agendas in both. Many environmental studies of the Global South con-
tinue to focus on such topics as conservation and natural resources rather than exploring
the politics of pressing environmental issues regarding cities, service provision, sanitation,
and the political system more broadly, although this is changing as some of the chapters in
the volume attest. Moreover, studies in and of the Global South increasingly figure prom-
inently in the comparative scholarship on environmental movements and rights, as also
demonstrated in the Handbook. Hochstetler further notes that moving beyond and away
from assuming a North–South conceptual divide enables comparative scholarship on the
rise of populist parties, democratic backsliding, and political polarization that characterize
polities such as the United States, Brazil, Hungary, and Turkey.
The next two chapters analyze how policy responses to natural disasters—floods and
hurricanes—are shaped by both domestic and transnational factors. Elizabeth Albright’s
contribution is a historically informed comparative assessment of climate and flood risk
management in the Netherlands and Hungary. Despite substantial differences in geog-
raphy and political history and institutions, she finds substantial similarities between the
Introduction 7
two states’ approaches as both move to reconceptualize and manage flood risks through
climate change adaptation lenses. In fact, catastrophic flooding in both countries in the
2000s seems to have pushed states in similar discursive and policy directions and produced
similar challenges in terms of reforming and integrating policy approaches across a host
of domestic institutions. She also finds barriers to civil society engagement in these policy
areas in both countries.
Isabella Alcañiz and Ana Ivelissse Sanchez-Rivera’s chapter, “Climate Disasters, Inequality
and Perceptions of Government Assistance,” focuses on the question of who citizens believe
is responsible for post-disaster relief and the failures in relief and recovery after a disaster.
This focus on post-disaster responsibility attribution draws on experiences following three
damaging hurricanes in 2017, with a particular focus on the aftermath of Hurricane Maria
in Puerto Rico. The chapter, moreover, shows that additional research is needed to under-
stand the comparative politics of climate disasters, given the likely influence of governance
structures, partisanship, ideology, and social and economic inequity.
The last two chapters in this section explore how international and regional environ-
mental governance is shaped by domestic capacities and institutional arrangements. Maria
Ivanova and her coauthors focus the comparative analysis on states’ implementation of the
multilateral environmental agreements (MEAs) they have signed and ratified. The chapter
assesses implementation efforts in 13 countries, from the Global North and the Global
South, related to four MEAs focused on hazardous waste, persistent organic pollutants,
wetlands, and trade in endangered species. Their analysis deploys a database index of MEA
implementation that includes information about measures taken by states (and reported by
states) regarding national policies, regional collaboration, and data collection and manage-
ment. Their work demonstrates that, contrary to oft-seen generalizations about countries
in the Global South, several such countries perform extremely well—including Rwanda
and Vietnam. The authors argue that there is substantial, often overlooked, environmental
leadership potential among states in the Global South.
Beth DeSombre’s chapter applies comparative analysis to interstate organizations
called regional fisheries management organizations (RFMOs). About 20 RFMOs have
been negotiated by states to improve the management of high seas fisheries (fisheries
that otherwise are beyond state jurisdiction). Some RFMOs focus on specific fish,
such as tuna, halibut, or pollock, in a particular oceanic region (e.g., the Pacific or the
Bering Sea), while others seek to regulate multiple fisheries for a region (such as the
Mediterranean). The organizations vary in terms of the organization of scientific know-
ledge, voting procedures, decision rules, monitoring, and enforcement processes. As
DeSombre outlines, RFMO regulatory variation is substantial, as is the effectiveness of
said regulation across RFMOs.
Part II: Methods and

Conceptual Considerations
Since CEP scholars embrace a wide array of qualitative and quantitative methodolog-
ical choices, we have included a section in the Handbook that focuses specifically on
methods to illuminate the rich methodological diversity and pluralism of the field.
Methods used by CEP scholars range from ethnographic field research and archival
studies to network analysis and large-N statistical studies. Increasingly, research is
carried out in collaboration and partnership with communities, as described by many
of the chapters on environmental justice and Indigenous rights. The chapters in the
Handbook highlight the broad array of methods deployed to tackle questions relevant
to the field of CEP.
The chapter by J. Samuel Barkin, V. Miranda Chase, and Saskia van Wees argues that
CEP should interrogate the common assumption that quantitative methods are associ-
ated with comparative inference questions while interpretive questions are associated with
qualitative methods. These methodological associations, they argue, simply do not have
a robust epistemological basis. The chapter, “Interpretive Methodologies, Quantitative
Methods and Comparative Environmental Politics,” offers two illustrative case studies
of the effective use of quantitative methods for interpretive research without embedding
those methods in epistemological positivism. One case examines patterns of environ-
mental performance and foreign policy in India and China while the other explores efforts
by Indigenous and traditional communities in the Amazon Basin to oppose dam con-
struction that negatively impacts their communities. The chapter closes by offering im-
portant distinctions between method, methodology, and epistemology. Instead, it calls for
approaches grounded in methodological pluralism, reflectivity, and creativity, approaches
that refuse to blithely assume simplistic connections between particular methods and
epistemologies.
Raul Pacheco-Vega’s contribution focuses our attention on the merits of ethnographic
research methods and contributions of these to CEP, with reference to studying vulner-
able communities. Pacheco- Vega defines ethnography as “the systematic observation
of populations and communities with the intention of learning about the cultural inner
workings of a societal group.” His chapter draws on research related to bottled water con-
sumption and informal waste picking to illustrate aspects of how ethnographic research can
be designed and carried out and some of the contributions it can make to CEP.
Annica Kronsell and her three coauthors’ chapter embarks on an intersectional explora-
tion of climate change institutions in Sweden. Using documentary analysis and interviews
they explore how a set of social issues are understood in four Swedish governmental climate
institutions—the Environmental Protection Agency, the Traffic Agency, the Energy Agency,
and the Innovation Agency. While social issues are widely recognized, they are lower in pri-
ority than technological innovation and economic incentives and difficult to integrate with
these dominant orientations. The authors advocate the use of more feminist and intersec-
tional approaches in the study of CEP.
Nicole Detraz’s contribution, “Gender and Comparative Environmental Politics,” also
illustrates the value of deploying gendered and feminist lenses in CEP. Detraz finds that
population discourses, particularly those associated with climate change, often con-
tinue to rely on rigid gender norms and problematic assumptions about which people or
communities in society are framed as environmental saviors and which as environmental
problems. While population discourses may have shifted away from early, more extreme
rhetorics, she calls on social scientists to critically examine their own use of language and
reflect on their roles in promulgating discourses that cast marginalized women as environ-
mental burdens, potentially impeding environmental and gender justice.
Introduction 9
Part III: Movements and Activism

in Comparative Environmental Politics
Central to comparative politics and environmental politics is the study of social movements
and political activism. Environmental activism, in particular, has manifested itself in many
ways across the world depending on different institutional and historical contexts and has
involved different coalitions of actors. CEP has long explored how people mobilize around
specific issue areas and influence environmental outcomes. Regime type can, for example,
influence the creation and form of environmental organizations and movements; author-
itarian countries like Russia are increasingly putting restrictions on nongovernmental or-
ganizations (NGOs), forcing them to register as foreign agents (see Henry). CEP has also
highlighted processes by which domestic and international environmental NGOs forge
alliances to tackle environmental problems, as was the case in Kazakhstan (Weinthal and
Watters 2010). In democracies, environmental movements may morph into political parties,
or environmental NGOs may build coalitions with different political parties to further their
agendas. Chapters in this section showcase different repertoires of action for addressing the
climate crisis and environmental injustices across a range of political spaces.
David Naguib Pellow’s chapter explores tensions between social movements focused
on climate and environmental justice and those centered on animal liberation, two areas
of CEP scholarship to which he has contributed substantially. The chapter explores war-
fare and militarization as phenomena and cases with common, dire short-and long-term
consequences for humans (especially marginalized communities) and other species. Such
consequences illustrate the potential common interests of environmental and multispecies
justice and the creation of “deeply intersectional” movements. Pellow concludes with a fas-
cinating discussion of what he calls “multispecies abolition democracy”—a concept rooted
in the work of W. E. B. Du Bois. “As much as prison and slavery abolitionists have articu-
lated powerful narratives of freedom for people oppressed by institutions that cage and re-
strict their mobility, that political project is incomplete without a consideration of the fuller
range of beings—nonhumans—who are also caged and consumed by structural violence,”
he writes. In pushing scholars of comparative environmental politics to consider the wel-
fare of other species, Pellow argues that abolitionists and radical reformers for racial and
social justice offer a repertoire of language and practice that can inspire deeper and broader
commitments to “multispecies” justice.
The contribution by Jennifer Allan and Jennifer Hadden explores civil society participa-
tion in CEP, asking questions about what the growing size, diversity, and complexity of civil
society networks means for scholarship. Their examination of environmental civil society
over time argues that growing complexity within civil society networks, with respect to
outcomes and impacts, and growing contention within civil society pose several challenges
to contemporary scholarship. They highlight a need for further cross-national comparative
research that includes more of the developing world and engages debates about legitimacy
and private authority, topics on which both have written extensively.
Joost de Moor focuses our attention on “Time and Place in Climate Activism.” The climate
movement has been fundamentally shaped by the temporality of climate change: namely,
many of its consequences are or will be inevitable and irreversible, making urgency a
central, increasing, and driving force in climate movements. Because time is partially so-
cially constructed, its meanings and implications are contested within climate activism,
impacting aspects of politics, strategy, and goals. Time is also contextual. What might seem
a future threat that can be managed by more privileged places and communities is already
an unfolding catastrophe for disadvantaged communities. Framing and deploying urgency
within climate politics shapes and reshapes climate activism across time, space, and scale.
The chapter by Laura Henry asks how environmental NGOs continue their activism under
conditions of increasing authoritarian governance. Henry’s chapter explores the Russian ex-
perience, from the 1990s post-Soviet year through the 2020s. She explains conditions in
the 1990s that allowed for the emergence of Russian environmental NGOs and charts the
increasing hostility of the Russian state to these NGOs, which undermined some of the very
conditions that facilitated their emergence, such as initially allowing and then banning for-
eign financial support. As Russia became a more centralized, authoritarian, and repressive
political regime, Russian environmentalists adapted their strategies and activism, as social
movement theory might predict. She thus argues that we should not overlook new forms of
activism that could emerge even as previous forms are repressed or forestalled.
Peter Jacques’s “Anglo Fears” focuses our attention on the comparative politics of climate de-
nial across borders. His work demonstrates that broad-based, politicized rejection of climate
science is a well-funded and well-organized counter movement to oppose global and national
climate movements and forestall climate mitigation policies. The chapter focuses on the United
States and the United Kingdom as the most important host countries for the organized counter
movement as they center and help export climate denialism in Australian, Canadian, and South
African politics (among others). Jacques demonstrates that climate denialism is primarily an
Anglo effort, connected to anxieties about losing long-held privileges and ways of life.
Joseph Brown’s chapter, “Civil Disobedience, Sabotage and Violence in US Environmental
Activism,” explores the diversity of tactics used by environmental activists and traces debates
within environmental movements about when to escalate from legal, accommodationist
strategies to more confrontational, yet still largely nonviolent approaches. He draws examples
primarily from the United States but also from Canada and other countries in which activists
sought to halt logging in old-growth forests, delay and cancel fossil fuel pipelines, and hinder
whaling vessels. These campaigns were often characterized by broad coalitions of activists and
stepwise escalation in tactics when legal and political challenges to state and corporate decision-
making proved insufficient. Environmental movements have systematically eschewed vio-
lence, defined by Brown as causing harm to people without their consent, but smaller groups
have embraced civil disobedience, nonviolent struggle, and, less frequently, sabotage (“ecotage”
in the language of EarthFirst!). Violence, he shows, has been far more frequently employed
against environmental activists, particularly those engaging in nonviolence civil disobedience.
Part IV: Markets and Firms in Comparative

CEP has understood firms—whether private or state-owned—to be central actors in

generating environmental outcomes, often with a focus on corporate interests in shaping
Introduction 11
institutions. Firms and corporations often circumvent state-led regulations and instead
push for voluntary governance mechanisms, including certification schemes to pro-
mote sustainability outcomes, for example. While environmental groups have frequently
promoted eco-labels and certification schemes to expand information and transparency for
consumers about products that they buy and consume, companies across sectors and coun-
tries have understood the value of such certification schemes and labels. CEP scholars have
examined the use of private regulation in promoting more sustainable development and
environmental management. Some comparative research has focused on what makes some
third-party certifiers more credible than others (Starobin and Weinthal 2010). Extractive
industries have increasingly relied on private regulation and certification schemes, espe-
cially in countries with weak governance or where the state has opted to decentralize policy
and regulation for the extractive sector.
Tim Bartley, in his chapter on “Territory, Private Authority, and Rights,” examines these
questions in relation to sustainable agriculture and forestry certifications. Such market-
based solutions ask corporations rather than states to address the environmental and social
impacts of corporate extractive policies. As a result, transnational sustainability standards
are increasingly contested, especially when they come into conflict with Indigenous cus-
tomary practices. Bartley’s chapter compares forest certification in Indonesia and China to
illuminate the tension that ensues when private sustainability standards encounter other
land claims and shows how these conflicts vary across different institutional contexts. The
chapter furthermore highlights the application of “free and prior informed consent” for
sustainability standards to Indigenous land.
Hamish van der Ven, in his chapter on “Comparing Voluntary Sustainability Standards,”
continues to unpack what CEP scholars know about voluntary sustainability standards as
well as what is missing in our knowledge toolkit. Van der Ven undertakes a survey of the
literature that compares two or more voluntary standards, covering forestry, fisheries, and
organic produce. In doing so, he finds a range of methods employed in the literature as well
as regional biases. Furthermore, as the comparative literature on sustainability standards
fails to focus on environmental impacts, van der Ven argues for a new research agenda that
will support CEP scholars in addressing the many weaknesses he identifies in the certifica-
tion and standards literature.
Another area of CEP research on markets and firms has to do with market-based approaches
in lieu of state-led governance mechanisms for addressing “wicked” environmental problems.
While states have voiced their collective support for climate action at the international level
with the signing of the Paris Agreement, much of the actual work on addressing climate change
is decentralized to states. Here, too, market-based approaches are being introduced at the na-
tional level as a means for states to meet their Nationally Determined Contributions (NDC).
Yet comparative politics tells us that states have unequal capacities to meet their NDCs as
well as different institutional structures that shape their policy choices at the national level.
Carley Chavara, Christian Elliot, Matthew Hoffman, and Matthew Paterson, in their chapter
on “Continuity and Change in Carbon Market Politics,” investigate the variation in domestic
institutions and political economies across five cases—the European Union, China, Canada,
South Korea, and Indonesia—to explain developments in carbon markets. While the chapter
highlights the transnational diffusion of policy ideas across different institutional contexts, it
also suggests that strategies to decentralize climate policy through a focus on carbon markets
may prevent countries from introducing more sweeping programs to reduce carbon emissions.
Part V: Environmental Justice and Rights
The chapters in Part V offer a deep dive into questions of environmental justice and rights.
In doing so, authors apply a comparative lens to ask, “What is environmental justice and
rights”? While scholars concur that there is a “normative commitment to justice” (Marion
Suiseeya) and that environmental justice is concerned with a range of issues ranging from
climate justice to food justice, the chapters here investigate under what circumstances en-
vironmental rights make a difference (Gellers and Jeffords), how communities struggle to
protect their communities’ well-being and the environment (Marion Suiseeya), and claims
for the rights of nature in which ecosystems are subjects with rights (Kauffman). Permeating
scholarship on environmental justice and rights within CEP are calls for action to rectify
the exclusions of marginalized populations from decisions about the costs and benefits of
natural resource use and the siting of polluting activities that affect their communities and
livelihoods. In many instances, governments in both industrialized and industrializing re-
gions have purposefully perpetuated racist policies that incentivized environmental harms
and extraction in communities of color.
The CEP literature on environmental justice and rights, as highlighted in this Handbook,
recognizes that justice manifests itself in different ways depending on different institu-
tional contexts and different types of environmental struggles. In some parts of the world,
communities and activists are fighting for access to clean water and air and reducing ex-
posure to toxic wastes when large polluting industries are sited in their communities, or
they are fighting to prevent the construction of large dams that could erase their ances-
tral homelands and cause forced displacement. In other parts of the world, activists are
fighting to protect forests upon which their livelihoods depend and protect land being
appropriated by large agro-conglomerates for export crops. Frontline environmental justice
communities, as Marion Suiseeya notes in Fiji, for example, are increasingly at risk from ex-
istential threats such as climate change. Authors in this handbook forcefully argue through
a comparative lens that environmental justice and environmental rights require rectifying
situations in which human beings are deprived of rights to clean and healthy environments.
Kemi Fuentes-George’s chapter on environmental justice highlights the comparative
dimensions of justice central to environmental and social struggles across the world. While
the language of environmental justice and environmental racism has manifested itself in a
particular context pertaining to the struggles of largely Black and Hispanic communities
in the American South, Fuentes-George shows that these concepts help to capture broader
social justice struggles and activism in New Zealand, Mexico, Jamaica, and Brazil, among
other places. He draws on a wide range of cases, which include fossil fuel extraction in
industrialized countries and agricultural development in the Global South, to illustrate how
socioeconomically marginalized communities continue to pay the costs for a global eco-
nomic system premised on economic growth and consumption. One important takeaway
from Fuentes-George’s chapter is a “critique of ‘colorblind’ mainstream environmentalism,”
which has not overcome “racist and ecologically unsustainable policies.”
The chapters also shed light on the different means and mechanisms by which groups
pursue justice across and within different countries. Some political systems have increas-
ingly adopted rights-based approaches for rectifying injustices incurred by many groups
Introduction 13
over decades in which natural resources, for example, were appropriated for use by the state
or the private sector. Fuentes-George, in his chapter, proposes mechanisms to “promote
and democratize information” and include “marginalized participation in policymaking”
to facilitate a more just and sustainable environment. Kim Marion Suiseeya, in her chapter
on “Critical Perspectives on Representation, Equity, and Rights,” adds another dimension
to our understanding of environmental justice by treating environmental justice as a driver
rather than as an unintended outcome of the policy and political process. Marion Suiseeya
asks whether theories of environmental racism and discriminatory siting can help to ex-
plain environmental justice politics across a range of countries. Her chapter makes the
case that environmental justice is a “political phenomenon,” and that environmental injus-
tice varies by specific context. The chapter draws attention to the local dimensions of en-
vironmental injustice while demonstrating connections to a global environmental justice
movement and the role of activists in building networks across different environmental
justice movements. She further examines how environmental justice is operationalized
and defined in practice.
In like manner, Prakash Kashwan seeks to further a formal comparative environmental
justice approach in his chapter on “Globalization of Environmental Justice.” Recognizing
that the roots of environmental justice are widespread, Kashwan offers a systematic com-
parison of how environmental justice is manifested in the environmental politics of
different countries. Through an in-depth comparison of environmental justice advocacy
in the United States and India, the chapter highlights the political economy of institutions
in shaping the scope and form of the environmental justice movements.
Several chapters discuss the expansion of basic rights to non-human living things, as
has been the case in the Ecuadorian 2008 Constitution or the 2010 Law of the Rights of
Mother Earth in Bolivia (e.g. chapters by Fuentes-George, Kauffman). Craig Kauffman’s
chapter on “Rights of Nature: Institutions, Law, and Policy for Sustainable Development”
expands on the legal strategy of including “Rights of Nature” provisions in domestic
and international policy arenas. Through an extensive comparative review, Kauffman
sheds light on the relationship between Rights of Nature (RoN) and human rights and
the ensuing implications for rethinking our understanding of sustainable development
as ecological sustainability. The intersectionality with Indigenous rights has profound
implications for past modes of economic development, as has been the case in Ecuador,
where the government canceled mining concessions to protect the Cofán’s community
rights (see Kauffman).
Given the proliferation of environmental rights, as documented in the chapters in this
section, Gellers and Jeffords offer a roadmap forward for assessing the conditions under
which environmental rights are producing meaningful outcomes. The global environ-
mental politics field has struggled with defining effectiveness; at times effectiveness has
meant solving an environmental problem, whereas at other times it has meant compli-
ance with an international environmental regime (Young 1994). In similar manner, CEP
scholars may not agree on what is meant by efficacy. Gellers and Jeffords open a discussion
regarding implementation of human and non-human rights to consider examples ranging
from the impacts of expanding access to improved water sources and sanitation facilities
to the practice of democratic participation. They ask CEP scholars to ponder situations
where protecting rights of nature might hamper the welfare of populations if people were
no longer able to access a water body for drinking water, for instance. Overall, their chapter
pushes the research agenda on RoN to adopt evidence-based approaches for evaluating
rights-based forms of environmental protection.
Farhana Sultana’s chapter, “Gendering the Human Right to Water in the Context of
Sustainable Development,” highlights the intersectional and gendered aspects of rights and
justice on the ground as applied to the human right to water. Sultana argues that rights are
linked and cannot be disaggregated precisely because they are co-constitutive of a broader
set of issues pertaining to sustainable development and social justice. Sultana explains why
gendering the human right to water is critical for achieving a more just and inclusive fu-
ture. For example, Sultana shows how advancing women’s human right to water helps to
empower women and gender minorities and how, when governments fail to facilitate these
rights, they reduce other rights to dignity and well-being for women and girls.
Overall, the chapters offer new paths to address climate change, mass extinction, and en-
vironmental destruction through calls for expanding rights to marginalized communities
and ecosystems, arguing that conventional environmental laws, policies, and regulations
are inadequate. Most notably, these chapters highlight the insights from CEP, in which
global environmental governance is increasingly rooted in the domestic politics of states.
This is particularly the case because domestic law should not only address the demands
and grievances of communities harmed by extractive policies, but also should recognize
ecosystems as subjects in the fight to prevent global environmental destruction and the
climate crisis. Rights of nature are also important in changing global economic institutions
that have prioritized the commodification of nature (e.g., Kauffman’s chapter).
Part VI: Natural Resources and

Comparative Political Economy
Comparative politics, and specifically the subfield of comparative political economy, has
long analyzed how variations in state–business relations impact development trajectories
and the evolution of specific economic sectors. States around the world continue to actively
shape the supposedly “invisible hand” of the market through a variety of industrial policies.
Joanna Lewis’s chapter, “Green Industrial Policy After Paris,” examines how states pursue
“green” industrial policies designed to create opportunities for the domestic production
of renewable energy technologies. The rapid uptake of renewable energies is essential to
limit global warming, yet industrial policies that protect domestic markets can also create
distortions and inefficiencies that limit innovation and slow the uptake of new technologies.
Joanna Lewis shows how many countries—both advanced industrial economies and “de-
veloping” countries—have experimented with a wide range of industrial policies, including
local content requirements, tax and other financial incentives, domestic certifications and
standards, research and development funds, and state auctions and contracts for wind and
solar projects. She argues that China stands out for its early and highly effective strategy of
fostering a domestic wind and solar photovoltaic (PV) industry by deploying green indus-
trial policies, despite friction with the World Trade Organization, the United States, and
foreign renewable energy companies as a result. India has proved less successful in breaking
Introduction 15
into the solar market, partly because it confronts global and domestic markets in which
Chinese solar PV exports remain cheaper than other alternatives.
Mohanned Al-Suwidan and Nimah Mazaheri’s chapter on “Natural Resources and the
Politics of Distribution” explores the various ways in which revenues collected by states
from the sale of natural resources like oil and gas can be distributed to the population. In
doing so they revisit some of the assumptions made in the extensive comparative politics
literature on rentier states and the so-called resource curse. They highlight that, because of
variations in state capacity, regime type, citizen needs and preferences, and resource own-
ership, universal prescriptions on how to manage natural resource rents are misplaced.
Instead, they called for enhanced empirical comparative research on distributive policies,
including sourcing more accurate data through community surveys, geospatial mapping,
and close attention to the potentially adverse outcomes of policy innovations.
Several chapters in this section highlight the importance of analyzing environmental
issues not just across spatial scales, but also across various timescales. The chapter
“Temporality, Limited Statehood, and Africa’s Abandoned Mines,” by W. R. Nadège
Compaoré and Nathan Andrews, asks us to consider what happens after large, open pit
mines in sub-Saharan Africa close and are abandoned by the international firms that
contracted with states to run the mines. The chapter highlights how domestic regulation,
international frameworks, and contracts between international mining firms and states all
“silence” the issue of mine closure by simply not including provisions for environmental
accountability after the mines close. Instead, they note that firms, states, and development
agencies continue to embrace mining as a development strategy despite its dismal record of
social and environmental harm.
The chapter by Songkhun Nillasithanukroh, Ekta Patel, Edmund Malesky, and Erika
Weinthal, “Illegal Wildlife Trade in the Mekong: The Interplay of Actors, Legal Governance,
and Political Economy,” analyzes the political economy of the illegal wildlife trade in
Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. Rather than invoking “weak enforcement” or “weak state
capacity” in explaining the growing trade in wildlife despite formal laws and international
treaties such as CITES, the authors analyze the political economy of wildlife supply chains
(i.e., suppliers who poach and harvest wildlife, middlemen who handle transport and trade,
and consumers of illegal wildlife commodities such as ivory and rhino horns). The authors
examine attempts to curtail trade in illegal wildlife through outright bans, regulating
hunting in protected areas, legalizing farms for captive breeding of endangered species such
as turtles and crocodiles, and other means. They argue that, by addressing the incentives
created by legal loopholes, jurisdictional overlap, criminalization, low wages for enforce-
ment officers, and pervasive corruption across the supply chain, the Mekong Basin coun-
tries could achieve more effective interventions to limit trade in illegal wildlife.
Part VII: The Politics of

Energy Transitions
Part VII’s focus on the politics of energy transitions examines how different states have
responded to climate change through investing in alternative energy sources. In the early
2000s, shale gas was pitched as a clean source of energy, especially when compared to
coal. Such shifts in energy production and sources of energy are not simply driven by
changes in technology that make new sources available, however. Rather, different coun-
tries may adopt strikingly different approaches to new sectors, such as hydraulic fracking
and the extraction of unconventional shale oil. France early on banned hydraulic frac-
turing, whereas, in the United States, regulation was left in the hands of US states and the
private sector rather than the federal government (Keulertz et al. 2018). The US industry
also supported voluntary regulations as opposed to mandatory disclosures for the chemi-
cals used in the hydraulic fracturing process (Neville et al. 2017). The lack of coordinated
oversight and baseline studies, however, meant that little information is available to the
public on total water withdrawals or cumulative chemical loads in groundwater from mul-
tiple fracking operations.
Since the US oil and gas industry is in the hands of the private sector and the sector
remains largely unregulated, many small and medium size companies turned the United
States into a leading producer of shale gas even as it became clear that this development
had numerous negative environmental and social impacts, including methane pollution.
Shanti Gamper-Rabindran, in her chapter on “Fracked Communities and Taxpayers in
US and Argentina,” examines the variation in political, legal, and financial institutions
that allowed the shale gas industry to externalize negative economic, health, and environ-
mental costs. What is striking in both cases is the power of state and local governments to
prevent affected communities, including Indigenous communities, from restricting shale
gas development in their areas. Ultimately, to push meaningful energy transitions forward,
Gamper-Rabindran argues that entrenched industries able to capture the policy process
and externalize costs will need to be reformed.
While renewables have the potential to reduce energy poverty and thus contribute
broadly to social welfare and economic growth globally, their introduction faces nu-
merous political, economic, and social challenges. Michaël Aklin, in his chapter on
“Renewable Energy, Energy Poverty, and Climate Change,” probes what hinders the ex-
pansion of renewable energy given its potential economic benefits and contributions to-
ward decarbonization. Aklin sheds light on the high costs of renewables to consumers
and the variation in government support for, and social acceptance of, the renewable
sector. While much attention has focused on solar as the means to expand energy access
in many low-income countries, Aklin notes that renewable energy may not fully raise
living standards.
It is essential to analyze the comparative dimensions of the supply chains underpinning
new energy sources to understand their diverse social and environmental impacts. Dustin
Mulvaney, in his chapter “Renewable Energy Supply Chains and the Just Transition,” shows
that while much attention has focused on the importance of new energy sources to address
global climate change, different types of renewable energy depend on different materials
and supply chains, with differential impacts for actors involved in the different sites of
production. For example, cobalt is required for batteries, and its production, refining, and
manufacturing takes place across a broad range of countries, including the Democratic
Republic of Congo, China, Japan, and Germany. Given varying institutional structures and
geographies, supply chains may generate more negative impacts in some countries than in
others. As Mulvaney notes, “The attribute of being renewable is not sufficient to understand
Introduction 17
the implications for sustainability or environmental justice, as there are many ways that re-
newable energy could be produced, integrated, or deployed, and these configurations affect
who benefits and who is made more vulnerable by energy transitions.”
Last, to decarbonize the world economy, the countries likely to be most resistant are those
that depend most on fossil fuel exports as their main source of revenue. Daniel Rabinowitz,
in his chapter on “The Rise and Fall of Fossil Fuels,” suggests that even the most fossil-fuel
dependent countries can be incentivized to lead the transition to renewable energy. Facing
an uncertain future owing to climate change that is leading major importers of oil and gas
to shift to renewables, and the negative consequences of rising temperatures and increasing
drought, ruling elites in Saudi Arabia and other major oil-exporting Gulf countries may
find reasons to undertake an energy transition.
Part VIII: Cities and Sustainability
Cities are increasingly important actors in environmental and climate governance. Their
demographic and political weight within their respective countries give them even more
prominence in setting national and regional environmental agendas. Issues of urban
sustainability are thus at the forefront of comparative environmental inquiry. All three
chapters in this section use comparative analysis to take seriously the diversity of cities and
their distinctive roles as nodes in local, national, and transnational political economies
and cultures. As the chapters show, CEP interventions in urban studies benefit from in-
cluding comparative perspectives grounded in the fields of anthropology, geography, and
political ecology.
Urbanization constitutes one of the greatest social, economic, and environmental
transformations of the past century. Most of the world’s megacities are in Asia and, with the
exception of Japan, are found in middle-or lower-income countries where they are hubs of
government, finance, industry, and trade. Many continue to grow each year, both in terms
of population and spatial distribution. Eight of the 23 largest cities in the world (based on
total population) are in Asia (China, Japan, and the Philippines), five in South Asia (India,
Pakistan, and Bangladesh), four in Latin America (Mexico, Argentina, and Brazil), two
in the Middle East and North Africa (Egypt and Turkey), and two in Africa (Democratic
Republic of Congo and Nigeria). Rural-to-urban migration continues to fuel the expansion
of secondary cities, towns, and provincial centers across much of the Global South, as well
as in some areas of the United States. In contrast, cities in many advanced industrial coun-
tries grow slowly or are losing population, which poses quite different urban dynamics and
challenges than the rapidly changing contours of other cities.
Christopher Gore, in his chapter “Cities and the Environment in Africa: An Agency-
Centered Research Agenda,” takes comparative environmental politics to the streets, in-
formal dump sites, and urban agricultural plots of selected cities in sub-Saharan Africa.
Gore builds on development scholarship that emphasizes “co-production” of environmental
governance between civil society actors and urban authorities. His in-depth, qualitative,
field-based research in Durban, South Africa, and Nairobi, Kenya, as well as in other cities,
reveals how residents and city governments can craft innovative, effective interventions
across such disparate environmental issue areas as solid waste collection, urban climate
change adaptation, and urban agriculture.
Manisha Anantharaman’s chapter, “Reclaiming the Circular Economy: Informal Work
and Grassroots Power,” further highlights the importance of understanding already-existing
urban political economies as a prerequisite for effective and just approaches to sustaina-
bility. Her focus is on the people and livelihoods in the informal waste sorting and recycling
sector in many cities in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Families and micro-enterprises
extract value from waste streams through collecting, sorting, disassembling, refurbishing,
and repairing activities and are important but underappreciated actors in the domestic and
international waste and recycling trade. State plans to “upgrade” and “improve” informal
waste recycling sectors in many of these cities, however, have often marginalized and some-
times dispossessed these communities, motivated in many cases by land speculation, cor-
porate profit, and class-and caste-based prejudices. The ideal of a green circular economy,
in which waste and materials are indefinitely recycled and reused, is increasingly invoked
as a new paradigm for urban sustainability, particularly by some cities in the European
Union. Fundamentally, the question of who benefits from novel interventions to “close the
loop” in materials and energy is a political one. Anantharaman argues that corporate and
state initiatives for new “circular economies” rarely consider the experience and needs of
already-present communities involved in local circular economies.
The chapter by Eric Chu and Linda Shi, “Urban Climate Adaptation: Discontents and
Alternative Politics,” on comparative urban adaptation, echoes some of the environmental
justice themes of the prior two chapters but does so through an epistemological critique of
the “dominant ways of knowing” employed by planning and climate professionals in cities
across the global North and South. As part of the growing field exploring different forms
of “climate urbanism,” Chu and Shi identify shared discourses and approaches in urban
adaptation planning for climate change, including extrapolating vulnerability from climate
models and prioritizing engineering and “hard” infrastructure projects to deal with cli-
mate risks (particularly for sectors considered high-value or that serve middle-and upper-
income communities). Like other forms of urban planning, climate adaptation planning
has also been significantly shaped by neoliberal development paradigms calling for privati-
zation of public assets and the shrinking of public services. They note, however, that there is
great diversity in city adaptation plans and that some cities have succeeded in incorporating
alternative approaches. These include more adequately conceptualizing social/climate vul-
nerability in terms of historical marginalization and exclusion, incorporating environ-
mental justice perspectives into adaptation planning, and engaging with civic and climate
activists demanding a fundamental restructuring of not only urban energy systems but also
entrenched structures of inequality.
Part IX: Environment, Resources,

and Violence
The final section expands the volume’s exploration of various relationships between vio-
lence and the environment. The chapters in Part IX explore the effects of armed conflict
Introduction 19
and “peacetime” military activities on the environment; the militarization of conserva-

tion efforts; and the ways in which civil wars are more a product of state policies than
drought or climate change per se.
War and armed conflict have long wrought a grim toll on the physical environment and
human and non-humans alike, as David Pellow’s chapter in Part III highlights. The stark
images of denuded landscapes destroyed in trench warfare in World War I, the fire-bombed
cities of World War II, aerial spraying of agent orange in Vietnam by US forces, the billowing
smoke and fires of the Kuwaiti oil fires in the Gulf War, and the destruction of Ukrainian
cities and infrastructure all show only the most visible and immediate forms of harm.
As Jeannie Sowers and Erika Weinthal show in their chapter, “War and Environmental
Politics: A Comparative Perspective,” preparation for war, militarism, and the ongoing activi-
ties of military-industrial complexes impose large environmental footprints and long-term
environmental impacts, only some of which are adequately documented given the histories
of secrecy around these institutions. The environmental and health impacts of the nuclear
arms race on remote areas of the United States and the Soviet Union illustrate some of these
issues, as does ongoing spraying of herbicides and defoliants for security purposes. They
further review the literature on environmental security to show how natural resources such
as timber, diamonds, water, and fossil fuels are used by parties to conflict—as a weapon, as
a source of revenue, and sometimes as a locus for negotiation and cooperation. Last, they
warn that the wartime targeting of civilian infrastructures and economic warfare measures
such as sanctions can lead not only to long-term negative impacts on human health but also
undermine ecosystem functioning and viability.
While Sowers and Weinthal focus on the environmental impacts of war and military-
industrial activities, Marwa Daoudy’s chapter, “Climate and Conflict: Lessons from the
Syria Case,” interrogates assumptions that natural resource scarcity—and, in particular,
droughts—lead to armed conflict and civil war. Using the case of the mass Syrian uprising
in 2011–2012 and subsequent civil war, Daoudy refutes these arguments. As anthropogenic
global warming led to more intense and prolonged droughts across much of the eastern
Mediterranean in the 1990s and 2000s, rural communities in northeast Syria had already
been rendered vulnerable to food and water insecurity by government policies. The ideo-
logical commitment of Syria’s Ba’athist regime to self-sufficiency in cereals promoted agri-
cultural policies that overextracted groundwater and sought to extend irrigation to areas
traditionally used for pastoralism. The uprising itself did not rely on either the areas or the
populations most gravely affected by drought. It was instead primarily a revolutionary po-
litical challenge to the Assad government, which was widely viewed as neglectful, corrupt,
and repressive.
Rosaleen Duffy and Francis Massé, in their chapter “The Integration of Conservation and
Security: Political Ecologies of Violence and the Illegal Wildlife Trade,” explore the militari-
zation of anti-poaching efforts in South Africa’s Kruger’s National Park and other national
parks, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa. Increased poaching of rhinos and elephants is
part of the expanding global illegal wildlife trade, driven by demand in China and Vietnam
for black rhino horn also addressed in the chapter by Nillasithanukroh et al. As Duffy and
Masse show, enforcement efforts have an increasingly militarized character. A reliance on
military technologies, private security forces, paramilitary training and arming of rangers,
and the criminalization of wildlife poaching have come to the fore. The authors note that
the “securitization” of conservation is partly in response to the militarization of poaching
itself, with armed criminal syndicates seen as a threat to the country’s natural heritage.
The authors argue that these “enforcement-first” approaches to conservation foster new
discourses of policing, violence, and militarization in and around protected areas, rather
than reducing global demand for illegal wildlife or prioritizing resources to address poverty
and livelihood opportunities for local communities.
References
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Keuleurtz, M., J. Sowers, E. Woertz, and R. Mohtar, R. “The Water-Energy-Food Nexus in Arid
Regions: The Politics of Problemsheds.” In Oxford Handbook of Water Politics and Policy,
edited by K. Conca and E. Weinthal, 167–196. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018.
Neville, Kate J. Fueling Resistance: The Contentious Political Economy of Biofuels and Fracking.
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Neville, Kate, Jennifer Baka, Shanti Gamper-Rabindran, Karen Bakker, Stefan Andreasson,
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Environmental Global Governance: The Kosher Label.” Business and Politics 12, no. 3
(2010): 1–35.
Steinberg, Paul F., and Stacy D. VanDeveer. Comparative Environmental Politics Theory,
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Weinthal, Erika, and Kate Watters. “The Transformation of Environmental Activism in
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Pa rt I
STAT E S A N D
E N V I RON M E N TA L
P OL IC I E S I N
C OM PA R AT I V E
P E R SP E C T I V E
Chapter 1
The Environmenta l Stat e

and Its Li mi ts
James Meadowcroft
Over the past two decades, scholars directed increased attention to the development of
the “environmental,” “green,” or “ecological” state (Dryzek 2003; Eckersley 2004; Barry
and Eckersley 2005; Christoff 2005; Duit 2016; Meadowcroft 2005, 2012; Bäckstrand and
Kronsell 2017). Although usage of these terms varies, all draw on the fact that modern
states have increasingly become enmeshed in the challenge of environmental governance.1
During the last third of the twentieth century advanced industrial countries built elabo-
rate mechanisms of regulation, specialized bureaucracies, and ideational and knowledge
systems for addressing environmental challenges. And environmental argument emerged
as an irreducible feature of political life. Over the ensuing decades much has been done to
improve environmental conditions in the most developed states, and yet the weakness, in-
consistency and fragility of these gains is continuously on display. Setting aside the more
complex problems of climate change and biodiversity loss, even on the mundane issues of
air and water pollution, states with comparatively sophisticated mechanisms of environmental
governance (such as Germany or the United States) remain prone to serious “lapses” where
they fail to deliver basic standards of environmental protection. Consider the Volkswagen
diesel emissions scandal that came to light in 2015, where hundreds of millions of citi-
zens (especially in Europe) have been exposed to elevated nitrogen oxide emissions. Or
the ongoing lead contamination of drinking water brought to the fore by events in Flint,
Michigan, in 2014. Not surprisingly, these and other failures have led some scholars to be-
come skeptical of the achievements of the environmental state, referring to its “decline”
(Mol 2016) or to a “glass ceiling” which severely limits its sphere of action (Hausknost 2020;
Hatzisavvidou 2020).
This chapter reexamines the accomplishments and potential of the environmental state.
As its starting point, it considers efforts to address air pollution. This choice may appear
paradoxical: If societies now face acute global threats such as climate change, why dwell
on the more conventional problem of air pollution? The issue provides an interesting entry
point for several reasons. It has a long pedigree, with ordinances regulating smoke going
back centuries. And air pollution was among the problems that prompted the establish-
ment of modern systems of environmental governance in the 1960s and 1970s (Weidner and
24 James Meadowcroft
Janicke 2002). Despite what is sometimes assumed, the problem is not straightforward, with
multiple sources and substances of concern, complex interactions among pollutants in the
atmosphere, transboundary impacts, and a continuously evolving understanding of poten-
tial harms to humans and natural systems. Controlling air pollution remains a challenge in
developed states, to say nothing of developing countries from China and Mexico to India or
Nigeria. Recent estimates put worldwide premature deaths associated with air pollution at
more than 8 million a year (Vohra et al. 2018). Although it may appear an “easy case” when
compared to climate change or preventing biodiversity loss, it is not so easy as to be trivial.
Approaching the environmental state on its “home turf ” can therefore provide a useful
jumping off point to reflect on its accomplishments and limitations.
The chapter is organized into four sections. The first provides a brief introduction to
modern environmental governance. The second reviews experience with managing air
pollution, showing how political processes mediated through the environmental state have
allowed a gradual ratcheting up of standards in the developed countries. The third explores
broader implications for environmental governance, suggesting that the potential for ex-
isting states to dramatically reduce environmental burdens is far from exhausted. Last, a
brief conclusion considers the future of the environmental state and suggests some avenues
for further research.
Greening Governance
Environmental states emerged during the final three decades of the twentieth century as
advanced industrial societies wrestled with increasing environmental dislocation driven
by economic development. They involve specialized administrative structures, bodies of
law and regulation, systematized scientific knowledge, and the expenditure of state funds
to mediate interactions with the environment (Duit et al. 2016). With the birth of the envi-
ronmental state, continuous intervention to protect the environment became accepted as a
legitimate activity of the public power (Dryzek et al. 2002; Meadowcroft 2005). Argument
over exactly what this entails has become an irreducible dimension of political life (Barry
and Eckersley 2005; Meadowcroft 2012; Bäckstrand and Kronsell 2017).
The genesis of this environmental state was closely linked to the emergence of the concept
of the environment. Prior to the 1960s “the environment” was rarely invoked to denote the
totality of human surroundings which provide the context for societal well-being but which
are being degraded by human activity (Meadowcroft 2017). This notion of a “threatened
environment” drew together a disparate array of phenomena (industrial pollution, agri-
cultural chemical use, air and water quality, protection of wildlife and landscapes, conser-
vation of renewable resources, urban living conditions, waste management, and so on),
absorbing them into a narrative about the destructive consequences of industrial civiliza-
tion. Faced with the magnitude of this threat, it made sense to call for national governments
to establish specialized systems of control, with dedicated organizations, personnel, know-
ledge, and budgets, to protect the vulnerable environment and reduce harm to humans and
ecosystems.
Over time the “official” diagnosis of the seriousness of environmental problems and the
scale of the societal effort required to manage them has evolved. Early initiatives focused
The Environmental State and Its Limits 25
on pollution control and clean-up (Janicke and Weidner 1997; Hanf and Jansen 1998;
Tatenhove et al. 2000). Attention later turned to the introduction of “environmental man-
agement systems” and to adjusting processes and products to reduce the imposed environ-
mental burden. By the time “sustainable development” received international endorsement
at the 1992 Rio Earth Summit (World Commission on Environment and Development
1987), “policy integration” had become a central concern, with the goal of linking envi-
ronmental considerations into decision-making across government and throughout so-
ciety (Nilsson and Eckerberg 2007; Jordan and Lenschow 2008, 2010; Persson et al. 2018).
With time, perspectives and approaches initially championed by environmental activists
and researchers gradually gained acceptance in the governmental sphere, such as eco-
system management, life-cycle analysis, adaptive management, carbon pricing, and others
(Meadowcroft and Fiorino 2017). Climate change put discussion of global “environmental
limits” firmly on the international agenda (Meadowcroft 2012). Recent talk of the circular
economy, green industrial policy, a green recovery, and the transition to net-zero carbon
emissions has pointed to an active role for the state in reconfiguring economic processes into
more ecologically friendly configurations.
The emergence of the environment as a focus for activity by national governments in
developed states from the 1970s paved the way for an increasing internationalization of
environmental governance through (a) the convergence of policy prescriptions and institu-
tional structures across nation states, encouraged by institutions such as the Organisation
for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) (Long 2000), (b) the spread of sys-
tems of national environmental control from developed states to an increasing number of
developing countries, and (c) the establishment of multilateral and transnational govern-
ance mechanisms (Duit et al. 2016).
Conceptualizing this history in terms of the evolution of an “environmental state”
points to parallels with the twentieth century growth of the “welfare state” (Meadowcroft
2005; Gough 2016), which also emerged as a product of long-term political conflicts
associated with the rise of industrial societies, capitalist economic development, and
democratization (Flora and Heidenheimer 1981; Held 1983; Pierson 1998). Discussion
of the state (Skocpol 1979; Evans et al. 1985; Pierson 1996; Hague et al. 2019; Hay et al.
2005), the welfare state (Ashford 1986; Arts and Gelissen 2010), the security state (Mabee
2009), and their linkages to “varieties of capitalism” (Hall and Soskice 2001; Hay 2020)
has long been a staple of comparative politics as analysts have struggled to understand
cross-national variation in patterns of political and economic power and their evolution
over time.
While the welfare state focuses on redistribution and service provision (Gough 2008),
the environmental state has to date functioned primarily by regulating activities deemed
to have environmentally undesirable consequences (Gough and Meadowcroft 2011). Like
welfare states, environmental states are but one dimension of a politico-administrative state
structure that is embedded within (and helps to reproduce) a broad set of established socio-
economic arrangements. Like welfare states, they are not finished products but are con-
stantly reworked through social and political struggle. Environmental goals, programs, and
institutions exist in tension with other state functions and structures (Meadowcroft 2012).
And the existence of environmental states does not mean that environmental concerns
trump other issues any more than welfare states guarantee a permanent end to inequality
and social privation.
The account of the environmental state presented here is broadly consistent with a
“neo-materialist” conception that understands the state as an (only partly integrated) in-
stitutional construct that is bound up in and marked by particular social and economic
relations. Modern states perform functions critical to social reproduction, but the order
they reproduce benefits some groups more than others (Dunleavy and O’Leary 1987; Huber
et al. 2015).
It is broadly agreed that, over the past half century, environmental states in the de-
veloped countries have achieved much to clean up contaminated sites, reduce air and
water pollution, improve management of waste and toxic chemicals, ameliorate forestry
practices, and extend protected areas (Duit 2014; EEA 2020). These improvements have
been secured even as population and economic output in these countries have grown. On the
other hand, it seems that while problems may be managed, they rarely go away. Sometimes
solutions turn out to have been forms of displacement (where impacts are shifted across
media or space or time) or of problem-substitution (where the new practices generate other
difficulties which only gradually become apparent). Over the decades, the scale at which
environmental impacts are manifest has grown, moving from local to global, as has their
“social reach” into domains more deeply embedded in existing institutional arrangements.
New problems continue to emerge as existing practices are reproduced at a broader scale
that finally triggers overt harm, research reveals negative processes that had hitherto
escaped notice, and novel technologies create additional impacts which provoke a societal
response.
To these difficulties must be added the unevenness of environmental states—in the level
of environmental protection each accords across an array of issues, and of their failures—
when they do not consistently implement their own rules and policies. The apparent fra-
gility of their accomplishments, as a new government or changed economic circumstances
can lead to a rapid unravelling of previous gains, is also evident: Trump rolling back ve-
hicle fuel efficiency standards or clean water regulations in the United States, deregula-
tion risks associated with Brexit, and so on. And also their inequities, where environmental
burdens and the costs and benefits of environmental policy, are distributed unevenly across
communities (within countries as well as internationally), as a number of chapters in this
volume explore. All this is before we talk of the difficulty of making meaningful progress in
relation to the meta challenges of climate change and biodiversity loss associated with the
continuing growth in the human appropriation of the biosphere. Indeed, despite the meas-
ures that have been taken over the past half century, the overall scale of the human impact on
the non-human natural world continues to expand (Geo5 2012; Waters et al. 2016; Newbold
et al. 2016; Bar-on et al. 2018; IPBES 2019).
Governing the Air
It used to be that you could dump pretty much whatever you wanted into the air. Not so
today, where in developed countries complex regulatory systems control emissions of mul-
tiple pollutants from numerous sources. Rules apply not just to discharges from large in-
dustrial facilities, but also to the products that can be brought to market and the activities
of businesses and households. The history of air pollution control over the past century is
The Environmental State and Its Limits 27
complex, with significant variation across jurisdictions, but some of the main features are
highlighted here.
• The range of substances subject to some form of control has steadily expanded. Initial
efforts were focused on visible pollutants: smoke and soot, particularly from coal com-
bustion. Attention then moved to smog, sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides, ground-
level ozone, lead, stratospheric ozone-depleting substances, volatile organic compounds,
mercury, particulates (PM10 and PM2.5), ammonia and greenhouse gases (GHGs).
• Concern has been with both ambient levels and emissions. Ambient levels determine the
potential exposure to harm of humans, the built environment, and natural ecosystems.
Air quality standards establish maximum ambient pollutant concentrations below
which harm is deemed acceptable. Emissions drive ambient levels, so restrictions on
emission can reduce ambient levels and the associated harms. Issues of causality, the
nature and severity of harms, technological and behavioral alternatives to existing
practices, and the costs of action and inaction typify the discussion of air quality
standards and emission control.
• Strategies to manage air pollution include reducing human exposure to high ambient
levels (smog advisories, air filtration for buildings, mask recommendations), displacing
polluting activities geographically (siting restrictions) and in time (activity limits for
specific periods), diluting pollutants in greater volumes of air (tall smokestacks), the
treatment of exhaust gases (capturing pollutants for processing and/or alternative
disposal), altering feedstocks or production processes to avoid generating emissions
(burning low-sulfur coal), and satisfying needs in ways that obviate demand for dam-
aging activities or products.
• Control efforts typically focus first on major point sources, then on mobile and
widely distributed sources. Smoke controls were applied to coal-fired power plants
(higher smokestacks and moving plants away from urban areas), then to railways
(with a switch from steam to diesel electric locomotives) and domestic heating fuel
(substituting coal with smokeless fuel). Later measures for coal-fired power genera-
tion included improving combustion efficiency, switching to low-sulfur coal, flue gas
desulphurization, electrostatic precipitators (for particulates), demand management
(reducing the need for new power plants), and fuel switching (to gas and other genera-
tion technologies). Building heating moved from coal to gas or electricity. Attempts to
control automobile emissions focused on changing engine design, altering fuel com-
position, adopting catalytic converters to clean tailpipe emissions, restrictions on car
usage, shifting commuters to mass transit or active mobility, and so on.
• Over time the jurisdictional level at which air pollution has been addressed has
evolved. Originally understood as a local issue caused by local industry and climate
conditions, early action campaigns were based in major cities (Temby 2012). By the
1950s, weaknesses of this strategy were becoming apparent; national governments be-
came more involved with research and monitoring, and pioneering air pollution legis-
lation was adopted in some countries, such as the United Kingdom. By the late 1960s
and early 1970s, air pollution control was “nationalized” across the developed world
with the adoption of national emission controls and air quality standards. Growing ev-
idence of the long-range transport of pollutants, such as acid rain in Europe and North
America and mercury deposition in the Arctic, prompted increased international
cooperation. The United Nations Economic Commission for Europe Convention on

Long Range Transboundary Air Pollution (LRTAP), with its evolving protocols cov-
ering different substances, coordinated a collective response. And further interna-
tional initiatives followed. Yet states (and the state-like European Union) remain in
the driving seat, largely determining the pace and direction of efforts to address air
pollution.
• Justifications for air pollution control have shifted over time, variously including the
prevention of nuisance and property damage (e.g., to buildings) and the maintenance
of a cleanly urban environment, the reduction of acute damage to ecosystems (forest
die-back, lake acidification, eutrophication, etc.), and the protection of human and
planetary health.
• Science has played a critical role in understanding how pollutants react in the en-
vironment and in identifying potential harm to humans and ecosystems. A collab-
orative modeling approach proved critical to building trust in the LRTAP process
(Bäckstrand 2017). Yet knowledge of harm on its own has rarely driven action. Nor
has research been effectively oriented to explore the full range of potential threats
(Grandjean 2013). Understanding the human health consequences of air pollution
continues to expand: for example, recent evidence suggests that particulates are asso-
ciated not just with respiratory ailments but also with cardiovascular, endocrine, and
cognitive issues, as well as with diseases of the eye. With this knowledge have come
calls to lower ambient thresholds and secure more profound emissions reductions
(WHO 2021).
If we look back over half a century, the data reveal significant reductions in the emission of
major air pollutants and improvements in ambient air quality across the developed world
(Fowler et al. 2020a, 2020b; Amann 2020). Emissions of sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides,
carbon monoxide, lead, volatile organic compounds, and particulates have all fallen sub-
stantially, although the depth of reductions varies by substance and country. The curves for
some pollutants are choppy, but the overall decline is clear (see, e.g., Figures 1.1 and 1.2).
Over this period, developed countries have experienced an absolute decoupling of economic
growth from these criterion air pollutants (Fowler et al. 2020a; McDuffie et al. 2020).
Does this mean that these governments have cracked the problem of air pollution?
Clearly not. Despite emissions reductions and improved air quality, significant harm to
human health and ecosystems continues. On the health side, this is illustrated through
estimates of premature death, while monitoring for acidification, eutrophication, and other
ecosystem damage shows continuing damage from air emissions, even if at greatly reduced
levels. Why? Because, while emissions are down, they are not down far enough. Many cities
or regions regularly fail to meet established air quality standards. Even within cities that
meet overall targets, neighborhoods near industrial facilities or major highways—where the
poor or marginalized communities tend to live—suffer disproportionately (Tessum et al.
2021). Thus, emissions controls are not sufficiently strict (or are not adequately enforced) to
secure consistent attainment of ambient standards that protect the entire population. And
even when existing air quality standards are met, the damage remains because limits have
not been reduced to reflect advances in the understanding of the impacts of pollution. For
example, many developed countries have yet to adopt the 2005 WHO air quality guidelines,
to say nothing of the more stringent standards issued in 2021.
125
Index: 1970 = 100 (For Ammonia 1980 = 100)

INDEX LINE
100
Ammonia
Non-methane
75 volatile organic compounds
50 Nitrogen oxides
PM10
25
PM2,5
Sulphur dioxide
0
1970 1975 1980 1985 1990 1995 2000 2005 2010 2015
Year Source: Ricardo Energy & Environment
Figure 1.1 Trends in annual emissions of particulate matter (PM10 and PM2.5), nitrogen
oxides, ammonia, non-methane volatile organic compounds, and sulfur dioxide, 1970–2019
(1980–2019 for ammonia) in the UK.
Source: UK DEFRA 2020 (https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/emissions-of-air-
pollutants/emissions-of-air-pollutants-in-the-uk-1970-to-2018-summary)
3.0
Change Relative to Initial Measurement*
2.0
1.0
1980 1990 2000 2010
Gross Domestic PM2.5 Ozone (O3) Nitrogen

Product (GDP) Dioxide (NO2)
Sulfur Dioxide Carbon Monoxide (CO) Lead
(SO2)
Figure 1.2 Change in gross domestic product and six common air pollutants, 1980–2018,
in the United States
Source: Federal Reserve Economic Data | Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. *The index begins
at 1 in 1980, with the exception of PM2.5, which was measured beginning in 2000. The index for
each year is the actual value divided by the initial value.
Available at: https://www.resources.org/archives/looking-back-50-years-clean-air-act-1970/
Thus, the overall pattern is one of a stepwise improvement of air pollution outcomes
spread over more than half a century, where advances typically lag the evolving scien-
tific understanding of potential harm by one or more decades. Pollution control measures
that provoke the least disruption to established economic interests are adopted first. But
increased scientific knowledge, advocacy campaigns that broaden the public perception of
damage, and expanding technological options to reduce emissions (at low cost or that se-
cure other benefits) feed into political/policy system cycles that allow a periodic ratcheting
up of standards and controls. Demonstration of the inadequacy of existing standards can
ultimately focus attention, increasing pressure on governments to introduce more strin-
gent policy measures and on industry to adopt technological alternatives to lower emis-
sions. The process is far from smooth or unidirectional: regulations can be relaxed as well
as strengthened, changing business strategies or consumer demand can spur growth of new
emissions sources and pollutants, and regulatory failures (poor instrument design, lack of
monitoring or enforcement) can lead to worsening conditions.
In comparative terms, political system factors matter, including the ease of producer group
access to government and possibilities for regulatory capture, opportunities for pollution
control advocates to organize and mobilize pressure, and whether a return to primary leg-
islation is required to implement tighter controls (Fiorino 2011). Business routinely opposes
more stringent measures, with loss of international competitiveness often cited as a reason to
delay, although in some countries and sectors the opposite case is made (early movement to
higher environmental standards can spur innovation and enhance competitiveness) (Porter
and Linde 1995). Pioneer jurisdictions do much to dispel myths that higher standards will
bankrupt industry. Over time the trend has been toward a ratcheting up of standards across
the developed world. And with the establishment of regulatory systems in less-affluent coun-
tries (often modeled on OECD norms) this trend has become international.
The Volkswagen Emissions Scandal

The Volkswagen emissions scandal is illustrative of these processes. In the 1990s, with
climate emerging on the political agenda, European governments began to encourage
consumers to shift to more fuel-efficient diesel engine cars (with lower CO2 emissions per
mile). Although embraced by European automakers who held an advantage in diesel en-
gine design for light-duty vehicles and saw a way of deferring more fundamental change
to the industry to confront climate change, the policy was flawed on two counts. First,
diesel engines produce more conventional pollutants, including particulate matter and
nitrogen oxides. And, second, from a climate perspective, the turn toward diesel was a
distraction from developing power trains compatible with full decarbonization (electric
or fuel cell vehicles). Although the EU gradually tightened its conventional air emissions
standards, the regulations were designed to accommodate the motor industry through
a loose inspection regime that avoided realistic road tests (with varying terrain, traffic,
weather conditions, etc.).
Notwithstanding this lax regulatory environment, manufacturers experienced increasing
difficulties meeting the bench tests: not that the standards could not be achieved, but
that attainment implied additional costs (for emissions abatement technologies) and
servicing requirements that customers might find irksome. Instead, Volkswagen (and
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CHAPTER XVI
Examples of Alcuin’s style in his letters, allusive, jocose, playful.—The perils of
the Alps.—The vision of Drithelme.—Letters to Arno.—Bacchus and Cupid.
A letter written by Alcuin in September, 799, may be taken as an

extreme example of his allusive style. A good deal of interpretation is
needed before the letter can be understood; it is a collection of
riddles.
The opening sentence runs thus: “The first letter Ep. 121. a.d. 799.
to the first, and the fifteenth to the sixth. The
number consecrated in steps to the number perfect in the works of
God.”
The first letter is A, and thus the first words mean A(lcuin) to
A(dalhard), Abbat of Corbie, or Arno, Archbishop of Salzburg; but
inasmuch as A is described in the letter as gallus monasticus, and
Arno was Aquila, we must understand that the Abbat of Corbie is
meant. No other known A satisfies the conditions. The fifteenth letter
is P, the sixth is F, and therefore we have P(ater) F(ilio), the father to
the son. The Psalms of Degrees are fifteen, the day of completion of
the works of God in creation was the sixth, and therefore the
concluding words are only a repetition of “father to son”.
“Why does that brother come with empty hands? In his tongue he
brought a Hail! to my ears; in his hands he brought nothing to my
eyes. Thou who art seated at a dividing of the ways [Corbie], why
hast thou demanded nothing certain of him who dwelleth in Maresa?
The crows fly about the roofs of the houses and cry out; and the
dove, nourished on the pavements of the church, is silent. I should
have trusted that dove had he said anything about the eagle [Leo III]
which lately deserted the roofs of the citadel of Rome to drink at the
fountains of the Saxon land [the Pope had come to Paderborn] to
see the lion [Karl]; or if our blackbird, flying between them, had
demanded of the monastic cock [Adalhard] who rouses the brethren
to their matin watch, that by means of him the sparrow [Alcuin] sitting
alone upon the house top might know what is the convention
between the lion and the eagle; and if the youth of the eagle, as the
psalmist prophesies, is renewed[237] to pristine gladness; and if new
dwellings grow up in the marshes of perfidy that were cleansed[238];
and if the lion, in pursuit of the ibex, meditates crossing the heights
of the Alps.
“The sparrow hath his ears open. But I see that the proverbial wolf
[this is said to mean the devil] in the fable[239] has taken away the
cock’s voice; lest it happen that if he crowed, the apostolic denial[240]
should be renewed in the city of his former power, and the last error
be worse than the first.
“Why has love sinned, which has not seen Vale [fare thee well]
written, while I hear that the partridges [messengers], running across
the fields, have come to the dwelling [Corbie] of the cock. Perfect
love driveth away fear. Perfect love with the sparkling pupils of the
eyes sees everything, and with the clear intuition of piety will always
find a fixed rule of wholesome counsel. It would seem that the cock
is turned into a cuckoo, which is silent when the sun ascends into the
summer constellation of the crab, while the nest-making sparrow at
every season alike twitters on the smoky roofs.[241]
“That sparrow now in this September month flies to revisit his
beloved nest[242], that he may feed his young[243], gaping with
hungry beaks, with little grains of piety: desiring that some time on
the banks of this river Loire, rich in fish, he may hear the voice of the
cock sounding forth the Vale, and that he who with flapping of his
wings rouses himself to matutinal melodies may come and exhort
the sparrow in the midst of his young.”
At this point the letter changes its character, and we need not
follow it further.
Thus Alcuin could write a jocose letter, even Ep. 16. a.d. 790.
quoting Scripture in that vein. Let us see another.
He was detained in Britain at the end of the year 790 by an
unexpected event, of which mention has already more than once
been made. Ethelred, the king of Northumbria, had been deposed
and kept in prison till the end of 790. Alcuin wrote to his pupil
Joseph, in Gaul, to tell him that Ethelred had passed from prison to
throne, from misery to majesty; and things were so unsettled that he
did not like to leave for France. He was evidently not well supplied
with money, food, or clothing. He begged Joseph to send him what
was necessary for the sea voyage; also five pounds weight of silver
which he had sent to his charge, and another five from his
possessions in France; three garments, of goat-skin and of wool for
the use of his attendants, lay and clerical, and of linen for his own
use; also black and red cloaks of goat skin, if he could find such, and
many pigments of sulphur and colours for pictures. Then he turns to
the question of meat and drink. Quoting 2 Kings iv. 40, he exclaims,
“‘O, thou man of God, there is death in the pot’, for [again quoting,
from 1 Sam. ix. 7, and putting wine in place of bread] the wine ‘is
spent in our vessels’: and [he adds] the acid beer of these parts
makes havoc in our stomachs.”
Here is another example of his playfulness and lightness of touch.
“To the most illustrious man Flavius Damoeta Ep. 9. a.d. 783-6.
Albinus sends abundant greeting of perpetual
peace.”
This was Riculfus, Archbishop of Mainz, whom in Ep. 12.
another letter he addresses as the great fisherman,
probably because of piscatorial rights which he Ep. 101.
naturally had as a riparian proprietor. Alcuin himself—we may note—
was a fisherman. He writes to Arno in 798, from Tours, that he does
not know in which of two places he will be the next month, but
whichever it was it would find him fishing. “I know not whether I shall
play the diver on the banks of the Meuse and catch fish, or float on
the waters of the Loire and catch salmon.” There are salmon now
both in the Meuse and in the Loire; but the phrases in Alcuin’s letter
seem to point to bottom-fishing on the Meuse and surface-fishing on
the Loire. Alcuin learned to fish on the Ouse at York, of which he
writes, as we have seen above[244], “Hanc piscosa suis undis
interluit Usa.” We must return to Letter 9.
“I greatly rejoice in your welfare, and am much delighted with your
loving present, sending you as many thanks as I have counted teeth
in your gift. It is a wonderful animal, with two heads, and with sixty
teeth, not of elephantine size but of the beauty of ivory. I am not
terrified by the horror of this beast, but delighted by its appearance; I
have no fear of its biting me with gnashing teeth. I am pleased with
its fawning caresses, which smooth the hair of my head. I see not
ferocity in its teeth; I see only the love of the sender.”
Alcuin afterwards made this ivory comb the Carmen ccxix, ed.
subject of a poetic riddle:— Quercet.
A beast has sudden come to this my house,

A beast of wonder, who two heads has got,
And yet the beast has only one jaw-bone.
Twice three times ten of horrid teeth it has.
Its food grows always on this body of mine,
Not flesh, not fruit. It eats not with its teeth,
Drinks not. Its open mouth shows no decay.
Tell me, Damoeta dear, what beast is this?
We can imagine the beauty of this ivory comb, with one row of
sixty teeth,[245] the solid piece at the top being ornamented with a
lion’s head at each end looking outwards. A hundred years later, the
comb, if made in Northumbria, might have had a ridged top, with two
bears’ heads, the muzzles looking inwards. It was, no doubt, this
beautiful comb that played a large part in the miracles wrought by
Alcuin after his death, as described at page 49.
Considering the frequent passings to and fro across the Alps in
Alcuin’s time by Karl, and, indeed, by Alcuin himself, and the coming
and going between Salzburg, Arno’s see, and Gaul, we should have
expected more reference to the hardships of the way than we find in
the letters of Alcuin.
In writing to Remedius or Remigius, the Bishop of Chur, or Coire, a
place very well known now, he makes no reference to any difficulty in
reaching the city. It was, as we know, a place of considerable
importance, and it possesses to this day some very interesting
Carolingian charters. The only local allusion which Alcuin makes in
his various letters to Remedius informs us of the heavy tolls charged
by those who held the passes, a matter about which our King Canute
spoke so strongly to the Pope.
“By this letter I commend to your fatherly Ep. 213.
protection this merchant of ours, who is conveying
merchandise to Italy. Let him have safe passage over the roads of
your land in going and in returning. And in the defiles of the
mountains let him not be troubled by your officers of custom, but by
the freedom of your charity let him have free passage.”
The inconsiderable references which we do find to the difficulties
of the way come chiefly in the addresses of his letters. Thus he
addresses a letter to Arno, Archbishop of Salzburg, in these words:
—
“To the eagle that flies across the Alps; goes Ep. 91.
swiftly over the plains; stalks through the cities; a
humble inhabitant of the earth sends greeting.”
“To Paulinus, Patriarch of Aquileia. Ep. 129.
“Four friends send greeting across the waters of
the Alps in a ship laden with love.”
“To Peter, Archbishop of Milan. Ep. 200.
“O that I had the wings of an eagle, that I might
fly across the heights of the Alps swifter than the winds.”
In his Life of Willibrord,[246] cap. xxxii, he says:—
“The Alps of St. Maurice are exalted more felicitously by the blood
of the Theban saints than by the height of their snows.”
To Arno. Ep. 151.
“To my father, of most sweet love, the eagle
prelate, a swan from across the sea sends wishes for perpetual
health with the pen-feathers of holy affection.”
To Arno. Ep. 134.
“To the eagle, of all the birds of the Alpine heights most dear,
Albinus sends greeting.”
To Arno. Ep. 126.
“A love which neither the cold of the Alps nor the
heat of Italy can overthrow.”
To Arno. Ep. 101.
“I long to hear when the eagle, flying high,
transcends the summits of the Alps, and, wearied with flight,
composes its wings in the parts of Rhetia.”
It will have been noticed that most of these are addressed to the
Tyrol. It may be remarked that there are traditions of the presence of
Karl in the far east of the Alps, especially in a valley about twenty
miles due west of the city of Trent. Mr. D. W. Freshfield has
printed[247] the long Latin inscription which gives an explanation of
frescoes in the Church of San Stefano in Val Rendena, showing Karl
and a Pope baptizing heathen. The inscription credits the district with
having been full, in Karl’s time, of castles held by pagan lords or by
Jews, who were converted or slain.
We have an interesting evidence of the sufferings endured in
crossing the Alps in the later Anglo-Saxon times. It is well known that
persons who granted charters of lands, under conditions, invoked
desperate penalties on the heads of any who should attempt to
alienate the lands or trifle with the conditions. In the reigns of
Athelstane and Eadmund, under dates ranging from a.d. 938 to 946,
a West Saxon scribe produced and employed frequently a new form
and idea of curse. He made the royal and archiepiscopal signatories
indulge in the pious and fervent wish that any one who endeavoured
to violate the gift set forth in the charter might suffer from the cold
blasts of the ice-fields and the pennine host of malignant spirits[248].
William of Malmesbury relates[249] the death of an Archbishop of
Canterbury from cold in the passage of the Alps. When Odo died in
959, Aelfsin, the Bishop of Winchester, bought the archbishopric and
behaved with mad violence. He stamped on the grave of Odo,
addressing him as “worst of old men”, taunting him that he had got
his desire (which Odo had always opposed), namely, the succession
to the archbishopric. That night the departed Odo appeared to him in
a dream and warned him of a speedy end. Aelfsin disregarded the
warning, and set off to Rome for the pallium. On the way across the
Alps he was overcome with cold. His feet were frost-bitten, and there
was no remedy but to put them into the warm carcasses of
disembowelled horses, these feet with which he had done violence
to the grave of Odo. Even so he could not get warm, and he was
frozen to death. His death made way for Dunstan, and he is not
reckoned among the archbishops.
The misery of extreme cold was a familiar fact to the
Northumbrians after the experiences of Benedict Biscop and others
in crossing the Alps. It is brought out in a very graphic way in the
description which Bede gives of the trance of one Drithelme[250],
who had appeared to be dead for six hours. Among other
remarkable visions of the other world, he came in his trance to a
valley, on one side of which was piercing cold, and on the other
unquenchable fire. The unhappy souls, tortured in the biting cold,
leaped madly across for warmth into the flames. Then, scorched in
the fearful heat, they sprang back again for coolness into the
torturing cold. In that continual alternation of tortures their time was
spent. Drithelme was wont ever after, in beating down his animal
passions, to stand up to his neck in the river, even in winter with
broken masses of ice dashing against him. And when one called to
him from the bank, “I wonder, brother Drithelme, that you endure
such cold,” he would reply, “I, at least, have seen worse cold than
this.”
Here is a peep behind the scenes in connexion with the morals of
a Pope, and an example of wisdom in burning letters that ought not
to see the light. Alcuin is writing to Arno.
“You were the third cause of my [proposed] Ep. 127. a.d. 799.
journey. The first was that of the churches of Christ.
The second was that of the lord king, because mourning in tears I
left him; my desire being to inscribe on my soul a perpetual memory
of the joy of his presence. The third was the longing to see the most
sweet face of your dearness. But I am prevented from accomplishing
that which I have strongly wished to accomplish. It will come to pass
through your holy prayers, if it do but please Him without whom
nothing good can be done.
“Your former letter[251], which reached us under your name,
contained some complaints about the manner of life of the
apostolic[252] and about the danger you were in when with him by
reason of the Romans. Your clerk Baldric, as I suppose, brought it,
bringing also a cope stitched together in the Roman fashion, a
vestment of linen and wool. As I did not wish that your letter should
fall into other hands, Candidus alone read it with me; and then I put it
in the fire, lest any scandal should arise through carelessness on the
part of the keeper of my papers....
“I would gladly write more, but the runner has your orders to get
back quickly.”
Nothing could exceed the affectionateness of Alcuin’s letters to
Arno, the Archbishop of Salzburg, to whose care in preserving the
letters addressed to him we owe so much. Arno’s name recalled to
Alcuin’s mind the early days when he saw hovering in the Yorkshire
skies the great eagles that gave their Anglian name of earn (arn) to
Arncliffe and other places. He always thought of him as the Arn,
addressed him as the Aquila, the eagle.
“To the Eagle, most noble of birds, the Goose, Ep. 108. a.d. 798.
with strident voice, sends greeting.
“When I heard of you as winging your way from transalpine hills to
your nest of sweetest quiet, a great repose shone suddenly forth
upon my mind anxious on your account. My mind flew back, as from
crashing storms, to a haven of placid peace. For love is wont to be
joyful in prosperity and oppressed in adversity. Thus it is that the
voice of the bride, bewailing the absence of the longed-for spouse,
cries ‘I am wounded with love’.[253] For both are true: your love
wounds, and it heals. One part of the wound inflicted by love remains
an open sore, your longed-for face has not yet beamed upon the
eyes of your lover. The anxiety of not knowing that you were well has
been removed from my mind, but the hunger of the eyes is not yet
appeased by the sight of your countenance. This Sorrow we trust
may very soon be taken away, by the ministry of that grace which
has deigned to remove the anxiety of mind by the arrival of your
letters; and then he who desires both health and vision will be full of
joy in the arrival of yourself.
“You have written to me of the religious life and justness of the lord
apostolic[254], what great and unjust trials he suffers at the hands of
the children of discord. I confess that I glow with great joy that the
father of the churches sets himself about the service of God with
pious and faithful mind, without guile. No wonder that justice suffers
persecution in his person at the hands of evil men, when in our
Chief, the fount of all goodness and justice, the God Christ, justice
suffered persecution even unto death.”
After referring sympathetically to Arno’s complaints that his life has
been a very unquiet one of late, by reason of much travelling, Alcuin
continues:—
“There is one journey upon which I wish that you would enter.
Would that I could see you praying in the venerable temple of
blessed Martin our protector, that thy supplication and ours might
restore my strength, that by Christ’s mercy the pious consolation of
love might advance us both on the way of perpetual beatitude. How
this may come about, let your providence consider. If the opportunity
of the present year does not grant to us our will, by reason of the
hindrance of affairs, may we meet in quiet times and at a quiet
season, after Easter of next year, at St. Amand[255]. The frequent
infirmity of my poor little body would make a long journey very
fatiguing to me in the storms of winter.”
Arno could himself write a genial and affectionate letter. One of his
letters to the Cuckoo[256] has been preserved:—
“Kartula dic: Cuculus valeat per saecula nostra. Ep. 287.
To the very dear bird the Cuckoo the Eagle sends
greeting.
“Be mindful of thyself and of me. Do what I have enjoined,
accomplish what you have promised. Be gentle and true to our father
[Alcuin], obedient and devoted to God. Love Him who has raised
thee from the mire and set thee to stand before princes. Stand like a
man against your adversary; go higher, never lower; advance, never
fall back....
“I have dipped my pen in love to write this letter. Rise, rise, most
pleasing bird. The winter is passing away; the rains have gone; the
flowers are showing on the earth; the time of song has come. Let
your friends—that is, the angelic dignities—hear your voice. Your
voice is sweet to them, may your appearance be fair in the eyes of
the Lord thy God, who desires your presence.”
The Cuckoo’s enemy, against whom he was to fight manfully, was
drink. He was evidently a very sweet and sympathetic singer at the
frequent feasts,[257] and was not sufficiently careful in respect of
strong drink. Alcuin’s Carmen 277 mourns in forty-eight lines the
absence of the Cuckoo, gone they did not know where. Some of the
lines are significant: “Ah me! if Bacchus has sunk him in that
pestiferous vortex!” And again: “Alas! that impious Bacchus, I
suppose, is entertaining him, Bacchus who desires to subvert all
hearts. Weep for the Cuckoo, weep all for the Cuckoo. He left us in
triumph, in tears he will return. Would that we had the Cuckoo, even
in tears; for then with the Cuckoo we could weep.”
Though himself a judge of wine, with a decided preference for
good and ripe wine, Alcuin was a determined advocate for strict
temperance. Total abstinence was not his idea of temperance. Of
another temptation of the physical senses he says surprisingly little;
indeed, he hardly ever refers to it. In Carmen 260, To his brothers of
York, a poem with a charming description of spring in its opening
verses, he gives to the younger brethren a very direct warning on
both of these physical temptations[258]:—
“Let not the tipsy Bacchus cast his fetters upon you, nor, noxious,
wipe out the lessons engraved on your minds. Nor let that wicked
Cretan boy, armed with piercing darts, drive you from the citadel of
safety.”
The conversion of Arno into Aquila was very natural to a
Yorkshireman. In several cases we can only guess at the Teutonic
names which Alcuin translated into Latin; for example, Gallicellulus
(Ep. 260). In two cases, at least, he translates into Greek.
Cambridge men who remember with much affection their private
tutor in Mathematics, William Walton, will remember his skill in thus
rendering names; his Prosgennades still survives, known to the
world as Atkinson. With Alcuin, Hechstan becomes Altapetra. The
abbess Adaula evidently had a Teutonic name. Anthropos was his
friend Monna. Stratocles had some such name as Heribercht. Epistle
282 is addressed, very near the end of his life, “to my best-loved
friends in Christ, brother and son, Anthropos and Stratocles, the
humble levite Alchuine sends greeting.” Epistle 283, of the same late
date, is addressed “to my dearest son Altapetra, the levite Albinus
sends greeting”. In the course of this letter to Hechstan, Alcuin sends
greetings and requests for prayers to two friends whose names
would not fall very easily into Latin, Scaest and Baegnod, the latter a
common Anglo-Saxon name, usually in the form Beagnoth, with the
final d aspirated. It occurs in runes on a knife in the British Museum,
and is found in Kent and Wessex.
CHAPTER XVII
Grammatical questions submitted to Alcuin by Karl.—Alcuin and Eginhart.—
Eginhart’s description of Charlemagne.—Alcuin’s interest in missions.—The
premature exaction of tithes.—Charlemagne’s elephant Abulabaz.—Figures of
elephants in silk stuffs.—Earliest examples of French and German.—Boniface’s
Abrenuntiatio Diaboli.—Early Saxon.—The earliest examples of Anglo-Saxon
prose and verse.
In many of Alcuin’s letters we find answers or allusions to

questions addressed to him by Karl. In Epistle 253 Alcuin writes
twelve paragraphs to the emperor in answer to twelve questions. In
Epistle 252 he writes to Homer (Angilbert), who has been
commanded by the emperor to consult him on the gender of the
word rubus and on the difference in meaning of despicere and
dispicere. In regard to rubus, he sums up a long list of authorities on
both sides by the correct remark that a bramble must not be counted
as a tree, and therefore rubus follows the ordinary rule of words
ending in us and is masculine. On the difference between despicere
and dispicere he has much to write, and in the course of his letter he
makes free use of quotations from the Greek. From Epistle 254 we
find that Charlemagne had inquired, through Candidus, as to the
distinction between aeternum and sempiternum; perpetuum and
inmortale; saeculum, aevum, and tempus. In Epistle 240, a very long
letter, he writes to the emperor in reply to his inquiry as to the force
of a question put by the Greek master—an Athenian sophist—about
the price of human salvation.
Considering the large part which the annalist Eginhart played in
the administrative work of Charlemagne’s reign, as secretary to the
king and emperor, it is remarkable that we find only one reference to
him in Alcuin’s letters. This one reference is affectionate in tone, and
gives no reason at all for supposing that Alcuin was jealous of the
quick and skilful secretary. The reference occurs in Ep. 112, a.d.
799, a letter addressed to Karl by Alcuin. The letter itself is of so
interesting a character that the opportunity of giving it in its entirety
should not be lost. From its contents we gather that Alcuin had sent
to Karl a treatise which he had hastily dictated and had not read over
and corrected. Karl had noted errors in the writing and punctuation,
and had sent it back to be corrected, a charming piece of discipline
which raises Karl higher than ever in our appreciative regard.
“To the most pious and excellent lord king David, Ep. 112. a.d. 799.
Flaccus wounded[259] with the pen of love sends
greeting.
“We give thanks to your venerable piety that you have caused to
be read to the ears of your wisdom the booklet sent to you in
accordance with the injunction of your command; and that you have
had errors in it noted, and have sent it back for correction. It would,
however, have been better corrected by yourself, because in any
work the judgement of another is most frequently of more value than
that of the actual author.
“You have done somewhat less than the full office of love
demanded, in that you have not in like manner noted opinions not
learnedly set forth or catholically worked out. I have a suspicion that
your letter indicates that not all which is written in my booklet has
your approval. For you have directed a defence of the work to be
sent to your excellency, whereas my poor words could have no
defender or emender better than yourself. The authority of him who
commands should defend the work of him who obeys.
“That the booklet does not run so scholarly in letter and
punctuation as the order and rule of the art of grammar demands is
no unusual effect of rapidity of thought, while the mind of the reader
forestalls the action of the eyes. Wearied with a bad headache I
cannot examine the words which flow by a sudden rush from my
mouth as I dictate; and one who is not willing to impute to himself the
negligence of another should not impute negligence to another.
“The account of the disputation of Felix with a Saracen I have not
seen, nor can we find it here; indeed I never heard of it before. But in
the course of very diligent inquiry whether any of our people have
heard of its existence, I have been told that it might be found with
Laidrad the Bishop of Lyon. I have at once sent a messenger to the
said bishop in order that if it can be found there it may be sent as
quickly as possible to your presence.
“When I went as a young man to Rome, and spent some days in
the royal city of Pavia, a certain Jew, Lullus by name, had a
disputation with Master Peter, and I heard in the same city that there
was a written record of the controversy. This was the same Peter
who with such clearness taught grammar in your palace[260].
Perhaps our Homer[261] has heard something about it from him.
“I have sent to your excellency some modes of expression,
supported by examples or verses from venerable fathers, and also
some figures of arithmetical subtlety for your amusement, on the
blank part of the paper which you have sent to us; in order that what
offered itself to our eye naked may come back to you clothed. It
seemed right that paper which came to us ennobled by your seal
should receive honour from our letters. And if any of the said forms
of expression are inadequately supported by examples, Beselel[262]
your familiar—yea and ours too—will be able to add others. He can
also make out the arithmetical puzzles.
“The major and minor distinctions of punctuation add greatly to the
beauty of sentences; but the use of them has been almost lost by the
rusticity of our scribes. Now that the beauty of all wisdom and the
ornament of salutary learning is beginning to be renewed by the
exertions of your nobility, so there is good hope that the use of
punctuation is to be restored in the hands of scribes.
“I for my part, though little proficient, fight daily against rusticity at
Tours. Let your authority teach the palace youths to produce in the
most elegant manner whatsoever your most lucid eloquence shall
have dictated, that documents which circulate in the name of the
king may bear on their face the nobility of the royal wisdom.”
That appears to be the only case in which Eginhart is spoken of by
Alcuin. Curiously enough, it appears that Alcuin is only once spoken
of by Eginhart. We might have expected some mention of Alcuin in
Eginhart’s statement of Karl’s fondness for foreigners[263]. The
remarkable passage in which Eginhart mentions Alcuin forms
chapter 25 of the Vita Caroli Magni, coming in the course of this fine
description of a man clearly worthy to be called Great:—
“In eloquence he was copious and exuberant; whatever he wished
to express he could express in the clearest manner. Nor was he
content to speak only in his native tongue; he worked hard at
learning foreign tongues. Latin he had learned so well that he was
wont to pray in that tongue equally with his own. Greek he
understood better than he spoke. He was so able in speech that he
appeared as a teacher. He cultivated most studiously the liberal arts,
and exceedingly respected and greatly honoured those who taught
them. In learning grammar he heard the aged Peter of Pisa, a
deacon. In other studies he had as his preceptor Albinus, whose
cognomen was Alcuin, also a deacon, of the Saxon race, from
Britain, a man most learned. With him he spent much time and
labour on rhetoric and dialectic, and especially on the study of
astronomy. He learned the art of computation, and with much
sagacity he scrutinized most closely the courses of the stars. He
made efforts, too, to become a scribe, for which purpose he used to
have tablets and specimens carried about under the pillows of his
bed, that he might practise his hand in writing when he had any
spare time; but he did not make much way with a task begun so late
in his life.”
It would have been strange if Alcuin had not Ep. 13. a.d. 789.
taken special interest in the spread of Christianity
among the pagan races on the eastern borders of the kingdom of
Karl. Our West-Saxon Boniface had made such a mark, by himself
and by his Malmesbury monks Lull and Burchardt and others, and
his Wimborne nuns and magistrae, that Alcuin found familiar names
in many parts of the eastern and north-eastern fringe, and made
many inquiries about the progress of the work. In one of the earliest
of his letters which have been preserved, he addresses an abbat
who had gone to visit the Bishop of Bremen. “Salute a thousand
times my best loved bishop Uilhaed. It sorely grieves me that I have
parted from him. Would that I could see him.” This was our own
Northumbrian Angle Willehad, born in 730, five years before Alcuin,
and no doubt his school-fellow. He had narrowly escaped
martyrdom, and had bent before the storm; but he returned to the
scene of his dangerous labours, and Karl caused him to be
consecrated at Worms first bishop of Bremen on July 13, 787. He
built his cathedral church at Bremen, and consecrated it on
November 1, 789; on November 8 he died of fever at Blexen, close
by. In this letter Alcuin charges the abbat—
“Inform me by letter how far the Saxons fall in with your preaching,
and if there is any hope of the conversion of the Danes, and if the
Wilts and Vionuds[264], whom the king has recently[265] acquired,
accept the faith of Christ, and what is going on in those parts, and
what the lord king intends to do about the Huns[266].”
In a letter to Colcu[267], in the beginning of the next year, he says:
—
“Let your dilection know that by the mercy of God Ep. 14. a.d. 790.
the holy Church in the parts of Europe has peace,
advances, grows. The Old Saxons and the Frisians have been
converted to the faith of Christ at the instance of Karl, some by
rewards, some by threats. Last year the said king with a great host
attacked the Sclaves, whom we called Vionuds, and brought them
into subjection.
“Further, the dukes and tribunes of the same most Christian king
have taken from the Saracens a large part of Spain, with a coast line
three hundred miles in length. But—ah the grief!—those same
accursed Saracens are dominant over the whole of Africa and the
greatest part of Asia.”
To Higbald of Lindisfarne, in the letter given at page 132, he
writes:—
“Almost the whole of Europe was destroyed by Ep. 24. a.d. 793.
the fire and the sword of the Goths or the Huns.
But now, by the mercy of God, as the sky shines bright with stars so
Europe shines with the ornament of churches, and in them the
offices of the Christian religion flourish and increase.”
Writing to his most intimate friend Arno, Archbishop of Salzburg,
who was about to accompany an army against the Avars, Alcuin
warns him against the premature imposition of tithes:—
“Be a preacher of piety, not an exactor of tithes; Ep. 64. post Mai.
for the freshly converted soul is to be fed with the 796.
milk of apostolical piety until it grows, strengthens,
and becomes strong enough to receive solid food. Tithes, it is said,
have subverted the faith of the Saxons. Why should we place on the
neck of the ignorant a yoke which neither we nor our brethren have
been able to bear?”
Again, writing to Karl after the subjugation of the Huns, Alcuin says
this:—
“Now let your most wise and God-pleasing piety Ep. 67. post Aug.
provide for the new people pious preachers, of 796.
honest life, learned in sacred science, imbued with
evangelical precepts, intent in their preaching on the examples of the
holy Apostles, who were wont to minister milk—that is, gentle
precepts—to their hearers who were beginners in the faith....
“These things being thus considered, let your most holy piety take
into wise consideration whether it is well to impose upon an ignorant
race, at the beginning of the faith, the yoke of tithes, so that they
shall be fully exacted from house to house. It is worth considering
whether the Apostles, taught by the God Christ Himself, and sent to
preach to the world, required the exaction of tithes or anywhere
demanded them. We know that the tithing of our substance is a very
good thing; but it is better to sacrifice the tithe than to lose the faith.
And indeed we, born and brought up and taught in the Catholic faith,
scarce consent to tithe to the full our substance; how much does
feeble faith not consent to the gift of tithe, and the infant will, and the
covetous mind. But when faith has become strong, and the practice
of Christianity is confirmed, then, as to perfect men, may stronger
precepts be given, from which the mind, become solid in the
Christian religion, may not recoil.”
He then proceeds to urge that the adults of the conquered Huns
shall not be baptized until they have first been carefully taught, “lest
the ablution of sacred baptism of the body profit nothing.” On this
subject of the baptism of the Huns a long report is found in a tenth-
century collection of Alcuin’s letters, written by Paulinus the Patriarch
of Aquileia, describing a discussion which took place at a meeting of
bishops, or in the College of Bishops, summoned by King Pippin in
the summer of this year 796.
In the autumn of 796, Alcuin again writes on the Ep. 69.
subject of tithes, this time addressing his friend[268]
Megenfrid, the treasurer of the palace, and dealing not with the
Huns, but with the Saxons. Alcuin writes to him as to one of the
principal advisers of Karl, enters fully into the oft repeated argument
about milk and strong meat, and arrives thus at his point.
“If the yoke easy and the burden light of Christ had been preached
to this most hard race, the Saxons, as carefully as the rendering of
tithes was required, and the legal penalties for the very smallest
faults, it may be that they would not have abhorred the sacraments
of baptism. As to those who are sent to teach them, sint
praedicatores non praedatores, let them preach, not prey.”
In another letter of that autumn, he sends full Ep. 71.
advice to Arno, the bishop of Salzburg, as to the
manner of teaching the faith to the Huns. In the course of this letter
he reminds Arno that the wretched race of the Saxons has
repeatedly lost the sacrament of baptism, because it never had in
heart the foundation of the faith.
In the year 801 the news reached Charlemagne that one Isaac the
Jew, whom he had sent four years before to the King of Persia, was
returning, bringing with him an elephant and many other presents.
He had got as far as Fez. Special arrangements were made for
bringing the elephant across the sea, and he arrived at Spezzia in
October, wintering at Vercelli because the Alps were already covered
with snow. Eginhart thought the arrival of the elephant at Aix-la-
Chapelle to be of sufficient importance to have the precise day
named, the only event thus honoured in a year rather full of events. It
was the twentieth of July; and the elephant’s name was Abulabaz.
Under the year 810, another year full of important events, Eginhart
records that Charlemagne heard of a sudden and successful raid of
Northmen upon the Frisians; he set off in great haste, summoned all
his forces from all parts, crossed the Rhine at Lippenheim, and
waited there a few days for the troops to assemble. He had taken his
favourite animal with him. While he was waiting, the elephant died
suddenly. See Appendix E.
The strange form of an elephant made it a frequent subject for the
ornamentation of silk and woollen robes. We hear of silk pallia thus
adorned in Charlemagne’s lifetime, and it is probable that in a stuff of
this kind his body was clothed in the grave at Aachen. Alcuin’s great
predecessor in learning, Aldhelm, had a chasuble of scarlet silk,
wrought with black scrolls containing the representations of
peacocks,[269] and this chasuble was preserved at Malmesbury in
the time of William of Malmesbury, about 1140. The silk robes in
which the body of St. Cuthbert was wrapped were ornamented with
large circular spaces containing men on horseback with hawk and
hound, and an island with trees, fishes, and eider ducks.
Plate VII
Elephant from the tomb of Charlemagne. To face p. 290

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About the Contributors  xi

Introduction: The Scope and Diversity of Comparative

1. The Environmental State and Its Limits  23

8. Implementation of International Environmental Law: A

10. Interpretive Methodologies, Quantitative Methods, and

14. Environmental Justice, Climate Justice, and Animal Liberation

17. The Comparative Politics of Environmental Activism in Russia:

20. Territory, Private Authority, and Rights: The Place of Land

23. The Comparative Politics of Environmental Justice  437

26. Rights of Nature: Institutions, Law, and Policy for Sustainable

29. Green Industrial Policy in Comparative Perspective: Supporting

33. Fracked Taxpayers and Communities: Shale Economics in

37. Cities and the Environment in Africa: An Agency-​Centered

40. War and Environmental Politics: A Comparative Perspective  775

Michaël Aklin, Department of Political Science, University of Pittsburgh

Candace Famiglietti, Department of Conflict Resolution, Human Security, and Global

Raul Pacheco-​Vega, Methods Lab, Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales

Jeannie Sowers, Stacy D. VanDeveer,

Comparative environmental politics (CEP) is a vibrant field of scholarship and practice

Scope and Method in Comparative

Comparative politics is characterized by the enduring importance of domestic institutions,

Part I: States, Domestic Political

interdisciplinary field of science and technology studies, explores relationships between

Part II: Methods and

Part III: Movements and Activism

Part IV: Markets and Firms in Comparative

CEP has understood firms—​whether private or state-​owned—​to be central actors in

Part V: Environmental Justice and Rights

Part VI: Natural Resources and

Part VII: The Politics of

Part VIII: Cities and Sustainability

Part IX: Environment, Resources,

and “peacetime” military activities on the environment; the militarization of conserva-

The Environmenta l Stat e

Governing the Air

cooperation. The United Nations Economic Commission for Europe Convention on

Index: 1970 = 100 (For Ammonia 1980 = 100)

1980 1990 2000 2010

Gross Domestic PM2.5 Ozone (O3) Nitrogen

The Volkswagen Emissions Scandal

A letter written by Alcuin in September, 799, may be taken as an

A beast has sudden come to this my house,

In many of Alcuin’s letters we find answers or allusions to

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About the Contributors xi

1. The Environmental State and Its Limits 23

8. Implementation of International Environmental Law: A

10. Interpretive Methodologies, Quantitative Methods, and

14. Environmental Justice, Climate Justice, and Animal Liberation

17. The Comparative Politics of Environmental Activism in Russia:

20. Territory, Private Authority, and Rights: The Place of Land

23. The Comparative Politics of Environmental Justice 437

26. Rights of Nature: Institutions, Law, and Policy for Sustainable

29. Green Industrial Policy in Comparative Perspective: Supporting

33. Fracked Taxpayers and Communities: Shale Economics in

37. Cities and the Environment in Africa: An Agency-Centered

40. War and Environmental Politics: A Comparative Perspective 775

Raul Pacheco-Vega, Methods Lab, Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales

CEP has understood firms—whether private or state-owned—to be central actors in