The Cause of Mountains: The Politics of Promoting a Global Agenda

Gilles Rudaz
Additional contact information
Gilles Rudaz: Gilles Rudaz is a Research Fellow in the Department of Geography, University of Geneva, Switzerland and lecturer at the Swiss School of Tourism, University of Applied Sciences Western Switzerland. His research focuses on mountain politics and policies. He has recently published, with Bernard Debarbieux, Les faiseurs de montagne: Imaginaires politiques et territorialités, XVIII-super-e–XXI-super-e siècle, on the conception of mountains as political object (2010); and edited “Mountains of Europe: Stakeholders, Legitimization, Delineation,” a thematic issue of the Journal of Alpine Research (2004).

Global Environmental Politics, 2011, vol. 11, issue 4, 43-65

Abstract: Due to the localized nature of mountains, their great diversity, and the fact that their specificity is rarely taken into account by national policies, their inscription on the world's environmental agenda can be considered a tour de force. Through the case study of mountains, this paper focuses on the process of framing an environmental object as “global.” While “global” is usually considered a descriptor, I here look at it as a contingent, constructed, and contested notion. The construction of an object and its framing as environmental and as global are political acts. The goal of this paper is not to demonstrate whether the elaboration of a global mountain agenda is “right” or “wrong” but to demonstrate that it is contingent, i.e. relevant for certain actors in certain contexts. The identification of mountains as a global issue has proven to have implications for certain actors harboring specific agendas and to be a powerful motor for collective action in a globalized world. © 2011 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Date: 2011
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1162/GLEP_a_00083 link to full text (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:tpr:glenvp:v:11:y:2011:i:4:p:43-65

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://mitpressjour ... rnal/?issn=1526-3800

Access Statistics for this article

Global Environmental Politics is currently edited by Steven Bernstein, Matthew Hoffmann and Erika Weinthal

More articles in Global Environmental Politics from MIT Press
Bibliographic data for series maintained by The MIT Press ().