On December 1, 2010, a spokesperson for Rep. John Boehner, the leader of the incoming House Republican majority, declared that the Republicans will dissolve the House Select Committee on Global Warming, established in 2007 to provide a forum for discussion of climate change issues. Boehner, like most of the Republican leadership, has long denied the urgency of climate change. In April 2009, as a guest on ABC's “This Week with George Stephanopoulos,” he notoriously compared carbon dioxide emissions to cow flatulence, asserting: “George, the idea that carbon dioxide is a carcinogen that is harmful to our environment is almost comical. Every time we exhale, we exhale carbon dioxide. Every cow in the world, you know, when they do what they do, you've got more carbon dioxide.”
Boehner is not alone, and his comment makes clear that while there is a strong scientific consensus on the facts of global warming and on the role of “greenhouse gas” emissions in bringing it about, there is also widespread doubt, much of it purveyed by conservative Republican elites, about the credibility of the scientific community on this score and, more importantly, about the importance of the issue itself.
Political science can and does play a crucial role in analyzing and explaining the rhetorical framing and political construction of such public debates. How “problems” become defined as “public issues” has been a major concern of political scientists at least since the writings of E. E. Schattschneider more than a half-century ago (for a more recent discussion of these issues, see our December 2009 symposium on Frank R. Baumgartner, Suzanne L. De Boef, and Amber E. Boydston's The Decline of the Death Penalty and the Discovery of Innocence). Indeed, this issue's important article on “The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism” is fully within the vein of such analyses. At the same time, political science has things to say not simply about how the public policy agenda is shaped, but also, in a more policy-prescriptive vein, about the ways politically-defined policy problems might best be solved. In recent years there has been a growing interest among political scientists in environmental politics, linked to an even broader concern with the complex politics of a range of “disasters” and “emergencies” that threaten human health and security across most parts of the world. According to “Weathering Climate Change,” a recent Report from Swiss Re, the world's second largest international reinsurer and risk assessor, an estimated 3.4 billion people are threatened by storms, floods, drought and other natural hazards, most of them in the developing world. Climate change could put at risk many more. The report projects that without massive investments in adaptation, climate risks could cost some countries up to 19 percent of annual GDP by 2030. Beyond the macroeconomic costs of these broadly “environmental” dangers are the costs to health, security, welfare, and political stability (the report can be accessed at http://www.swissre.com/rethinking/climate/Weathering_climate_change.html).
Such “emergencies” raise profound questions for political science, about the relationships between the “natural” and the “social”; the global diffusion of “bads” as well as “goods”; and the extent to which current forms of organizing global politics are sufficient for dealing with such transnational and global problems, which endanger both welfare and freedom, and pose challenges to both the regulatory capacity of existing regimes and the rule of law.
The pressing nature of these challenges, combined with the remarkable outpouring of interesting work on this topic, has led us to feature the theme of “environmental politics” in this issue of Perspectives on Politics.
Our lead article, Robert O. Keohane and David G. Victor's “The Regime Complex for Climate Change,” is a timely and ambitious policy-oriented piece, whose approach to multilevel governance and climate change goes beyond standard nostrums about markets, states, or global regulation. Keohane and Victor consider climate change a pressing global problem in need of attention, and argue that while the global situation renders a comprehensive climate change regime unfeasible, there currently exists a loosely organized “regime complex” that effectively governs climate change. They contend that this complex evolved in haphazard ways to address specific problems as they arose, and was not developed with an overarching logic or purposiveness; and that it serves important strategic, organizational, and functional purposes in a situation of complex interdependence of nation-states and non-state actors with varying degrees of capability and commitment to the regulation of climate change and the reduction of greenhouse gases. While the paper's primary purpose is analytic and explanatory, it also advances a pragmatic defense of this “regime complex” as a feasible response to a range of challenges, and implicitly supports the deepening of this complex rather than efforts to either surpass it with a comprehensive global climate regime or to diminish it in the name of free markets,“invisible hands” or “national sovereignty,” which represent, according to Keohane and Victor, less functional responses. As the authors write: “The emergence of a climate change regime complex rather than an integrated, comprehensive climate change regime does not necessarily provide reasons to despair. On the contrary, policy makers who seek more effective limitation on the magnitude of climate change can use regime complexes to their advantage. And the availability of a regime complex policy strategy suggests that countries most committed to doing something about global warming should rethink the strategy that has dominated most of their efforts so far: the unwavering investment in massive, integrated legal instruments and global summits such as witnessed in Copenhagen.”
Our special section of book reviews on “the politics of the environment” contains discussion of a number of books dealing with precisely these questions of global governance and regime structure. Also included are three Critical Dialogues, each of which brings together scholars of environmental politics from different places on the intellectual map to engage each others' work. Henrik Selin's Global Governance of Hazardous Chemicals: Challenges of Multilevel Management offers an account of the environmental and human health threats posed by the international movement of hazardous chemicals and waste, building a case for why this problem is an appropriate target for international cooperation and governance, and also analyzing the forms of fragmentation that result from the strategic interactions of a range of interested parties. Megan Mullin's Governing the Tap: Special District Governance and the New Local Politics of Water deals with water rather than hazardous chemicals, and with American rather than global policy challenges. Analyzing the creation of special water districts, Mullin is interested more broadly in “the consequences of specialization and fragmentation for local policymaking.” She thus develops a “conditional theory of specialized governance,” analyzing how such specialized governance can require difficult and costly cross-jurisdictional coordination, but also how it may make decision-making processes more transparent and stimulate innovative policy solutions to complex problems. The dialogue between Selin and Mullin underscores that the boundaries separating our academic subfields and specializations are no less porous than those governing the movement of water and waste in our complex world. It also makes a wonderful complement to the Keohane and Victor article. Similar complementarities emerge in the Critical Dialogue between Laura A. Henry and Brian Mayer. Henry's Red to Green: Environmental Activism in Post-Soviet Russia, is an analysis of the many environmental groups that have emerged in post-Soviet Russia, the complex strategies and ties linking NGOs, social movements, and transnational actors, and the strengths and limits of these efforts. Mayer's Blue-Green Coalitions: Fighting for Safe Workplaces and Healthy Communities is an account of the possibilities and obstacles confronting labor-environmental coalitions in the US, drawing on case studies of three local efforts. While the authors differ in terms of area focus, and marginally in terms of methodological orientations, their books bring home a common point: that if the “engineering” of a regulatory regime structure, primarily by elites, is one central problem of environmental politics, equally important are the forms of civic mobilization and coalition-building that place environmental issues on the public agenda and keep them there as topics of political and legal incorporation.
The dialogue between Thomas Princen and Jane Bennett brings together an environmental policy analyst and a political theorist who arrive at a very similar place from two very different academic starting points. Princen's Treading Softly: Paths to Ecological Order critiques a faith in limitless growth and technological advance, and endorses a fundamental reorientation of political economy around thrift, prudence, self-discipline, and greater self-sufficiency and “environmental sustainability.” Bennett advances a very similar approach, and the exchange between these two authors—who candidly admit that they are not likely to have otherwise read each others' books, and that they have both benefited from having done so—offers a wonderful example of the kinds of constructive scholarly dialogues that are possible when colleagues are willing to stretch beyond their normal comfort zones. While Princen's book is informed by and oriented towards policy analysis, Bennett's Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, is a philosophical reflection on the nature-human connection, a critique of a dualism deeply rooted in Western thought, and a thoughtful defense of a “commonality with the out-side [which] may induce vital materialists to treat nonhumans—animals, plants, earth, even artifacts and commodities—more carefully, more strategically, more ecologically.” As Princen puts it in his review, “Bennett allows us to see that, in so many ways, we are living ‘in nature’ and ‘of nature’ and those very forces that seem ‘out there’ are indeed ‘in here,’ in us.”
The dialogue between Bennett and Princen underscores the complex connections potentially linking an ethic of care and a politics of remedy, and also the precariousness of such links. Our issue's two review essays address themselves primarily to challenges facing a politics of remedy. Each analyzes a very different aspect of what might be called the political response to emergency. And yet here too there is a convergence, on nuanced rather than binary thinking about such matters.
Daniel P. Aldrich's essay, “Between Market and State: Directions in Social Science Research on Disaster,” addresses the broad topic of political response to disaster as this has been discussed in a number of recent books. Echoing the above-mentioned Swiss Re report on climate change, Aldrich points out that policy analysts the world over are increasingly concerned with the vulnerability of our constructed social and natural world to a range of potentially “high consequence” shocks, from floods, ice storms, heat waves, chemical spills, terrorist attacks, and earthquakes, to infectious disease epidemics and pandemics. Aldrich, following many theorists of “networks,” notes that the very sources of our connectedness are also sources of great risk, from electrical grids to complex and tightly-linked computer operating systems, to the concentration of populations in under-sea-level cities, the latter a source of world trade that also places millions of people at risk in the face of the coastal flooding associated with global warming and consequent rise in sea levels. Surveying recent work at the intersection of social science and disaster scholarship, Aldrich argues that the most important factors determining the success of “disaster recovery” are the internal characteristics of affected communities themselves. Communities with deeper reservoirs of social capital can more effectively mobilize, coordinate, and overcome collective action problems to better recover after catastrophe. At the same time, he argues, such social capital often acts like a “double edged sword,” empowering well-situated groups but often rendering more marginalized populations more vulnerable. Aldrich's basic point, of relevance to a wide range of “disasters” including but not limited to those linked to climate change, is that solutions to these problems—those related to both “relief” and “prevention”—need to take account of the complex social ecology and the distribution of power on the ground.
David Dyzenhaus's “Emergency, Liberalism, and the State” is a very different kind of essay, a work of legal theory addressing “states of emergency” in times of crisis. But, like Aldrich, Dyzenhaus reflects upon recent scholarship to defend the possibility of constructive yet nuanced political remedies. Dyzenhaus focuses on the ways that liberal democratic states, grounded on the rule of law, deal with “states of emergency,” crises which seem to demand swift and decisive state action, typically executive action, in tension with normal forms of law-making and due process. The paradigm case of such “states of emergency” is the prerogative claimed by executives in time of war, whether a “domestic disturbance” or civil war of the kind faced by Abraham Lincoln in 1861, or a foreign war of the kind declared (verbally, not legally) by George W. Bush in the wake of 9-11. Dyzenhaus reviews three books—Bonnie Honig's Emergency Politics: Paradox, Law, Democracy, Clement Fatovic's Outside the Law: Emergency and Executive Power, and Nomi Claire Lazar's States of Emergency in Liberal Democracies. The books under review all take their bearing, in different ways, from the writings of Carl Schmitt, the Weimar legal theorist (and pro-Nazi ideologue) who argued that the essence of sovereignty is the power to decide the exception, and that the liberal commitment to legalism must falter before the demands of real politics. Dyzenhaus discusses the ways that contemporary liberal and democratic theorists make use of this Schmittean insight about the inherent fragility of political and normative order, and argues that the liberal democratic state can meet the demands of “emergency” if liberals understand that the commitment to “liberal legalism” is less a commitment to determinate legal rules than a commitment to a public culture of legal justification and adjudication and an institutional structure in which legal advocacy and independent judicial decision-making is protected. Dyzenhaus's piece is more legalistic and normative, and also more procedurally oriented, than the more contextualist, pragmatic approach to complex governance endorsed, in more muted tones, by both Keohane and Victor and Aldrich. At the same time, all three of these pieces contribute to a common discussion about the possibility and desirability of nuanced, pragmatic political responses to “emergency.”
While the works cited above offer a variety of explanatory and normative approaches, they all have in common an idea that lies at the heart of most political science, an idea so commonplace that it is often taken for granted: the idea that politics is about crafting and constituting forms of order, and that these forms of order, at least at their best, promise to enhance the lives of those who live within them. Our featured symposium is a wide-ranging discussion of James Scott's The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia, a book that challenges this assumption. Scott's latest book is a synoptic history of Upland Southeast Asia—a 2.5 million kilometer region of hill country spanning Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, Burma and China—that centers on the ways that the peoples of this region have resisted political authority and the forms of order, legibility, law, and “civility” that states have sought to enforce. Scott's book is a self-described work of anarchist political theory, and our symposium brings together a terrific group of commentators from a range of disciplines, each of whom has worked extensively on questions of state power, and who differ on the appeal of Scott's anarchist perspective regarding the limits of the state and the virtues of resisting it.
The theme of anti-statism offers a nice segue to Vanessa Williamson, Theda Skocpol, and John Coggin's “The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism.” In recent issues of Perspectives, and especially our September 2010 issue, we have published a number of articles, essays, and symposia dealing with the causes and consequences of the weakening of political liberalism in US politics. Williamson, Skocpol, and Coggin offer a wonderful contribution to this broad discussion as well as an extremely timely overview of the Tea Party movement. As they observe, while there has been extensive media attention given to the Tea Party, “there has been little in-depth social science scholarship on the development and organizational characteristics of Tea Party activism; little probing of the nuanced beliefs of members and supporters; and little consideration of the possible political effects of this new variant of right-wing activism. By offering an empirical analysis rather than normative commentary, our article aims to help fill this void.” Their analysis employs mixed methods and draws from extensive fieldwork on the Massachusetts Tea Party. It highlights the role of conservative media elites and funders in helping to fuel the movement, but mostly centers on the heterogeneity of the movement and the complex beliefs of the “disgruntled white middle-class conservatives” who constitute its base. Completed in late November 2010, the piece notes the Tea Party's mixed successes in the 2010 midterm elections, but also notes the broader impact of the movement. As the authors conclude, “even if the Tea Party eventually subsides, it has undercut Obama's presidency, revitalized conservatism, and pulled the national Republican Party toward the far right.”
If Williamson, Skocpol, and Coggin offer an account of successful mobilization on the right, Hahrie Han, Kenneth T. Andrews, Marshall Ganz, Matthew Baggetta, and Chaeyoon Lim's “The Relationship of Leadership Quality to the Political Presence of Civic Associations” analyzes the success of the left-of-center Sierra Club in building organizational strength by cultivating leadership and building leadership skills. While focused on the Sierra Club, the piece is a contribution to a much broader scholarly and public intellectual discussion about civic association and civic resources in US politics, and it has implications for all groups, whether “progressive” or “conservative,” that seek to organize citizens, build “presence,” and impact public policy.
This issue marks the ninth anniversary of our journal. It is also an opportunity for me acknowledge that our work would not be possible without the incredible support of the people at the American Political Science Association and Cambridge University Press. Also indispensable has been the support of our terrific editorial board. Special mention is owed to three people who have consistently done terrific work helping us copyedit the journal: Linda Lindenfelser, the journal's former Managing Editor under Jim Johnson; Maurice Meilleur, an accomplished and published young political scientist who currently works at University of Illinois at Champagne-Urbana; and Melanie Loewhing, a very talented PhD student scheduled to soon defend her dissertation in Indiana University's Department of Communication and Culture.
Most of all, I must thank my terrific editorial staff, led by multi-talented and always multi-tasking Managing Editor James Moskowitz. We have an extraordinary group of Editorial Assistants, including Rebekah Tromble, who is completing her dissertation on Islamic politics, Adrian Florea, Emily Hilty, and Katie Scofield. I am also pleased to welcome Hicham Bou Nassif, who joined our staff this Fall to replace Carolyn Holmes, who moved on to other work after two years of exemplary service to the journal. And finally, I am proud to note that Margot Morgan—who along with James has worked with me on the journal from the very start—recently received her Ph.D. in political theory from Rutgers University, and along with it received a well-earned promotion–as our journal's new full-time Book Review Managing Editor. Before I became Editor in Chief of Perspectives, the position of Book Review Editor had always been a separate position. When I assumed editorial leadership, I retained editorship of the Book Review, and will continue to serve as Editor of the entire journal. At the same time, as we have grown with the journal, we have discovered that it is important to have someone responsible full-time for managing the Review office, the flow of books, and communication with the hundreds of reviewers with whom we deal every year. These responsibilities have been in Margot's hands since last September, and I am happy to report that things have never run more smoothly.
On an entirely personal note, I would like to say how happy I am to have included Peter T. Manicas in our symposium on Jim Scott's book. Peter was my undergraduate teacher at Queens College, CUNY in the mid-1970's, and his 1974 book The Death of the State was one of the most important things I have ever read. I am reasonably certain that without Peter's influence and inspiration I would not be an academic, and I am absolutely certain that were it not for the approaches to social science that I learned from him decades ago I would not now be editing this journal. Whether or not this is cause for celebration I will leave to others! But it is very rare that we have the chance publicly to both publish and acknowledge our mentors, and it is my great pleasure to take this opportunity to acknowledge Peter.
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Postscript: Threats to Freedom of Inquiry
As proofs of this issue were being readied for the printer, the New York Times (January 21) ran a news story by Brian Stelter bearing the headline “Spotlight from Glenn Beck Brings a CUNY Professor Threats.” The story reports that Frances Fox Piven—a distinguished political scientist and former Vice President of APSA—has repeatedly been vilified on the air by Glenn Beck, and that she recently has been the target of online threats that reference the hostile things said about her on the air.
Perspectives on Politics is a scholarly journal that features a broad range of political science scholarship, and that judges all submissions on scholarly and not political criteria. As a scholarly journal Perspectives does not take partisan or political positions. But our entire enterprise rests on a value that would seem essential to all academic disciplines: the premise that scholarly inquiry is a valuable intellectual activity that contributes to the vitality of a democratic society.
Frances Fox Piven is a widely respected social scientist whose books and articles have earned critical acclaim. She is also a recent contributor to this journal (she participated in a September 2009 symposium on “Interest Groups, Representation, and American Democracy”). Professor Piven is both a scholar and public intellectual, and a wide range of opinions are possible about the strengths and limits of her scholarship, her political opinions and interventions, and the points of overlap between them. At the same time, when any scholar becomes the target of a hostile media campaign, and especially when such targeting is followed by threats made by adherents of the campaign, then this should give all scholars pause. For such threats are wrong, and they endanger not simply the targeted individuals but all of us who believe in the freedom of inquiry. Perspectives on Politics aspires to be “a political science public sphere.” This mainly involves the painstaking work of editing. But in the editorial work that we do and in the writing that we proudly publish we also enact certain core scientific and scholarly values, through our openness to a range of perspectives and the premium we place on critical and collegial evaluation of all contributions based on their scholarly merit. In so doing we participate in a broad and international republic of letters. No value is more essential to this “republic” than the freedom to inquire and to publish without fear.
