Editors’ Introduction

We are excited and privileged to become the fourth editorial team for Global Environmental Politics with the publication of issue 18-1. We have the good fortune to follow Kate O’Neill and Stacy VanDeveer, and a challenge to live up to the high standards they and previous editors have set for the journal. Under their tutelage, the journal’s five-year impact factor is an impressive 2.526. Through the hard work of our predecessors, and the creativity and efforts of authors and reviewers, Global Environmental Politics is now the premier academic home for research on the politics of the global environment.Thanks to Stacy and Kate, the transition to the new editorial team has also been relatively smooth. We have quickly learned that much credit for that also lies with the journal’s managing editor, Susan Altman, to whom we are especially grateful for staying on and ensuring the continued high quality of the editorial and production process. We have also learned that editing the journal is a team effort. Fortunately for us, two of the associate editors, Aarti Gupta and D. G. Webster, will be staying on, and we are pleased that Susan Park and Henrik Selin agreed to join them. We also want to thank Beth DeSombre, who will continue as book review editor.Global Environmental Politics is an inclusive journal in the sense of starting with a broad conception of “global,” “environmental,” and “politics.” We see this inclusivity as crucial to the ongoing success of the journal. It allows GEP to be a focal point for scholars from multiple disciplines, and it means that the conversations in GEP speak to the broad range of theoretical and methodological approaches and perspectives necessary to push our knowledge of global environmental politics forward. While readers of this journal need no reminder of the importance of the issues it covers, the salience and urgency of improving our understanding of politics in the current global context of environmental challenges could hardly be greater. We will work to ensure that GEP continues to be the go-to source for exploring and explaining those politics to both disciplinary and wider audiences in the academic and policy worlds.We pledge to build on the already strong foundations for this task and to implement some small changes to continue improving the journal. Our goals and priorities include the following four areas:1. Further enhance the pluralism of the journal’s offerings along multiple dimensions (issue area, geographic scope, methods, and theoretical approaches, including normative theory that addresses questions such as environmental justice) to capture the full range of scholarship on global environmental politics.2. Continue to broaden the journal’s audience. The GEP community is one of the great strengths of this journal. We think that this community can be expanded to increase the communication and cross-fertilization of new knowledge and innovative research in GEP. We will thus work to strengthen connections to multiple communities that focus on environmental politics—regional, national, and global academic organizations and scholarly networks. We also intend to engage with scholars of politics beyond political science (e.g., political sociology, political geography, political anthropology, political economy, and legal studies).3. Actively explore opportunities for greater engagement with practitioners as we collectively seek to understand and act on the multiple environmental crises facing the world and to do so justly. We will seek more work on the practice/theory interface and will encourage forum articles that focus on this nexus.4. Institute a few practical changes to tweak what is an already well-oiled machine. These include:• an editorial introduction in each issue, to put articles into context and conversation;• more forum articles that focus on the big picture of GEP and the practice/theory connection;• occasional research notes—the first appearing in this issue—that quickly communicate and spotlight new research tools, methods, approaches, and data sources generated by our community.• continue to build GEP’s social media presence so we can maintain and expand the GEP community.While we hope these modest experiments in structure and outreach will bring GEP to even wider audiences and raise the journal’s profile, in the end its quality and impact stem from the GEP community. We thank you for your contributions and interest in the journal, and we very much look forward to continuing to provide the best possible platform for excellent work in our field.This issue kicks off with an exploration of the perennial and crucial question of the role of individual behavior in the pursuit of solutions to global environmental problems. Beth DeSombre’s forum article examines why seeking globally effective individual behavior change is likely to be a frustrating endeavor. However, understanding the challenges of altering individual behavior can lead to insight on figuring “out how to change many actions by large numbers of people at the same time.”Global Environmental Politics has been an outlet for innovative research on non-state and hybrid forms of governance. The research articles begin with Marjanneke Vijge’s contribution on the extractive industries transparency initiative in Myanmar highlights the role of multiple stakeholders across different levels of scale in natural resource governance. She examines the effects of transparency on civil society empowerment in Myanmar, a country emerging from decades of military rule. Through extensive fieldwork and interviews with stakeholders, Vijge shows that it is important to focus not only on what information is being disclosed but also on the process of constituting and debating transparency.While politics often works through institutional arrangements at multiple levels, it also plays out in interactions with environmental change. Jeff Colgan’s article addresses such links, specifically focusing on security issues. He is particularly concerned with how climate change may interact with nuclear waste that remains buried in large quantities in ice sheets, causing a number of unanticipated environmental effects. He examines the case of secret US military bases in Greenland, where nuclear ballistic missiles were once stored and minimal decommissioning took place. Colgan draws attention to the indirect environmental consequences of climate change—what he refers to as “knock-on-environmental problems”—the interactions between climate change, local pollution, and human-made infrastructure.A core topic of inquiry since the founding of GEP is the study of international regimes. As these regimes have developed, the ability to do fine-grained research over time and across cases has improved, increasing our knowledge of the effects, limits, and interactions among them. In this issue, Jo-Kristian Røttereng examines the role of carbon sinks, which have been central to the climate change convention since its inception in 1992. Specifically, he draws upon an original data set covering carbon capture and storage (CCS) and reduced emissions from deforestation and forest degradation in developing countries (REDD+), to explain why different industrialized countries favor carbon sink-based options over other mitigation measures. Røttereng finds that industrialized countries that produce fossil energy—particularly oil—increasingly favor carbon sink-based measures, which allow them to maintain their energy economies while also undertaking climate action steps.Taking advantage of our current ability to assess the impact of regimes over time, Andreas Tveit’s article highlights that even frontrunners in international environmental action often fall short of their commitments, a puzzle poorly explained by extant compliance scholarship. His in-depth case study of Norway’s failure to meet its 2010 emission targets for nitrogen oxides under the 1999 Gothenburg Protocol draws on key elite interviews to show that even leading environmental states can be sensitive to compliance costs, but normative pressures to comply as target deadlines loom can be a major motivator for increased action. This factor, previously unexplored in the literature, plausibly affects both leading and laggard countries.Environmental justice is also a central theme in Joshua Gellers and Chris Jeffords’ article. They provide the first systemic quantitative assessment of how well procedural environmental rights entrenched in law, such as access to information and participation in environmental decision-making, produce environmental justice.Finally, we are particularly excited to launch our new occasional Research Notes section with Jean-Frédéric Morin, Andreas Dür, and Lisa Lechner’s introduction of their new comprehensive data set on environmental provisions found in 630 trade agreements signed between 1947 and 2016. This incredible—and hand-coded—tool holds enormous promise for analyzing research questions on topics including international institutional design, policy innovation, regime complexity, policy diffusion, and regime effectiveness. As a small sampling of this tool’s potential, the authors assess whether countries include trade provisions in environmental agreements to legitimately promote stringent environmental standards, or as mere window dressing for protectionist interests.

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