What is environmental politics?

What is environmental politics? The book’s title might seem banal to the readers of this journal. Indeed, who does not know what environmental politics is? Yet this book by Elizabeth R. DeSombre, the first book in Polity’s What is Politics? series, is specifically devoted to the question. Without stepping into the dry territory of textbooks and encyclopedias, it aims to explain to general readers the most important systems and structures through which environmental policy decisions are made.

DeSombre starts the book with an explanation of the basic concepts of political and environmental sciences, and then gradually moves to the more complex ones. In the beginning, she defines concepts like ‘the environment’, ‘politics’, ‘externalities’, and ‘temporal discounting’ and briefly but effectively explains the most important social dilemmas in environmental politics such as the problem of collective action and the so-called ‘tragedy of the commons’.

The book further explains the importance of uncertainty in science, how it is relevant to environmental sciences and policy, and why this field has attracted different types of skeptics, denialists, and conspiracy theorists. Using concrete examples, the author shows how environmental policy decisions ought to be based on scientific knowledge and why they often are not. Naturally, any explanation of the environmental policy process requires an understanding of political structures that inevitably shape it. DeSombre compares the effectiveness of democratic and authoritarian regimes, which she is careful to define, in protecting the environment. Her next, quite logical step is the identification of the main political actors in environmental politics such as politicians, political parties, bureaucracies, interest groups, and the media.

The book briefly but successfully describes international environmental politics, how international cooperation works or why it does not, and what role intergovernmental and international nongovernmental organizations play in global environmental protection. In conclusion, DeSombre summarizes the limitations of environmental politics in solving contemporary environmental issues and discusses some nonpolitical alternatives such as making the environment a moral issue. Nevertheless, the book focuses mostly on mainstream environmental protection through traditional political means and offers some ideas on how to improve the political process without radical changes in the system.

Throughout the book, DeSombre provides detailed information about how the environmental political process works in practice. She does so without including many tables or graphs, which will make it accessible to general readers who might find this type of data visualization difficult. In fact, the book only has one table of comparative democracy measurements in different countries, and one graph of the environmental Kuznets curve.

The author’s attention to conceptual definitions is impressive. Indeed, we often assume that students, the media, governmental officials, and the lay public are familiar with at least the fundamentals – the most important concepts – of our discipline. Yet every scholar has firsthand experience of how wrong this assumption is and how non-experts often misunderstand even the simplest concepts. Clearly, concepts are extremely important for environmental politics – they help to communicate ideas, introduce perspectives, and explain broad generalizations within the discipline. Without good, clear conceptual definitions, we cannot communicate effectively about the environment or set and achieve environmental policy goals.

Although the intended readership of this book is a general audience interested in environmental politics, the book could also serve as background reading for introductory environmental policy and politics classes. Regular readers of Environmental Politics will not find much new information here, but DeSombre’s work provides useful examples of how to communicate eco-political ideas to non-experts.