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ABSTRACT
Australian IR scholars and scholarship have been prominent in framing, informing and contributing to global debates in the field of global environmental politics. This article reviews and analyses those contributions with a focus on the period since 2009. It takes as a starting point research that addresses international or global environmental issues, including those that demand a scalar approach to how the global is voiced and experienced at local and regional sites, and that, in doing so, illuminates key disciplinary concerns and contributes to disciplinary debates. The core of the article is woven around three overlapping sub-fields: global environmental governance, international political economy, and normative IR. It reveals how Australian-based IR scholars working on the environment have engaged with critiques of neo-liberalism, pursued more critical approaches to securitization, expanded the empirical and conceptual basis of how we understand institutional ecosystems, contributed to bringing social justice concerns to the forefront of global environmental politics and theory, and been part of a conversation about environmental challenges in the Asia Pacific region. The article concludes with some thoughts about the future direction of this research and scholarship.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 Despite the contemporary push in academe for interdisciplinary and collaborative research projects, and the kinds of multi-authored outputs that often arise, this article grounds its analysis primarily in single or co-authored publications where the contribution of individual IR scholars based in Australia is easier to identify.
2 This boundary spanning is also reflected in dissemination practices, with Australian IR scholars who work on environmental concerns publishing not only in IR or global politics journals (such as Global Governance, Millennium, Ethics and International Affairs, European Journal of International Relations and the Australian Journal of International Affairs) or in the standard journals of record such as Global Environmental Politics, Review of European, Comparative and International Environmental Law (RECIEL), Environmental Politics, and International Environmental Agreements, but others (such as Water International and Business and Politics) that usually linger outside the purview of most IR scholars.
3 To be fair, Burke et al, in their first airing of their Planet Politics manifesto, did also acknowledge that ‘at the edges of IR – in NGOs, in critical geography, posthuman IR, global governance and ecological politics – a new consciousness is visible’ (Citation2016, 501).
4 Australia-based climate scientist Will Steffen, working with Nobel Laureate Paul Crutzen and others, has been a leader in advancing these debates (see Steffen Citation2021 for a summary; see also Simangan (Citation2019), a former Australian National University PhD candidate, who situates the Asia Pacific in the Anthropocene).
5 In 2019, in recognition of these interdependencies and complexities, the UN General Assembly declared that 2021–2030 would be the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration (UNGA Citation2019).
6 McDonald for example, has examined the failed securitization of climate change in Australia (Citation2012) and the future of Australian climate politics (Citation2013b). Pickering and Mitchell have explored the influences on Australian governments’ position on multilateral climate finance (Pickering and Mitchell Citation2017), and Haward and Griffiths (Citation2011) have examined Australia’s influence in the Antarctic.
7 Downie also casts an empirical and conceptual lens on international organisations—agency above the state—and the ‘strategic role that [they] play in their own right’ (Citation2020, 1).
8 These ideas were developed by Fengshi Wu, now Associate Professor at UNSW, during her time at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Lorraine Elliott
Lorraine Elliott is Professor Emerita in the Department of International Relations at the Australian National University and LeadFaculty (and former member of the Scientific Steering Committee) with the Earth System Governance research network.