"Global Environmental Change Programme.".

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Introduction / Ted Benton and Michael Redclift -- Biology and social theory in the environmental debate / Ted Benton -- Sociology and the environment : discordant discourse? / Michael Redclift and Graham Woodgate -- The limits to neoclassicism : towards an institutional environmental economics / Michael Jacobs -- Running out of time : global crisis and human engagement / Barbara Adam -- Gender analysis and environmentalisms / Cecile Jackson -- Social movements and environmental change / Steven Yearley -- Scientific knowledge and the global environment / Brian Wynne -- Facing global warming : the interactions between science and policy-making in the European community / Angela Liberatore -- Global sociology and global environmental change / Leslie Sklair -- Environmental sociology and global environmental change : a critical assessment / Frederick Buttel and Peter Taylor -- Sustaining developments in environmental sociology / Elizabeth Shove.

Published as part of the Global Environmental Change Programme.

Issues such as ozone depletion, global warming, acid deposition, deforestation and species-loss have until recently been primarily matters for natural scientific determination and 'expert' policy prescription. If the social sciences had any role, it was to investigate social impacts of processes and policy responses formulated elsewhere. Social Theory and the Global Environment emphasizes the ways in which cultural, economic and political values are already involved in shaping the definitions of 'environmental problems' for scientific analysis. Providing a much-needed perspective on the relationship between social theory and sustainability, the book examines the challenge which environmental problems and human concerns with the environment represent for Sociology and stresses the necessity for the voice of social science to be heard on the most pressing issue of our time: environmental degradation and its human cost. The contributors, all international social scientists with longstanding interests in environmental issues, explore the current policy agenda from a critical perspective, emphasizing the need for qualitative studies of the way societies represent the 'environment' in public discourse. In their various ways they call into question purely technical versions of environmental management, and draw upon social theory to construct a broader view of humanity's relation to 'nature'. Social Theory and the Global Environment is the first volume in the Global Environmental Change series published in association with the ESRC Global Environmental Change Programme and edited by Michael Redclift, Martin Parry, Timothy O'Riordan, Robin Grove-White and Brian Robson.