Energizing Comparative Environmental Politics and Comparative Political Economy

Abstract

Globally, the long, slow trickle of financial capital and human resources moving into more renewable energy sectors and projects for wind, solar, and biofuel energy sources increasingly looks like a flood. Talk of global and national energy transitions is seemingly everywhere. But, of course, this is all happening in parallel—and sometimes in competition—with continuing, massive investments in additional oil and gas extraction. As their titles suggest, the three books reviewed here are centrally about comparative and global political economy. They are also “environmental politics” books, although their intersections with global and comparative environmental politics scholarship—and the roles played by actors and institutions deploying explicitly environmental frames—differ quite a lot. While comparative political economy has a longer tradition, the rapid growth in systematically comparative research around energy and environmental politics is more recent (Hancock and Allison 2021; Sowers et al., forthcoming; Steinberg and VanDeveer 2012). The three books reviewed here demonstrate the vast potential for the important, innovative, and influential research that can result by bringing these three areas of inquiry together. They illustrate and energize some positive trends in