Commentary: Challenges and opportunities for global environmental governance in the 21st century

The four articles in this symposium address one of the most important questions of our day: whether national and global societies can effectively and fairly address the environmental crises that face us. We need to understand how “another world” might be possible, who the key actors would be in creating it, and what the main obstacles are likely to be. New avenues for control of the negative effects of globalization are emerging, and these are important articles in moving the discussion forward on voluntary, technological, and citizen-consumer efforts to institute them. We need systematic studies of when and where citizen power is greatest and least, and what happens at the points in the middle. Social scientists’ role can be both critical and positive, providing analyses that facilitate realistic and strategic solutions that can be tried and improved.