Episode 2.6: Great Power Politics and the Environment

Image
What influence do the world's most powerful nations have on global environmental politics? In this episode, Dr. Yixian Sun, Assistant Professor in International Development at the University of Bath, and Dr. Matthew Paterson, Professor of International Politics at the University of Manchester, help us investigate this question by exploring the ways in which the growth of the BRICS and corporate power have shifted who can sway climate change policy and other decisions on the global stage.


Host

Ryan M. Katz-Rosene
Assistant Professor, School of Political Studies, University of Ottawa

Guest

Yixian Sun
Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in International Development, Department of Social and Policy Sciences, University of Bath

Guest Bios

Guest

Matthew Paterson
Professor of International Politics, University of Manchester

Guest Bios

Episode Audio & Video

Listen to the podcast on:
iTunes
Spotify
Stitcher
TuneIn

Additional Pedagogical Resources

Guest Bios

Yixian Sun

Yixian Sunis a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in International Development at the University of Bath, UK. He studies transnational governance, environmental politics, and sustainable development. His research seeks to explain whether and how different types of governance initiatives can help emerging economies and developing countries achieve sustainability transitions. Yixian has been also interested in the global food system transition and conducted large-scale surveys on sustainable food consumption in China, Europe, and the US. He recently started some projects to investigate the sustainability impacts of China’s development finance and overseas investment in the Global South, with a focus on the energy and mining sectors. Yixian’s work appeared in major academic journals including Ecological Economics, Global Environmental Politics, Global Food Security, International Environmental Agreements: Politics, Law and Economics, Nature Food, and the Review of International Political Economy. Originally from China, Yixian holds a PhD and MA in International Relations/Political Science from the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva and was a postdoctoral fellow at Yale University. Besides academia, he has been also a writer for the Earth Negotiations Bulletin, and attended various meetings of multilateral environmental treaties.

Matthew Paterson

Matthew Paterson is Professor of International Politics at the University of Manchester, and Research Director of the Sustainable Consumption Institute. His research focuses on the political economy, global governance, and cultural politics of climate change. His publications include Global Warming and Global Politics (Routledge 1996), Automobile Politics: Ecology and Cultural Political Economy (CUP 2007), Climate Capitalism: global warming and the transformation of the global economy (with Peter Newell, CUP 2010), and most recently Thinking Ecologically about the Global Political Economy (with Ryan Katz-Rosene, Routledge 2018). His most recent research has explored the contestations over how shifts to a low carbon society produce novel forms of cultural practice and challenge established ones and will be published in 2021 as In Search of Climate Politics (Cambridge University Press). He is now starting to work in using Social Network Analysis to understand patterns of authority in the global climate governance complex. He was a Lead Author for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Fifth Assessment Report published in 2014.