Introduction Both political and international relations theorists have struggled with how to overcome the paradox of the as it relates to the production and correction of global environmental problems. Although there is wide agreement among those who study global environmental politics that international cooperation is a necessary step in alleviating global environmental problems, the shape of this cooperation, the social and political forms that cooperation takes, and the role of the state in cooperation are all topics of contestation (See Conca and Dabelko 2010). Informing this debate are the material realities and norms that underpin globalization, neoliberal capitalism, and state sovereignty, which all serve to naturalize certain (neo)liberal forms of social and political interaction and obscure alternative forms of local-state-global relations. Indeed, overlapping tensions manifest between increasingly transnational connections and fragmentations of authority, including the traditional nation-state system. As Ken Conca and Geoffrey D. Dabelko (2010) note, “We live in a world that is at once fragmented by the political division into sovereign states and reassembled by pervasive flows of people, goods, money, ideas, images, and technology across borders” (p. 2). In short, borders and identities are increasingly subjected to forces that both contest their rigidity and re-inscribe new forms of sovereignty and authority on both nation-states and groups that straddle these traditional borders (See Ong 2006). Despite the tensions between continued fragmentation and transnationalism, however, the nation-state remains powerful, and uniquely positioned in world politics. External and internal sovereignties, while contested, are far from obsolete. For example, while Robyn Eckersley (2005; 2007) argues that states still possess a great deal of power, and states
inadequate to the task of radically re-situating the state and the concept of statehood as a basis for combatting transnational and global environmental problems. State Power and National Community under the Global Neoliberal Order Declining to accept that calls for transnational and cosmopolitan justice and democracy are sufficient endpoints for fully understanding the moral contours of the relationships between states, societies, and world politics, Robyn Eckersley (2007) has called for a “rescuing and reframing, of national identities so that they take on a more cosmopolitan character” (p. 675). For Eckersley, this rescue mission acknowledges the importance of both the power of nation-states and of membership in a national community for enabling meaningful political action, especially at the global level. Ultimately, finding solutions to global problems requires a reframing of the nation-state, its place in global politics, and its relationship to national civil society (Eckersley 2007). Although state power has shifted because of the rapid acceleration of both globalization and transnational networks, Compagnon et al (2012) argue that fully functioning states (as opposed to limited and failed states) retain exclusive rights of control over a particular territory. Likewise, they argue that in the context of global environmental governance and the proliferation of hybridized authority structures, the state still ultimately determines the success or failure of these governance mechanisms and whether or not they can act within certain contexts (Compagnon et al 2012). Since states are often ultimately responsible for their own environmental successes, they also tend to be highly responsible for environmental degradation within their borders. Eckersley (2005), for example, argues that radical political ecologists focused on developing global structures of environmental protection tend to downplay and overlook the responsibility that states have in perpetuating environmental destruction.