BOOKS BY KEN CONCA
Forthcoming! Ken Conca and Erika Weinthal, eds., The Oxford
Handbook of Water Politics and Policy (Oxford University Press, 2016).
An Unfinished Foundation: The United Nations and Global
Environmental Governance (Oxford University Press, 2015).
Why is the UN not more effective on global environmental
challenges? Its charter mandates the global organization to seek 4
noble aspirations: international peace and security, rule of law
among nations, human rights for all people, and social progress
through development. On environmental issues, however, the UN
has understood its charge much more narrowly: "better law
between nations and better development within them." This
approach treats peace and human rights as unrelated to the world's
environmental problems, despite a large body of evidence to the
contrary. This path-breaking book critiques the UN's failure to use its
mandates on human rights and peace as tools in its environmental
work. Despite some important gains, the UN’s traditional approach
is failing on some of world's most pressing and contentious
environmental challenges, and has lost most of the political
momentum it once enjoyed. By not treating the environment as a human rights issue, the UN fails to
mobilize powerful tools for accountability in the face of pollution and resource degradation. And by
ignoring the conflict potential around natural resources and environmental protection efforts, the UN
misses opportunities to transform the destructive cycle of violence and vulnerability around resource
extraction. The UN's environmental efforts require not just a managerial reorganization but a
conceptual revolution—one that brings to bear the full force of the organization's mandate.
Peacebuilding, conflict sensitivity, rights-based frameworks, and accountability mechanisms can be used
to enhance the UN's environmental effectiveness and legitimacy.
“Ken Conca argues carefully and persuasively that the United Nations must do much more to
incorporate principles of human rights and conflict resolution into its environmental policies. His
diagnosis is on target, and his concrete proposals would make international environmental protection
more transparent, more responsive, and more effective.”
– John Knox, United Nations Special Rapporteur on Human Rights and the Environment
“Ken Conca’s well-deserved reputation as an active, engaged, and insightful analyst is burnished further
with his persuasive probing of the United Nations as an essential institution hobbled by a feeble and
wrong approach to environmental challenges. This book is a wake-up call for those who dismiss
international organizations as insignificant. An Unfinished Foundation makes a compelling case that a
narrow focus on development and international law deprives the world organization of the leverage that
would result from reframing the issue to include the peace- and rights-related dimensions of global
environmental governance.”
–Thomas G. Weiss, author of What’s Wrong with the United Nations and How to Fix It
“Without discounting or distorting the important work of the United Nations, Conca conducts a critical
analysis of the international body’s record on environmental issues and sets out a bold but pragmatic
agenda for reform and renewal. This book should inspire a vital debate about how the UN can live up to
the full promise of its mandate, in order to tackle the most serious challenges facing humanity.”
– Athena Ballesteros, Director of the Sustainable Finance Center at World Resources
Institute
*****
Ken Conca and Geoffrey D. Dabelko, eds., Green Planet Blues:
Critical Perspectives on Global Environmental Politics (Westview
Press, fifth edition 2015).
Revised and updated throughout, this unique anthology examines
global environmental politics from a range of perspectives and
reflects voices of the powerless and powerful. Paradigms of
sustainability, environmental security, and ecological justice illustrate
the many ways environmental challenges and their solutions are
framed in contemporary international debates about climate, water,
forests, toxics, energy, food, and biodiversity in the twenty-first
century. Organized thematically, the selections offer a truly global
scope. Seventeen new readings explore climate justice,
environmental peacebuilding, globalization, land grabs, corporate
environmentalism, and the future of global environmental politics in
the wake of the “Rio+20” global summit of 2012. This book stresses
the underlying questions of power, interests, authority, and legitimacy that shape environmental
debates, and it provides readers with a global range of perspectives on the critical challenges facing the
planet and its people.
“Conca and Dabelko have produced a volume that stimulates and challenges. The diverse views
represented in the volume challenge orthodox thinking, making for a stimulating reading and class
discussion…It is essential reading to understanding the dynamics shaping international environmental
law and institutions now and in the foreseeable future.”
—Carl Bruch, Senior Attorney and Codirector of International Programs, Environmental
Law Institute
“Green Planet Blues remains the only indispensable global environmental politics reader. It presents key
readings that capture the major differences in thinking on critical issues in global environmental politics,
including governance, justice, security, and sustainability. This is a book that has stood the test of time,
and it remains an invaluable guide to past and present debates in global environmental politics. It is
notable for its clear introduction, concise chapters, and strong representation of voices from the South,
and this makes it a book for globally minded students everywhere.”
—Jon Barnett, Associate Professor, University of Melbourne, Australia
*****
Jacob Park, Ken Conca, and Matthias Finger, eds., The Crisis of Global
Environmental Governance: Towards a New Political Economy of
Sustainability (New York: Routledge, 2008).
More than 20 years after the Brundtland Commission report, Our
Common Future, we have yet to secure the basis for a serious approach
to global environmental governance. The failed 2002 World Summit on
Sustainable Development showed the need for a new approach to
globalization and sustainability.
Taking a critical perspective, rooted in political economy, regulation
theory, and post-sovereign international relations, this book explores
questions concerning the governance of environmental sustainability
in a globalizing economy. With contributions from leading international
scholars, the book offers a comprehensive framework on globalization,
governance, and sustainability, and examines institutional mechanisms
and arrangements to achieve sustainable environmental governance.
“We urgently need global environmental governance. For this, the 1992 Earth Summit was lamentably
inadequate, and the 2002 Johannesburg World Summit was even worse. This book finally offers
perspectives on governance structures for sustainable development.”
—Ernst Ulrich von Weizsäcker, Dean, Bren School of Environmental Science and
Management, University of California Santa Barbara
“This is a book that asks hard questions and provides thoughtful answers. While the world cries out for
leadership or innovative collaboration involving multi-stakeholders to address the challenges of
globalization, environmental degradation and climate change, people are much less willing to address
governance, both domestically and internationally, because the dysfunctionalities of our politics and
economics are so entrenched. This book inconveniently opens Pandora’s Box and demands our
attention.”
—Christine Loh, CEO of think tank Civic Exchange, Hong Kong and named a Hero of the
Environment by Time magazine, 2007
*****
Governing Water: Contentious Transnational Politics and Global
Institution Building (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006).
** Harold and Margaret Sprout Award for
best book on international environmental affairs,
International Studies Association
** Chadwick Alger Prize for best book on international
organization, International Studies Association
Governing Water examines how social and economic globalization
are yielding informal but increasingly embedded sets of global rules
for the governance of water, rivers, watersheds, and freshwater
ecosystems around the world. The book contrasts
institutionalization from four sources: international river-basin
diplomacy, expert water-policy networks, transnational activist
networks, and neoliberal marketization. The book also examines
the relative influence of these forces in two key cases of water-policy reform, Brazil and South Africa.
Particular attention is given to the role of transnational political controversies, activism, and social
conflicts around water as sources of institutional development.
“Scholars, students, practitioners, and all those who care about sustainable development, human
security, and democratization should read this book.”
—Sanjeev Khagram, Lindenberg Center for International Development, University of
Washington; author of Dams and Development
“This is an outstanding contribution to the study of international environmental politics and world
politics more generally.”
—Margaret Keck, Johns Hopkins University; author of Activists Beyond Borders
"Well-written and thought-provoking....It fills major gaps in IR theory, IWRM literature, and the discipline
of environmental security...I sincerely believe that it will play a substantial role in placing the discipline of
hydropolitics firmly on the IR research agenda."
—Anthony Turton, African Waters International Research Unit, University of Pretoria
“Conca's study of water produces a compelling critique of prevailing modes of global governance and a
hopeful exploration of a nonterritorialist, nonstatist, nonfunctionalist social ecology.”
—Jan Aart Scholte, Centre for the Study of Globalisation and Regionalisation, University
of Warwick
*****
Ken Conca and Geoffrey D. Dabelko, eds., Environmental Peacemaking
(Washington: Woodrow Wilson Center Press and Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 2002).
Through a series of case studies, the editors and contributors examine
opportunities to use environmental cooperation as a foundation for
broader forms of regional international peacemaking in several world
regions, including the Baltic Sea, Caspian Sea, South Asia, Aral Sea,
southern Africa, and along the Mexico-US border.
“Ken Conca and Geoffrey Dabelko have put together an interesting and
useful volume on the potential linkages between environmental
cooperation and peace... informative and well written...should be read by
scholars and policy actors interested in the potential ways environmental
cooperations might promote peace rather than violence."
—Rodger A. Payne, University of Louisville
*****
Thomas Princen, Michael Maniates, and Ken Conca, eds., Confronting
Consumption (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2002).
This book examines linkages among consumption, consumerism, and
environmental degradation in a changing world economy. Particular
attention is paid to processes of commoditization, spatial and social
distancing between consumption and its effects, and responses to the
consumption problem by a broad array of social movements.
** Harold and Margaret Sprout Award for best book on
international environmental affairs, International Studies
Association
"This book addresses, to spectacular effect, the great silence about the vast appetite for resources in
North America.....In terms of both vision and execution, this is a landmark volume."
—Ramachandra Guha, author of Environmentalism: A Global History
"Scholars, teachers, and activists alike will be enriched by the book's analysis and inspired by new
possibilities for confronting the complexities of consumption."
—Carolyn Merchant, author of Radical Ecology: The Search for a Livable World
Earlier books:
Manufacturing Insecurity: The Rise and Fall of Brazil's Military-Industrial Complex (Boulder, CO: Lynne
Rienner Publishers, 1997).
Ronnie D. Lipschutz and Ken Conca, eds., The State and Social Power in Global Environmental Politics
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1993).
Wayne Sandholtz, Michael Borrus, John Zysman, Ken Conca, Jay Stowsky, Steven Vogel, and Steve Weber,
The Highest Stakes: The Economic Foundations of the Next Security System (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1992).