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This book provides a sophisticated overview of the theories, concepts and methods central to the complex and contentious field of International Environmental Politics (IEP). Ronald Mitchell carefully introduces students to the political processes involved in both causing and resolving international environmental problems

This book provides a sophisticated overview of the theories, concepts and methods central to the complex and contentious field of International Environmental Politics (IEP). Ronald Mitchell carefully introduces students to the political processes involved in both causing and resolving international environmental problems.

Current understandings of global environmental governance owe much to the numerous theoretical, empirical, and methodological contributions of Oran Young. Over the course of 50 years, Young has created many of the theories and typologies we use to explain why international environmental institutions form and what types of effects they have and the conditions under which they have them. His contributions have been central to the development of the concepts of institutional dynamics, interplay, and scale. He has made major contributions to environmental policy globally and in the Arctic, both through his own work and by fostering the work of other scholars. This article summarizes the contributions Young has made to the field and introduces the articles in this special issue that honor those contributions. Adapted from the source document.

Reducing human emissions of carbon dioxide by 80% by 2100 requires more than technological innovation. Historical rates of emissions decline due to such innovation of about 0.7% are insufficient to offset the 3% growth in emissions that stems from population and per capita income growth. Existing scientific and political debates are dominated by a "technophilic optimism" that projects emission reductions from technological improvement that are not supported by the evidence. If we fail to develop policies proactively to constrain population, affluence, and consumption while respecting other human values, we will almost certainly face impacts from climate change that constrain population, affluence, and consumption for us.

To accurately assess the relative effectiveness of international environmental agreements requires that we pay greater attention to how problem structures influence both institutional design and the outcomes we use to evaluate institutional effects. Analyzing multiple agreements allows us to move beyond claims that an agreement was influential to claims regarding which variables explain that influence, to examine how institutional influence depends on other factors and to evaluate an agreement's effectiveness relative to other agreements and non-institutional influences. Accounting for problem structure is crucial to such endeavors because problem structure variables may be alternatives to or interact with institutional variables and because institutional design is endogenous to the problem structure-outcome relationship. The shortcomings related to incorporating problem structure in extant effectiveness research can be overcome through four strategies: carefully describing analytically useful variation in problem structure, selecting cases to limit variation in problem structure, evaluating problem structure variables and their influence on design and behavior, and evaluating effectiveness in terms appropriate to the problem structure.