Environmental Politics

Abstract

The study of the politics of the environment is now an important sub-area of the discipline in Australia. It was not always so. As this chapter shows, the discipline was slow to engage with the emergence of the environment as a political issue — markedly slower, for example than in the United States, where the 1970s saw numerous works by political scientists follow the rise in salience of environmental issues. In Australia, as we will see, the emergence of research output was slow and sporadic, coming of age only after environmental issues themselves came of age in the federal election of 1990.