Negotiating the Environment

While key to our collective future, few of us know much about the inner workings of United Nations-based environmental policy-making. This book fills the void. Based on thorough ethnographic fieldwork, Lauren E. Eastwood offers an original account of how civil society groups struggle in the corridors to keep global power accountable. -- Anders Blok, Department of Sociology, University of Copenhagen, Denmark A remarkable book. Lauren Eastwood's ethnography of how UN climate and environmental agreements are actually put together in the everyday of arguments, pressures, demonstrations and denials that go into the wording of documents is a powerful story. It is not good news, but I learned in reading what I did not know, I did not know. Thank you, Lauren. -- Dorothy E. Smith, Professor Emerita, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto, Canada Eastwood weaves rich ethnographic data and careful analysis to provide a deep understanding of global policy-making. She takes the reader on a journey into the meeting rooms and hallways of the UN and international climate conferences, through the discursive context and the textual processes that shape global environmental governance. Policy-makers, environmental activists, and anyone else who cares about the present challenges and future of our environment should read this book. -- Nancy Naples, Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, University of Connecticut, USA. Negotiating the Environment, by Lauren E. Eastwood, illuminates the politics of the policy processes by explicating how different views and commitments are coordinated through the production of institutional texts that become agreements, with associated winners and losers in particular policy matters. As an argument, Eastwo