Earthly Politics: Local and Global in Environmental Governance.

• Position: Book Review

Edited by Sheila Jasanoff and Marybeth Long Martello. 5 Cambridge Center, Cambridge Massachusetts 02142: MIT Press, July 2004. (800) 405-1619. www.mitpress.mit.edu. ISBN 0-262860059-5. 356 pp. $27.00 Paperback.

Globalization today is as much a problem for international harmony as it is a necessary condition of living together on our planet. Increasing interconnectedness in ecology, economy, technology, and politics has brought nations and societies into ever closer contact, creating acute demands for cooperation. Earthly Politics argues that in the coming decades global governance will have to accommodate differences even as it obliterates distance, and will have to respect many aspects of the local while developing institutions that transcend localism.

This book analyzes a variety of environmental governance approaches that balance the local and the global in order to encourage new, more flexible frameworks of global governance. On the theoretical level, it draws on insights from the field of science and technology studies to enrich our understanding of environmental development politics. On the pragmatic level, it discusses the design of institutions and processes to...