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

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.