ABSTRACT

In light of a multi-faceted ecological crisis, scholars and practitioners increasingly pay attention to the role of religion as a way to address the ethical dimensions of the current environmental crisis and bring about a sustainability transformation. This chapter discusses the role that religion plays in global sustainability governance and the contribution that religious actors can make to sustainable development. First, it introduces religious perspectives on the environment and discusses whether religion can be ascribed a decisive transformative role in global sustainability politics. Second, the chapter shows how religious actors have been involved in political debates on the environment and argues that religious environmentalism operates across scales and involves a broad range of sustainability initiatives. Third, it looks at how religious perspectives on environmental ethics can be transformed into politics and discusses how they can make a difference to global sustainability governance. The chapter concludes by looking at how religion can further contribute to an interdisciplinary understanding of the ecological crisis.