ABSTRACT
Pressure on the environment has increased in step with economic growth and the mass consumption that fueled rising gross domestic product throughout the twentieth century (see Chapter 16 ). Both growth and ecological crises have attained a global reach, challenging our established notions of cause and effect, and our framing of problems and solutions. Accordingly, global environmental politics has witnessed major changes and signifi cant “rescaling” in its “locus, agency and scope” (Andonova and Mitchell 2010 : 257; see Chapter 2 ). Both dimensions of global environmental politics – politics and governance, and the ecological problems that are the subject matter of global environmental politics – are being reinterpreted due to increasing complexity, interconnectedness and interdependence. Accordingly, the range of actors and disciplines that inform global environmental politics and contribute to framing global environmental problems is widening, in an acknowledgment of inescapable pluralism (see Part III of this volume).
