Environmental Politics

The study of the politics of the environment is now an important sub-area of the discipline in Australia. It was not always so. As this chapter shows, the discipline was slow to engage with the emergence of the environment as a political issue - markedly slower, for example than in the United States, where the 1970s saw numerous works by political scientists follow the rise in salience of environmental issues. In Australia, as we will see, the emergence of research output was slow and sporadic, coming of age only after environmental issues themselves came of age in the federal election of 1990.

The contribution to the discipline made by Australian political scientists has been variable. The most significant contribution has undoubtedly been in political theory, followed by the international politics of the environment. Much of the rest of the literature has suffered from the challenges of the limits of the Australian publishing market, and the desire to study phenomena of interest to Australians (and to contribute to an evidence base for improved policy-making) that are not of such interest internationally so as to attract international publishers. But there has been little research on Australia generally that has made much of an impact on the diSCipline internationally, with the possible exception of studies focusing on federalism. This, together with the work on political theory and international polities, are where the greatest contributions by Australians lie.