The Global South and the Environment: Essays in Memory of Marian A.L. Miller

I always looked up to Marian Miller as a role model in my own academic work. Marian was just that much further along in her career and was working on similar issues as myself. She was one of the first scholars to effectively merge studies in international development, international relations, political economy, and the environment. She was blazing an interdisciplinary path that a number of us were to follow. Marian's background was in international relations and international political economy. She earned her Ph.D. from the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, and she was a tenured Associate Professor of political science at the University of Akron, in Ohio, teaching courses on international development and global environmental politics.

I was fortunate to get to know Marian in the mid-1990s through discussions we had following panels on global environmental issues and the Global South at the International Studies Association annual meetings. As a relatively new faculty member myself in 1997, I invited Marian to come to speak at my university. Her book, The Third World in Global Environmental Politics,¹ had just won the Sprout Award for the best book in international environmental affairs. I was very proud to have had Marian address students and faculty at my university, and she drew a huge crowd. I continued my friendship with Marian, sharing research ideas and sources on topics we were both researching. I also had the privilege of working with Marian on the Global Development Section of the ISA, which she chaired in 1998–99. Marian was also part of the founding editorial team of Global Environmental Politics, along with Peter Dauvergne as Editor, and Marian, myself, and Paul Wapner as Associate Editors. Marian was very dedicated to her work in these endeavors.

When Marian passed away after a brave fight against cancer in the fall of 2003, I felt a sense of profound loss—she was both a friend and an inspirational colleague. I wanted to do something that would celebrate Marian's work. This special issue is thus devoted to the area of scholarship that Marian played such an important role in defining—The Global South and the Environment. The articles in this special issue were all written as a tribute to Marian, and they draw on research themes that were important to her. Marian's own work was varied in terms of issue areas she covered—environmental regimes (especially with respect to hazardous waste, biodiversity, and ozone depletion), Caribbean environmental issues, sovereignty and the environment, gender issues, natural resource management, and transnational corporations. Though Marian covered a wide range of topics in her research, her concerns about global inequality and injustice, and the place of the Third World in the global political economy, ran through all of her research. Her emphasis was always on the marginalized, and she sought to uncover the structures and forces that lead to such marginalization as a means by which to suggest ways to reduce injustice and discrimination.

The articles we wrote for this special issue aim to speak to these themes and to Marian's approach. This issue consists of one research note, three current debate articles, and three research articles. Peter Dauvergne's research note speaks to the dearth of research on the link between global environmental change and the incidence of cancer, as well as the ways in which the global political economy works against the promotion of research on cancer prevention via environmental stewardship. Ambuj Sagar and Stacy VanDeveer's current debate article argues that capacity building efforts in the international environmental realm should not just be about improving the South's ability to implement what are typically Northern driven environmental agreements, but rather that they should focus on improving capacity—of both the South and the North—to define environmental problems and to identify the best ways to tackle them. My own current debate article discusses the evolution of formal multilateral environmental governance mechanisms designed to influence the environmental behavior of TNCs, and argues that a formal treaty on corporate accountability could go a long way...