Few scholars have attempted to evaluate critically the role mediators play in managing international conflicts. Thomas Princen examines where mediation fits in the larger realm of diplomatic practice, going beyond the usual state-centric focus to account for the mediating activities of a wide range of actors-from superpowers to small states, from international organizations to nongovernmental groups. Originally published in 1995. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distingui.
Commoditization seems immutable and unstoppable but, like other social processes, its prevalence is context dependent. The enabling context for commoditization has been cheap fossil fuels, economic growth, and ever-increasing energy and material throughput. In fact, the scientific findings of ecological, climate, footprint, and material flow studies all point in the same direction— excess throughput. We cannot grow our way out of growth-driven crisis; new technologies will not create new sources of energy or new waste sinks. Counter-commoditization measures can take the form of formal policies or of informal social change processes, including processes now under way. Three social change processes are relational decision making, ecological language, and localization. The common thread is relations (between humans and between human systems—especially the economy—and natural systems), context (spatial and temporal, ecological and social). Applied to fossil fuels it is clear that the end of the hydrocarbon era must be accelerated. The normative imperative to support and invest in the "economy of care and connection" becomes ever stronger.
Hiking through the desert once I stopped to hug a large round boulder. I don't know what compelled me to do it. I had never done it before or since, but I can still feel it. It was as if the rock hugged back.
First, I offer a big thank you to Jane Bennett for an insightful and kind review. As authors know, it is hard looking back at one's work as a mere reader, let alone in a constructively critical vein. Often as not, my reaction is: I wrote that? Bennett helped me see this work with fresh eyes. And, having read and reviewed Vibrant Matter (kudos to editor Jeff Isaac), I can see my work through an entirely different lens—vibrant materiality. In this reply, I'd like to flag two points of convergence in our work and take up the notion of "common sense."
A central conundrum in the need to infuse a long-term perspective into climate policy and other environmental decision-making is the widespread belief that humans are inherently short-term thinkers. An analysis of human decision-making informed by evolved adaptations—biological, psychological and cultural—suggests that humans actually have a long-term thinking capacity. In fact, the human time horizon encompasses both the immediate and the future (near and far term). And yet this very temporal duality makes people susceptible to manipulation; it carries its own politics, a politics of the short term. A "legacy politics" would extend the prevailing time horizon by identifying structural factors that build on evolved biological and cultural factors.
A central conundrum in the need to infuse a long-term perspective into climate policy and other environmental decision-making is the widespread belief that humans are inherently short-term thinkers. An analysis of human decision-making informed by evolved adaptations-biological, psychological and cultural-suggests that humans actually have a long-term thinking capacity. In fact, the human time horizon encompasses both the immediate and the future (near and far term). And yet this very temporal duality makes people susceptible to manipulation; it carries its own politics, a politics of the short term. A "legacy politics" would extend the prevailing time horizon by identifying structural factors that build on evolved biological and cultural factors. Adapted from the source document.
Although global environmental politics (GEP), like other areas of international relations, should be theorized, no single unified theory of GEP is in the offing, nor should be. Nevertheless, assuming that the ultimate societal goal is ecological and social sustainability, at least three elements are necessary in that theorizing: starting points, metaphors, and normative content. The primary starting points for GEP include concern for irreversible diminution of the earth's life support systems, the consequences of ever-increasing throughput of material and energy, and the injustices of uneven distribution. Inappropriate metaphors of the environment include the machine and the laboratory; appropriate ones include spaceship earth and a watershed. Appropriate norms include ecological capping and zero waste. Finally, the theorizing effort needs to be explicit about the questions being asked. Are they about environmental improvement or sustainability? Are they about easing the environmental burdens of the powerless or easing the adjustment costs of the powerful?
Although global environmental politics (GEP), like other areas of international relations, should be theorized, no single unified theory of GEP is in the offing, nor should be. Nevertheless, assuming that the ultimate societal goal is ecological and social sustainability, at least three elements are necessary in that theorizing: starting points, metaphors, and normative content. The primary starting points for GEP include concern for irreversible diminution of the earth's life support systems, the consequences of ever-increasing throughput of material and energy, and the injustices of uneven distribution. Inappropriate metaphors of the environment include the machine and the laboratory; appropriate ones include spaceship earth and a watershed. Appropriate norms include ecological capping and zero waste. Finally, the theorizing effort needs to be explicit about the questions being asked. Are they about environmental improvement or sustainability? Are they about easing the environmental burdens of the powerless or easing the adjustment costs of the powerful? Adapted from the source document.
If analysts of political and ecological economy take seriously critical trends in environmental degradation and accept social responsibility for contributing to the reversal of such trends, they must go beyond the descriptive and predictive to the prescriptive, beyond marginal environmental improvement to sustainability, beyond cooperation and efficiency to sufficiency. Cooperation and efficiency principles are useful when biophysical underpinnings remain intact. Otherwise, sufficiency principles—restraint, precaution, polluter pays, zero, reverse onus—address the defining characteristics of current trends, namely environmental criticality, risk export, and responsibility evasion. They engage overconsumption. They compel decision-makers to ask when too much resource use or too little regeneration risks important values such as ecological integrity and social cohesion, when material gains now preclude material gains in the future, when consumer gratification or investor reward threatens economic security, when benefits internalized depend on costs externalized. Under sufficiency, one necessarily asks what are the risks, not just in the short term and for immediate beneficiaries, but in the longterm and for the under-represented.
