Description: Global environmental negotiations have become central sites for studying the interaction between politics, power, and environmental degradation. This book challenges what constitutes the sites, actors, and processes of negotiations beyond conventional approaches and provides a critical, multidisciplinary, and applied perspective reflecting recent developments, such as the increase of actor diversity and the digitalisation of global environmental meetings. It provides a step-by-step guide to the study of global environmental negotiations using accessible language and illustrative examples from different negotiation settings, including climate change, biodiversity, and ocean protection. It introduces the concept of 'agreement-making' to broaden understanding of what is studied as a 'site' of negotiation, illustrating how diverse methods can be applied to research the actors, processes, and order-making. It provides practical guidance and methodological tools for students, researchers and practitioners participating in global environmental agreement-making. One of a series of publications associated with the Earth System Governance Project: www.cambridge.org/earth-system-governance.
Brief description: Hannah Hughes is Senior Lecturer in International Politics and Climate Change in the International Politics Department at Aberystwyth University. Hannah's central research concern is global environmental degradation and the forms of knowledge that inform the political response, as well as the necessary conceptual and methodological innovation to advance understanding of this. She has examined this through research on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and published findings in Nature Climate Change and Global Environmental Politics. Hannah is co-investigator on the ESRC grant The Politics of Science in International Climate Cooperation and has a forthcoming book on The IPCC and the Politics of Writing Climate Change. Hannah and Alice began their collaboration in 2016 with the aim of initiating greater discussion on the study of negotiation sites through the concept of global environmental agreement-making, editing a special section in Global Environmental Politics and leading a multi-authored perspective piece in the Earth System Governance journal.