Brian J Gareau
Biographic Data
| ID | 3674054 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Brian J Gareau |
| GIVEN NAMES | Brian J |
| FAMILY NAME | Gareau |
| SIGNATURE | GAREAU B J |
| AFFILIATIONS | Boston College |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-0529-3389 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 26 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 126 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 26 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2004 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
Becoming a ‘good birder’: Legitimacy, inequality and the environmental practice of birding in Greater Boston
This paper develops the concept of the ‘good birder’ to analyze how identities and norms are constructed in the contemporary environmental practice of birding. Building on ‘good farmer’ scholarship, we argue that birdwatching (or ‘birding’) provides a parallel site where legitimacy hinges on ecological stewardship, ethical conduct, and social recognition. Drawing on the first author’s ethnographic participant observation, conducted both online an…
Combining world-system and world polity approaches to analyze international environmental governance: A case study of forest governance in Chile
This paper analyzes an important facet in international environmental governance: the development and implementation of Chile’s national forestry strategy. As a national program designed to reduce emissions from deforestation and forest degradation, and to enhance the role of conservation, sustainable management of forests, and forest carbon stocks (i.e., a national REDD+ program), Chile’s national forestry strategy demonstrates the norm diffusio…
Silent Spring at 60: Assessing environmentalism in the cranberry treadmill of production in Massachusetts
Neoliberal restructuring of the world polity: The weakening of the Montreal Protocol and Basel Convention in historical perspective
World polity theory argues that as nation-states become further integrated in global governance they adopt attributes associated with the institutional order, including concern for the environment. We contribute to this scholarship an exploration of how historical changes in the economic dimension of the world polity have shifted the norms and decision-making processes of global environmental treaties over time. Specifically, this paper explores …
Halon management and ozone-depleting substances control in Jordan
Hydro/Power? Politics, Discourse and Neoliberalization in Laos's Hydroelectric Development
Hydropower development is making a global resurgence due to endorsement by powerful global institutions such as the World Bank and the imperative to scale up renewable energy production to address global climate change. Employing a green governmentality lens, we analyze the debate surrounding one controversial dam in Laos, the Xayaburi. In the realm of hydropower development in the Mekong, a green governmentality approach allows for both an inves…
Ecosocialisms, Past, Present and Future: From the Metabolic Rift to a Reconstructive, Dynamic and Hybrid Ecosocialism
John Bellamy Foster and his colleagues have recently argued that the project of ecosocialism should be understood in terms of a "prefigurative" and "first stage" of red-green thinkers whose insights have largely been transcended by their own work on the metabolic rift. Rift scholars have further argued that "second-stage" ecosocialists should push back against "idealist" deviations occurring amongst historical materialists concerned with the prod…
Organic Futures: Struggling for Sustainability on the Small Farm
Walking through nearly any grocery store, contemporary American consumers are bound to encounter organic food. At any of the myriad of farmers’ markets that have sprung up in cities and small communities across the United States, shoppers can expect to see claims about the provenance and farming practices employed to grow everything from prized heirloom tomatoes to seemingly mundane heads of garlic. But behind the scenes, critical scholarship has…
Organic Futures: Struggling for Sustainability on the Small Farm
Environments, Natures and Social Theory: Towards a Critical Hybridity
Introduction to the special issue on ozone layer protection and climate change: The extraordinary experience of building the Montreal Protocol, lessons learned, and hopes for future climate change eff…
Lessons from the Montreal Protocol delay in phasing out methyl bromide
From Waste to Resources? Interrogating ‘Race to the Bottom’ in the Global Environmental Governance of the Hazardous Waste Trade
The rise of global environmental governance regimes allegedly contradicts the process of an environmental “race to the bottom” (RTB) that results from capitalist globalization. We examine new developments in this area through a qualitative case study of the Basel Convention. Here, we find that new regulations in toxic wastes governance are in fact being co-created with industry actors and aim to accelerate the flow of toxic “resources” to less-de…
Obstacles to preserving precaution and equity in global hazardous waste regulation: An analysis of contested knowledge in the Basel Convention
Good Green Jobs in a Global Economy: Making and Keeping New Industries in the United States
Theorizing Environmental Governance of the World System: Global Political Economy Theory and Some Applications to Stratospheric Ozone Politics
This paper incorporates world-systems perspectives into an analysis of global environmental politics, thus adjoining a political economic analysis of scale with studies of global environmental policy. It is the ability of some social groups and institutions to jump scale that determines how global environmental policies are shaped. The United States carbon-intensive economy is seen to face larger short-term costs from global environmental agreeme…
The limited influence of global civil society: International environmental non-governmental organisations and the Methyl Bromide Controversy in the Montreal Protocol
Governance scholars have demonstrated that the agendas, discourses, and actions of global civil society groups are affected by powerful states. In neoliberal globalisation, powerful states push for market-based schemes to resolve global environmental problems, and civil society groups often contribute to that agenda. Through the lens of governmentality, scholars have shown how civil society acts in ways that relegitimise and sustain state power/i…
A critical review of the successful CFC phase-out versus the delayed methyl bromide phase-out in the Montreal Protocol
From Public to Private Global Environmental Governance: Lessons from the Montreal Protocol's Stalled Methyl Bromide Phase-Out
The Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer, a multilateral environmental agreement, has successfully eliminated the use of most ozone-depleting chlorofluoro-carbons. As a result, a number of observers have pointed to the possibility of transferring successes-and even linking regulations-between the Montreal Protocol and Kyoto Protocol, the international but stalled climate-change agreement. We argue that there is need for ca…
Dangerous Holes in Global Environmental Governance: The Roles of Neoliberal Discourse, Science, and California Agriculture in the Montreal Protocol
This paper explores how a relatively successful global environmental treaty, the Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer, is currently undermined by US protectionism. At the “global scale” of environmental governance, powerful nation‐states like the US prolong their domination of certain economic sectors with the assistance of neoliberal discourse. Using empirical data gathered while attending Montreal Protocol meetings from …
Neoliberal Knowledge: The Decline of Technocracy and the Weakening of the Montreal Protocol
Objective. The turn to participatory, stakeholder modes of governance has been accompanied by the legitimization of a new “particularist knowledge regime” emphasizing the knowledge claims made by private interests and local voices. It has also tended to de‐legitimize the ways of knowing that had characterized central state governance, namely, state expertise based on general welfare analytics such as cost‐benefit analysis. This turn away from sta…
Class Consciousness or Natural Consciousness? Socionatural Relations and the Potential for Social Change: Suggestions from Development in Southern Honduras
This article addresses the potential of eco-Marxism to enhance understanding of people/nature,or socionatural, relations by focusing on the effect of the so-called natural world on human perceptions of nature and society. Empirical data on hurricane frequency in Honduras suggest that so-called natural phenomena can contribute significantly to human perceptions of their environment. Interview data on an inhabited protected area in Honduras reveal …
Ecological Values amid Local Interests: Natural Resource Conservation, Social Differentiation, and Human Survival in Honduras
Local peoples living in protected areas often have a different understanding about their natural space than do non-local groups that promote and declare such areas 'protected.' By designing protected areas without local involvement, or understandings of local social differentiation and power, natural resources management schemes will likely be unsuccessful. Protected area Cerro guanacaure in southern Honduras has been subject to many development …
Actor-Network Theory, Marxist Economics, and Marxist Political Ecology* The participants thank Barbara Laurence. The symposium came about because of her interest, prodding and persistence, all of whic…
Science and technology studies have generated increasing interest within Marxist circles. In this symposium, we focus on Actor-Network Theory, a topic that has, at times, sparked misguided debate d
We Have Never Been Human: Agential Nature, ANT, and Marxist Political Ecology* I am indebted to Alan Rudy for his support with this manuscript. Thanks also to Jim O'Connor, Barbara Laurence, Ben Fine,…
(2005). We Have Never Been Human: Agential Nature, ANT, and Marxist Political Ecology I am indebted to Alan Rudy for his support with this manuscript. Thanks also to Jim O'Connor, Barbara Laurence, Ben Fine, Wally Goldfrank, Ben Crow, Andy Szaz, Paul Burkett, and the Jessica Roy Reading Group in Sociology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Many of the concepts in this paper first appeared in Brian J. Gareau, "We Have Never Been 'Human':…
Ecosocialisms, Past, Present and Future: From the Metabolic Rift to a Reconstructive, Dynamic and Hybrid Ecosocialism
John Bellamy Foster and his colleagues have recently argued that the project of ecosocialism should be understood in terms of a "prefigurative" and "first stage" of red-green thinkers whose insights have largely been transcended by their own work on the metabolic rift. Rift scholars have further argued that "second-stage" ecosocialists should push back against "idealist" deviations occurring amongst historical materialists concerned with the prod…
We Have Never Been Human: Agential Nature, ANT, and Marxist Political Ecology* I am indebted to Alan Rudy for his support with this manuscript. Thanks also to Jim O'Connor, Barbara Laurence, Ben Fine,…
(2005). We Have Never Been Human: Agential Nature, ANT, and Marxist Political Ecology I am indebted to Alan Rudy for his support with this manuscript. Thanks also to Jim O'Connor, Barbara Laurence, Ben Fine, Wally Goldfrank, Ben Crow, Andy Szaz, Paul Burkett, and the Jessica Roy Reading Group in Sociology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Many of the concepts in this paper first appeared in Brian J. Gareau, "We Have Never Been 'Human':…
Hydro/Power? Politics, Discourse and Neoliberalization in Laos's Hydroelectric Development
Hydropower development is making a global resurgence due to endorsement by powerful global institutions such as the World Bank and the imperative to scale up renewable energy production to address global climate change. Employing a green governmentality lens, we analyze the debate surrounding one controversial dam in Laos, the Xayaburi. In the realm of hydropower development in the Mekong, a green governmentality approach allows for both an inves…
Dangerous Holes in Global Environmental Governance: The Roles of Neoliberal Discourse, Science, and California Agriculture in the Montreal Protocol
This paper explores how a relatively successful global environmental treaty, the Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer, is currently undermined by US protectionism. At the “global scale” of environmental governance, powerful nation‐states like the US prolong their domination of certain economic sectors with the assistance of neoliberal discourse. Using empirical data gathered while attending Montreal Protocol meetings from …
Actor-Network Theory, Marxist Economics, and Marxist Political Ecology* The participants thank Barbara Laurence. The symposium came about because of her interest, prodding and persistence, all of whic…
Science and technology studies have generated increasing interest within Marxist circles. In this symposium, we focus on Actor-Network Theory, a topic that has, at times, sparked misguided debate d
From Waste to Resources? Interrogating ‘Race to the Bottom’ in the Global Environmental Governance of the Hazardous Waste Trade
The rise of global environmental governance regimes allegedly contradicts the process of an environmental “race to the bottom” (RTB) that results from capitalist globalization. We examine new developments in this area through a qualitative case study of the Basel Convention. Here, we find that new regulations in toxic wastes governance are in fact being co-created with industry actors and aim to accelerate the flow of toxic “resources” to less-de…
Neoliberal Knowledge: The Decline of Technocracy and the Weakening of the Montreal Protocol
Objective. The turn to participatory, stakeholder modes of governance has been accompanied by the legitimization of a new “particularist knowledge regime” emphasizing the knowledge claims made by private interests and local voices. It has also tended to de‐legitimize the ways of knowing that had characterized central state governance, namely, state expertise based on general welfare analytics such as cost‐benefit analysis. This turn away from sta…
The limited influence of global civil society: International environmental non-governmental organisations and the Methyl Bromide Controversy in the Montreal Protocol
Governance scholars have demonstrated that the agendas, discourses, and actions of global civil society groups are affected by powerful states. In neoliberal globalisation, powerful states push for market-based schemes to resolve global environmental problems, and civil society groups often contribute to that agenda. Through the lens of governmentality, scholars have shown how civil society acts in ways that relegitimise and sustain state power/i…
Ecological Values amid Local Interests: Natural Resource Conservation, Social Differentiation, and Human Survival in Honduras
Local peoples living in protected areas often have a different understanding about their natural space than do non-local groups that promote and declare such areas 'protected.' By designing protected areas without local involvement, or understandings of local social differentiation and power, natural resources management schemes will likely be unsuccessful. Protected area Cerro guanacaure in southern Honduras has been subject to many development …
Neoliberal restructuring of the world polity: The weakening of the Montreal Protocol and Basel Convention in historical perspective
World polity theory argues that as nation-states become further integrated in global governance they adopt attributes associated with the institutional order, including concern for the environment. We contribute to this scholarship an exploration of how historical changes in the economic dimension of the world polity have shifted the norms and decision-making processes of global environmental treaties over time. Specifically, this paper explores …
Obstacles to preserving precaution and equity in global hazardous waste regulation: An analysis of contested knowledge in the Basel Convention
Theorizing Environmental Governance of the World System: Global Political Economy Theory and Some Applications to Stratospheric Ozone Politics
This paper incorporates world-systems perspectives into an analysis of global environmental politics, thus adjoining a political economic analysis of scale with studies of global environmental policy. It is the ability of some social groups and institutions to jump scale that determines how global environmental policies are shaped. The United States carbon-intensive economy is seen to face larger short-term costs from global environmental agreeme…
From Public to Private Global Environmental Governance: Lessons from the Montreal Protocol's Stalled Methyl Bromide Phase-Out
The Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer, a multilateral environmental agreement, has successfully eliminated the use of most ozone-depleting chlorofluoro-carbons. As a result, a number of observers have pointed to the possibility of transferring successes-and even linking regulations-between the Montreal Protocol and Kyoto Protocol, the international but stalled climate-change agreement. We argue that there is need for ca…
Class Consciousness or Natural Consciousness? Socionatural Relations and the Potential for Social Change: Suggestions from Development in Southern Honduras
This article addresses the potential of eco-Marxism to enhance understanding of people/nature,or socionatural, relations by focusing on the effect of the so-called natural world on human perceptions of nature and society. Empirical data on hurricane frequency in Honduras suggest that so-called natural phenomena can contribute significantly to human perceptions of their environment. Interview data on an inhabited protected area in Honduras reveal …
Use and exchange value in development projects in southern Honduras
Development has long acted as a way of incorporating new, often rural, areas into the global capitalist market, at the expense of local socio-ecological conditions. Impoverished peoples in the glob
Introduction to the special issue on ozone layer protection and climate change: The extraordinary experience of building the Montreal Protocol, lessons learned, and hopes for future climate change eff…
Combining world-system and world polity approaches to analyze international environmental governance: A case study of forest governance in Chile
This paper analyzes an important facet in international environmental governance: the development and implementation of Chile’s national forestry strategy. As a national program designed to reduce emissions from deforestation and forest degradation, and to enhance the role of conservation, sustainable management of forests, and forest carbon stocks (i.e., a national REDD+ program), Chile’s national forestry strategy demonstrates the norm diffusio…
Halon management and ozone-depleting substances control in Jordan
Use and exchange value in development projects in southern Honduras
Development has long acted as a way of incorporating new, often rural, areas into the global capitalist market, at the expense of local socio-ecological conditions. Impoverished peoples in the glob
Actor-Network Theory, Marxist Economics, and Marxist Political Ecology* The participants thank Barbara Laurence. The symposium came about because of her interest, prodding and persistence, all of whic…
Science and technology studies have generated increasing interest within Marxist circles. In this symposium, we focus on Actor-Network Theory, a topic that has, at times, sparked misguided debate d
We Have Never Been Human: Agential Nature, ANT, and Marxist Political Ecology* I am indebted to Alan Rudy for his support with this manuscript. Thanks also to Jim O'Connor, Barbara Laurence, Ben Fine,…
(2005). We Have Never Been Human: Agential Nature, ANT, and Marxist Political Ecology I am indebted to Alan Rudy for his support with this manuscript. Thanks also to Jim O'Connor, Barbara Laurence, Ben Fine, Wally Goldfrank, Ben Crow, Andy Szaz, Paul Burkett, and the Jessica Roy Reading Group in Sociology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Many of the concepts in this paper first appeared in Brian J. Gareau, "We Have Never Been 'Human':…
Class Consciousness or Natural Consciousness? Socionatural Relations and the Potential for Social Change: Suggestions from Development in Southern Honduras
This article addresses the potential of eco-Marxism to enhance understanding of people/nature,or socionatural, relations by focusing on the effect of the so-called natural world on human perceptions of nature and society. Empirical data on hurricane frequency in Honduras suggest that so-called natural phenomena can contribute significantly to human perceptions of their environment. Interview data on an inhabited protected area in Honduras reveal …
Ecological Values amid Local Interests: Natural Resource Conservation, Social Differentiation, and Human Survival in Honduras
Local peoples living in protected areas often have a different understanding about their natural space than do non-local groups that promote and declare such areas 'protected.' By designing protected areas without local involvement, or understandings of local social differentiation and power, natural resources management schemes will likely be unsuccessful. Protected area Cerro guanacaure in southern Honduras has been subject to many development …
Dangerous Holes in Global Environmental Governance: The Roles of Neoliberal Discourse, Science, and California Agriculture in the Montreal Protocol
This paper explores how a relatively successful global environmental treaty, the Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer, is currently undermined by US protectionism. At the “global scale” of environmental governance, powerful nation‐states like the US prolong their domination of certain economic sectors with the assistance of neoliberal discourse. Using empirical data gathered while attending Montreal Protocol meetings from …
Neoliberal Knowledge: The Decline of Technocracy and the Weakening of the Montreal Protocol
Objective. The turn to participatory, stakeholder modes of governance has been accompanied by the legitimization of a new “particularist knowledge regime” emphasizing the knowledge claims made by private interests and local voices. It has also tended to de‐legitimize the ways of knowing that had characterized central state governance, namely, state expertise based on general welfare analytics such as cost‐benefit analysis. This turn away from sta…
From Public to Private Global Environmental Governance: Lessons from the Montreal Protocol's Stalled Methyl Bromide Phase-Out
The Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer, a multilateral environmental agreement, has successfully eliminated the use of most ozone-depleting chlorofluoro-carbons. As a result, a number of observers have pointed to the possibility of transferring successes-and even linking regulations-between the Montreal Protocol and Kyoto Protocol, the international but stalled climate-change agreement. We argue that there is need for ca…
A critical review of the successful CFC phase-out versus the delayed methyl bromide phase-out in the Montreal Protocol
Theorizing Environmental Governance of the World System: Global Political Economy Theory and Some Applications to Stratospheric Ozone Politics
This paper incorporates world-systems perspectives into an analysis of global environmental politics, thus adjoining a political economic analysis of scale with studies of global environmental policy. It is the ability of some social groups and institutions to jump scale that determines how global environmental policies are shaped. The United States carbon-intensive economy is seen to face larger short-term costs from global environmental agreeme…
The limited influence of global civil society: International environmental non-governmental organisations and the Methyl Bromide Controversy in the Montreal Protocol
Governance scholars have demonstrated that the agendas, discourses, and actions of global civil society groups are affected by powerful states. In neoliberal globalisation, powerful states push for market-based schemes to resolve global environmental problems, and civil society groups often contribute to that agenda. Through the lens of governmentality, scholars have shown how civil society acts in ways that relegitimise and sustain state power/i…
Obstacles to preserving precaution and equity in global hazardous waste regulation: An analysis of contested knowledge in the Basel Convention
Good Green Jobs in a Global Economy: Making and Keeping New Industries in the United States
Introduction to the special issue on ozone layer protection and climate change: The extraordinary experience of building the Montreal Protocol, lessons learned, and hopes for future climate change eff…
Lessons from the Montreal Protocol delay in phasing out methyl bromide
From Waste to Resources? Interrogating ‘Race to the Bottom’ in the Global Environmental Governance of the Hazardous Waste Trade
The rise of global environmental governance regimes allegedly contradicts the process of an environmental “race to the bottom” (RTB) that results from capitalist globalization. We examine new developments in this area through a qualitative case study of the Basel Convention. Here, we find that new regulations in toxic wastes governance are in fact being co-created with industry actors and aim to accelerate the flow of toxic “resources” to less-de…
Organic Futures: Struggling for Sustainability on the Small Farm
Walking through nearly any grocery store, contemporary American consumers are bound to encounter organic food. At any of the myriad of farmers’ markets that have sprung up in cities and small communities across the United States, shoppers can expect to see claims about the provenance and farming practices employed to grow everything from prized heirloom tomatoes to seemingly mundane heads of garlic. But behind the scenes, critical scholarship has…
Organic Futures: Struggling for Sustainability on the Small Farm
Environments, Natures and Social Theory: Towards a Critical Hybridity
Ecosocialisms, Past, Present and Future: From the Metabolic Rift to a Reconstructive, Dynamic and Hybrid Ecosocialism
John Bellamy Foster and his colleagues have recently argued that the project of ecosocialism should be understood in terms of a "prefigurative" and "first stage" of red-green thinkers whose insights have largely been transcended by their own work on the metabolic rift. Rift scholars have further argued that "second-stage" ecosocialists should push back against "idealist" deviations occurring amongst historical materialists concerned with the prod…
Neoliberal restructuring of the world polity: The weakening of the Montreal Protocol and Basel Convention in historical perspective
World polity theory argues that as nation-states become further integrated in global governance they adopt attributes associated with the institutional order, including concern for the environment. We contribute to this scholarship an exploration of how historical changes in the economic dimension of the world polity have shifted the norms and decision-making processes of global environmental treaties over time. Specifically, this paper explores …
Halon management and ozone-depleting substances control in Jordan
Hydro/Power? Politics, Discourse and Neoliberalization in Laos's Hydroelectric Development
Hydropower development is making a global resurgence due to endorsement by powerful global institutions such as the World Bank and the imperative to scale up renewable energy production to address global climate change. Employing a green governmentality lens, we analyze the debate surrounding one controversial dam in Laos, the Xayaburi. In the realm of hydropower development in the Mekong, a green governmentality approach allows for both an inves…
Combining world-system and world polity approaches to analyze international environmental governance: A case study of forest governance in Chile
This paper analyzes an important facet in international environmental governance: the development and implementation of Chile’s national forestry strategy. As a national program designed to reduce emissions from deforestation and forest degradation, and to enhance the role of conservation, sustainable management of forests, and forest carbon stocks (i.e., a national REDD+ program), Chile’s national forestry strategy demonstrates the norm diffusio…
Silent Spring at 60: Assessing environmentalism in the cranberry treadmill of production in Massachusetts
Political science (19 works) · Economics (17 works) · Law (16 works) · Politics (14 works) · Sociology (13 works) · Law (12 works) · Ecology (9 works) · Geography (9 works) · Corporate governance (8 works) · Montreal Protocol (8 works)