Regionalism Politics And The Environment

Comparative Environmental Regionalism focuses on environmental governance as a key issue of analysis to provide an important new conceptualisation of 'region' and regional power. Examining both interregionalism and regional integration, the book goes beyond the traditional study of micro-regions within the EU to examine regions and regional institutions across Asia, Africa and the Americas. The focus on forms of governance allows a consideration of the variety of processes and mechanisms developed to deal with collective issues in addition to formal institutional cooperation. Using globally based case studies, Comparative Environmental Regionalism will be of interest to students and scholars of environmental and regional politics, and international relations.

"This book provides a comprehensive understanding of environmental regionalism at the international level, analyzing the concept and identifying recurring patterns from six in-depth case studies. While ecoregions or environmental regions are defined on ecological boundaries rather than administrative criteria, ecoregionalism is the idea that regional dynamics should cluster around ecoregions, while ecoregionalization is the tendency of regional dynamics to cluster around ecoregions. Focusing on the international level, this book presents six cases of ecoregional processes from around the world and the regional environmental agreements: two are terrestrial, the Alps and the Andes; two are marine, the Mediterranean Sea and the Baltic Sea; two are related to freshwater ecosystems: the Amu Darya in Central Asia and the Great Lakes in North America. The book analyzes both ecoregional processes focused on the environment, as well as intersectoral ecoregional processes. The case studies are analyzed based on the ecoregional governance framework, developed by the author for this book. Despite the diversity of context, the similarity of the governance system of the six cases is striking. Several recurring patterns have been identified, which may also extend to the subnational level. They are not design principles, but may be taken into consideration for the design or redesign of current and future regional environmental agreements and processes. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of environmental politics, natural resource management, spatial planning and international relations"--

Revised to include new discussions on climate justice, green political parties, climate legislation and recent environmental struggles.

Textbook on regionalism and its role in a global marketplace, ideal for students of IR and globalisation.

Academics, community activists, and politicians have rediscovered regionalism, insisting that regions are critical functional units in a world-wide economy and, just as important, critical functional units in individual American lives. More and more of us travel across city, county, even state borders every morning on our way to work. Our television, radio, and print media rely on a regional marketplace. Our businesses, large and small, depend on suppliers, workers, and customers who rarely reside in a single jurisdiction. The parks, riverfronts, stadiums, and museums we visit draw from, and provide an identity to, an area much larger than a single city. The fumes, gases, chemicals, and run-off that pollute our air and water have no regard for municipal boundaries. This book lays out a variety of opinions on regionalism, its history and its future. While the essays do not comprise a debate, pro and con, about regionalism, they do provide a wide array of perspectives, based on the authors' diverse backgrounds and experience. Some contributors have made close academic studies of how regional action occurs, in various states like Minnesota, California, and Oregon; others give an historical account of a particular region like that surrounding New York City; and yet others point out aspects of regionalism--race, especially-- that should not be ignored. Why did past efforts at regional collaboration fall apart? What did regionalist efforts of decades ago leave undone, and what new goals should regionalists set? Without an understanding of these questions, policymakers and advocates may find themselves "reinventing the region." This book provides an important understanding of how regionalism has played out in the past, how policies shape places, and the possibilities and limits of regional action. Bruce J. Katz, director of the Brookings Institution Center on Urban and Metropolitan Policy, was formerly chief of staff at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Featuring a notable list of international contributors, this book presents a systematic and stimulating discussion on regionalism, covering topical issues such as recent financial crises, enlargement within EU and the post-Lome regionalism of Africa.

Well known for his column in The New Yorker, Lewis Mumford is widely regarded as the foremost urban critic of this century. Through historical and theoretical perspectives, author Mark Luccarelli traces the development of Mumford's thought on regional planning focusing on his pioneering concept of an ecologically-based region and shows how he attempted to turn his ideas into reality through the Regional Planning Association of America (RPAA). This informative book also demonstrates how Mumford's ideas remain extraordinarily relevant and valuable to today's urban problems.

Regions are difficult to govern – coordinating policies across local jurisdictional boundaries in the absence of a formal regional government gives rise to enormous challenges. Yet some degree of coordination is almost always essential for local governments to effectively fulfill their responsibilities to their citizens. State and local governments have, over time, awkwardly, and with much experimenting, developed common approaches to regional governance. In this revolutionary new book, authors David Miller and Jen Nelles offer a new way to conceptualize those common approaches: Regional Intergovernmental Organizations (RIGOs) that bring together local governments to coordinate policies across jurisdictional boundaries. RIGOs are not governments themselves, but as Miller and Nelles demonstrate, they do have a measure of political authority that allows them to quietly and sometimes almost invisibly work to further regional interests and mitigate cross-boundary irritations. Providing a new conceptual framework for understanding how regional decision-making has emerged in the U.S., this book will provoke a new and rich era of discussion about American regionalism in theory and practice. Discovering American Regionalism will be a future classic in the study of intergovernmental relations, regionalism, and cross-boundary collaboration.

This book examines what counts regarding the role and conceptualization of regions in world politics. It presents a fresh look at which narratives awake, persist, fall dormant or re-emerge amidst diverse interlocking processes of environmental, technological and global political changes. It puts forward a thorough and multidimensional conceptualization of regions as embedded in changing, overlapping environments, and requires more attention to regions' shifting materiality, temporality and technological underpinnings. Combing the approaches, questions and analyses of Critical IR and Political Geography, it calls for a renewed emphasis on the puzzle of how the contextual environment of regions may become more (or less) multidimensional, or how some aspects of a region's contextual environment may be mutually constitutive in non-intuitive ways. Ultimately, it sheds light on the politics of regions and the regional scale in international politics in order to overcome the often-underlying territorial fixity of territory and space within IR approaches. This book will be of key interest to scholars and students of international relations, international political sociology, political geography, regionalism, geopolitics and area studies.