After a history of funding environmentally costly megaprojects, the World Bank now claims that it is trying to become a leading force for sustainable development. For more than a decade, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and grassroots movements have formed transnational coalitions to reform the World Bank and the governments that it funds. The Struggle for Accountability assesses the efforts of these groups to make the World Bank more publicly accountable.The book is organized into four parts. Part I describes the NGOs and grassroots movements that are the book's central focus....

This book surveys current conceptual, theoretical, and methodological approaches to global climate change and international relations. Although it focuses on the role of states, it also examines the role of nonstate actors and international organizations whenever state-centric explanations are insufficient.The book begins with a discussion of environmental constraints on human activities, the environmental consequences of human activities, and the history of global climate change cooperation. It then moves to an analysis of the global climate regime from various conceptual and theoretical...

Researchers studying the role institutions play in causing and confronting environmental change use a variety of concepts and methods that make it difficult to compare their findings. Seeking to remedy this problem, Oran Young takes the analytic themes identified in the Institutional Dimensions of Global Environmental Change (IDGEC) Science Plan as cutting-edge research concerns and develops them into a common structure for conducting research. He illustrates his arguments with examples of environmental change ranging in scale from the depletion of local fish stocks to the disruption of...