Global Political Economy of Sustainability

Dear Colleagues,

The new overarching societal objective of sustainability as articulated by the World Commission on Environment and Development and set out in the Sustainable Development Goals clearly has important ramifications for the way states, firms and civil society actors engage in global trade, investment, the exchange rate, labour, and supply chain relationships among many others.

However, analysts researching within the two broad interdisciplinary fields of Sustainability and International/Global Political Economy rarely fully and clearly articulate what these implications are. While theorists of sustainability often propose what they regard as practical technological and policy solutions to climate change, biodiversity, pollution, waste and other problems, their working assumption appears to be that the current GPE is up to the task and that all that is required is that governments muster the required ‘political will’.

GPE theorists, on the other hand, operating within competing liberal, nationalist and neo-Marxist paradigms, focus attention on everything but sustainability. Sustainability barely features in major textbooks, and if covered at all, appears as a separate chapter on the environment at the back of the book along with other ‘new and emerging’ issues.

Contributors to this Special Issue are invited to submit papers that reflect on the GPE/sustainability relationship, assess the degree to which there is, in fact, a GPE of sustainability, and explain what might be required to foster its further development.

Assoc. Prof. Fred Gale
Guest Editor

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