Timothy Doyle

The welfare of now and the green (post) politics of the future

This paper examines how key differences in the very manner in which the environment/welfare nexus is experienced and understood in both the global North and the global South are managed in favour of the former over the latter. We show how in the case of the global North — the more affluent world, such as Britain — environmental issues have been usually construed as post-materialist and/or post-industrialist. We argue that predominantly Northern-based post-materialists see environmental welfare (largely through the rhetoric of sustainable development and ecological modernization) as either something separate from humans (for the welfare of the ‘rest of nature’) or for the welfare of unborn, future generations. We use the concept of the ‘post-political’ to interpret how the global North dominates debates on the environment and how it can be quite dismissive, and even negligent, of welfare issues in the global South. In the case of the majority world, green welfare policy agendas are littered with the consequences of environmental devastation incurred through centuries of Northern oppression and resource exploitation. In the global South green welfare goals concentrate on the alleviation of those more basic needs of survival — provision of shelter, water availability, air quality, food sovereignty, and energy security — for those humans actually living on the planet; rather than those who may at some time in the future. In short, issues of environmental debt are writ large, rather than those of an imagined environmental future.

Beyond borders: Transnational politics, social movements and modern environmentalisms

Abstract This introduction considers three themes that recur across the various contributions to this collection. The first is the nature of borders and how these have been affected by the increase in transnational collective action and the growth in the power of transnational institutions. The second is the distinction between environmental movements and the social movement forms of environmentalism: meaning that not all forms of environmental movement are social movements. The third is the evidence of the diversity of environmentalisms, which leads us to identify three principal kinds of environmental movement, the post-material movements strongest in the United States and Australia, the post-industrial movements that are strongest in Europe and the post-colonial movements of the South.

‘Securing’ the Indian Ocean? Competing regional security constructions

Dictated and driven to a significant extent by the changing dynamics of the knowledge–power equation, regional constructions are devised and propagated for a range of purposes – describing economic success, structuring a set of relationships, reproducing a particular vision of (in)security or organising a specific function, such as to maximise economic cooperation, to minimise insecurity or to fashion a particular form of security architecture. It is argued that there are three competing regional constructions for security (currently in circulation) in the Indian Ocean Region, emanating largely from Australia, the United States and India – an Indian Ocean-wide concept, an East Indian Ocean construct and an Indo-Pacific concept. It is suggested that there exists an overriding narrative in favour of an ‘Indo-Pacific’ construction at the expense of Indian Ocean concepts. As a result, it is concluded that the Indian Ocean Rim Association for Regional Cooperation (IOR-ARC) will remain relatively weak for the foreseeable future and that, unless there is a concerted attempt to involve China in a new maritime security regime, the discourse and practices of regional security might become the preserve of an Indo-Pacific alliance comprising Australia, India, the United States and other East Asian states, including Japan.

Climate Terror A Critical Geopolitics of Climate Change

Climate Terror: A Critical Geopolitics of Climate Change Sanjay Chaturvedi & Timothy Doyle

Green public spheres and the green governance state: the politics of emancipation and ecological conditionality

Abstract A consistent thread weaves through all the articles in this edition. Each author, in some fashion, reflects upon the dual concepts of a ‘global green public sphere’ and the ‘global governance state’, as they intersect with the politics of environmentalism. Indeed, as is evidenced in the preceding pages, the politics of green concern transmute into a myriad of different collective forms. Despite this diversity of responses found within and between environmental groups, we conclude that most greens cross boundaries in a positive fashion. Through the construction of transnational networks of solidarity, movements become global entities, acting in concert to protect ecosystems and emancipate humans and non-humans from degradation and subjugation and expanding the public sphere of green debate transnationally. In certain instances, however, environmentalism is used as a tool for continued conquest and domination. These instances, although not generally reflective of green movements as a whole, are often writ large due to the relative power, in comparative terms, of the proponents. ‘Environment’, therefore, can be either a symbol for liberation or repression; emancipation or conditionality. It can be used to support democracy or, alternatively, to support authoritarianism; it can be used to attack neoliberalism and corporate-controlled globalisation, and it can be used to support it; it can be used to lionise concepts of ‘the local’, and it can be utilised to denigrate local systems of meaning in a neocolonial fashion.

Climate Territories: A Global Soul for the Global South?

In this article, we depict climate as an issue which deterritorialises existing geopolitical realities in a manner which suits the discourses of both elite science and corporate globalisation. In this deterritorialisation, the politics of place, of difference, are removed; the divisions between North and South – the Minority and Majority Worlds – must melt away as all peoples become citizen-consumers in need of a morally conservative (using global archetypal myths of flood and fire) but economically neo-liberal global soul with which to confront the global nemesis of climate change. This deterritorialisation is constructed from a Northern (particularly a Western European) position. It emerges from post-material and post-industrial environmental discourses, largely ignoring the discourses and frames of post-colonial environmentalism (and environmental debt) which are far more appropriate when describing the environmental and developmental realities of the Global South. In the article, we introduce the case of India, as both its civil society and governments wrestle with the new realities of the global climate change agenda. We show how Indias official framing of climate change discourse, overwhelmingly dictated and driven by the imperatives of economic growth, continues to oscillate between the ‘scientific’ underpinnings of deterritorialised-global representations of climate change and the growing trends to reterritorialise multifaceted climate space through geopolitical-geoeconomic reasonings.

Geopolitics of fear and the emergence of ‘climate refugees’: imaginative geographies of climate change and displacements in Bangladesh

This paper is based on the premise that the science of climate change is fast becoming a powerful orthodoxy amongst many intellectuals, governments, corporations and non-government organisations, particularly in the global North. In recognising this dominant category in scholarly and political discourses, our key intention in this paper is not to deny or validate the premises and conclusions of climate change scientists in any essentialist manner, but to build on and develop the insights offered by number of recent studies by political geographers exploring the how and why of the discursive production of geographical knowledge (in plural) of climate change by various actors/agencies, in support of certain domestic as well as foreign policy agendas. We argue that it is the geopolitics of fear that appears to be dictating and driving the dominant climate change discourse both in and about Bangladesh. The paper first develops a theoretical perspective through which to analyse the imaginative geographies of climate change-induced displacements and their implications for Bangladesh, and its Indian Oceanic neighbourhood. Next, we focus on various facets of the geopolitics of fear and on some of the key sites where climate change knowledge production about Bangladesh is taking place. One of the ways in which climate change is folded into a discourse of fear (that, in turn, requires a geopolitical response) is by referencing the ‘problem’ of refugees. Penultimately, then, we then move on to deconstruct the official discourses and political speeches both within Bangladesh and its immediate neighbourhood in India, in order to reveal the underlying geopolitics of fear and boundary-reinforcing cartographic anxieties about climate change-induced displacements and migrations. We conclude the article by examining the prospects for counter-imaginative geographies of hope and the role they could possibly play in approaching the issue of climate change-induced migrations from the angle of human security and human rights of the socially disadvantaged, dispossessed and displaced in the global South.

Geopolitics of climate change and Australia's 'Re-engagement' with Asia: Discourses of fear and cartographic anxieties

Drawing theoretical insights offered by the Copenhagen School, in conjunction with a critical assessment of environmental security, the intention of this paper is to examine the ways in which Australias ‘re-engagement with Asia’ is getting increasingly securitized through both speech acts and practices relating to climate change and energy security. These acts and practices are dictated and driven by the state-centric ‘national security’ discourses on the one hand, and by the geo-economic imperatives of fossil fuel-driven models of economic growth and energy security on the other hand. The key question, in our view, then becomes: What are the actual or potential linkages (and contradictions) between Australias self-image as an energy superpower, alongside its increasingly embraced normative role as a responsible international (and even Asian) citizen committed to effectively mitigating climate change?

Surviving the Gang Bang Theory of Nature: The Environment Movement during the Howard Years

This article investigates the Australian environment movement during the Howard years, 1996–2007. First, the author maps out key issues which emerged during this period of governance, and then focuses on outlining the strategic and tactical repertoire of the movement at this time. The author argues the case that the movement embraced a neoliberal ideology often expressed within the dominant discourses shared by the state and big business, as the movement sought to operate more and more on business principles. In addition, environmentalists pursued a neoconservative moral agenda, so typical of the Howard years, right across the policy-making realm. Finally, the article concludes with the argument that the Australian green movement, mistaking a neoliberal geo-economic agenda as postmodernity, reorganized itself in such a way as to deliver political wins to its traditional adversaries, fundamentally weakening its position within Australian society as an advocate of radical social change.

Research agendas for the Indian Ocean Region

One of the principal commitments of the Journal of the Indian Ocean Region (JIOR) is to facilitate a regional voice in the identification, research and analysis of policy issues of common regional concern. This implies the acceptance and encouragement of eclectic frameworks and philosophical predispositions of local, national, regional and global orientations, of multiple agendas, and of a true openness to critical reflection. However, the Journal’s central focus on issues of common regional interest and concern, by implication, has as its ultimate outcome, the development of programmes directed towards the betterment of the life chances of Indian Ocean communities and peoples. This necessitates the acquisition of policies aimed at facilitating the creation of just, peaceful and resilient localities, communities and states in the Indian Ocean Region. To ensure this outcome, the Indian Ocean Region is replete with policy questions that necessitate collective state responses. The aim of this editorial essay is to present the views of some of the members of the JIOR international editorial board on what they consider to be important research issues for the Indian Ocean Region. These issues are discussed under six broad interrelated and overlapping headings geopolitical change, state security, maritime jurisdiction and security, environmental security, literary and cultural studies and regionalism.