Governing Sustainable Development: Partnerships, Protests and Power at the World Summit

This book is a theoretically-informed empirical examination of the political consequences of the World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD), held in Johannesburg in 2002. It shows how the Summit had important effects in three distinct but related fields: the discursive construction of sustainable development; the evolving political role of UN summits; and the participation of non-state actors in both South African and global politics. As such the book provides detailed and original research on the WSSD itself, as well as using a theoretical approach inspired by Michel Foucault's work on governmentality to re-think conventional analyses of the discourse of sustainable development; the politics of summitry; and the nature of resistance. It concludes that the WSSD worked to make politically sustainable a global order which is manifestly unsustainable ' whilst also providing opportunities for the status quo to be protested and resisted.

Carl Death teaches environmental politics and African politics in the Department of International Politics, Aberystwyth University. His chief area of research is the governance and contestation of sustainable development in Southern Africa, and he has spent time conducting research at the University of the Witwatersrand, the University of KwaZulu-Natal, and Dublin City University in recent years.