Bringing the in-between back in: Foreign policy in global environmental politics

Many environmental problems are transnational in their causes, consequences, and/or solutions. The increasing pace of global environmental destruction suggests that research on policies to address these problems has proved to be inadequate to the task. One possible way to enhance our understanding of global environmental politics and policy is to look more carefully at what goes on between and across the international and domestic aspects of it: to look at environmental foreign policy. This article describes foreign policy in the context of global environmental politics and discusses the potential utility of foreign policy analysis to help scholars and policy makers to better explore, comprehend, and possibly mitigate the human impact on the environment. Examples are drawn from the cases of China, Japan, and the United States. Copyright © 2008 The Policy Studies Organization. All rights reserved.