Ecological Change and Political Crisis

Abstract

A decade ago environmental issues were only beginning to make an impression on scholars of international relations. It was in the 1980s that the famous reports prepared under the guidance of Willy Brandt and Gro Harlem Bruntland brought ecological issues to the fore, and subsequently these have attracted an increasingly great amount of attention from scholars and policy makers.¹ Notable in this flurry of attention have been the studies by individuals such as Daniel Deudney, Thomas Homer-Dixon, Michael Grubb, Andrew Hurrell, Mark Imber, Jessica Tuchman Matthews, Ian Rowlands, Jeremy Russell, Caroline Thomas, John Vogler and Arthur Westing and by a range of institutions.² Of the institutional programmes, perhaps the most significant for the field have been SIPRI’s series of books on the ecological consequences of war, the World Resources Institute’s assessment of the global resource-base, The Royal Institute of International Affairs’ Energy and Environmental Programme, and the Global Security programme at the University of Cambridge. Any list of key studies in the development of environmental analysis in international relations must, of course, include the United Nations’ environment programme.