Timothy Doyle teaches and researches International Political Economy and Global Environmental Politics in the Department of Politics and International Studies at the University of Adelaide, Australia; and he is a Distinguished Research Fellow at the Australia-Asia-Pacific Institute (AAPI), Curtin University, Western Australia. Doug McEachern was formerly Deputy Vice Chancellor Research and Innovation at the University of Western Australia. Professor McEachern specializes in studies of the role of business in politics through consideration of public policy debate and disputes. His most recent work has been on environmental politics and policy. Sherilyn MacGregor is Senior Lecturer in Environmental Politics and the Director of the Environmental Studies programme at Keele University, UK. She has taught environmental politics at universities in Canada, the USA, and the UK. She is joint editor of Environmental Politics. Her research focuses on the intersections of feminism and environmentalism and on theories of ecological citizenship.
With this fourth edition, Doyle (international political economy and global environmental politics, Univ. of Adelaide, Australia), McEachern (formerly, Univ. of Western Australia), and MacGregor (environmental politics, Keele Univ., UK) have significantly updated their textbook. This work provides a global perspective on the manner in which politics shapes environmental policies. This edition is an audacious effort at examining environmental politics through a myriad of theoretical lenses—from neoliberalism to ecocentrism. It includes chapters on environmental movements, nongovernmental organizations, parties, capitalism and corporations, and environmental governance and citizenship. End-of-chapter key words and discussion questions are useful. Most topics are treated with nuance and fairness, although the rationales for emphases on some topics and the selection of examples are often unclear. The authors contextualize American environmental issues as part of the “minority world” in which the minority of the human population lives. Readers who want a summary of US environmental legislation will be disappointed. This is a thought-provoking textbook, and its goal is to help readers make sense of environmental issues by inserting them in philosophical and theoretical contexts. Though free of jargon, the work is still a challenging read. --R. E. O'Connor, National Science Foundation, January 2017 issue of CHOICE