Editors’ Introduction

We are excited and privileged to become the fourth editorial team for Global Environmental Politics with the publication of issue 18-1. We have the good fortune to follow Kate O’Neill and Stacy VanDeveer, and a challenge to live up to the high standards they and previous editors have set for the journal. Under their tutelage, the journal’s five-year impact factor is an impressive 2.526. Through the hard work of our predecessors, and the creativity and efforts of authors and reviewers, Global Environmental Politics is now the premier academic home for research on the politics of the global environment.

Thanks to Stacy and Kate, the transition to the new editorial team has also been relatively smooth. We have quickly learned that much credit for that also lies with the journal’s managing editor, Susan Altman, to whom we are especially grateful for staying on and ensuring the continued high quality of the editorial and production process. We have also learned that editing the journal is a team effort. Fortunately for us, two of the associate editors, Aarti Gupta and D. G. Webster, will be staying on, and we are pleased that Susan Park and Henrik Selin agreed to join them. We also want to thank Beth DeSombre, who will continue as book review editor.

Maintaining and Building on the GEP Research Community

Global Environmental Politics is an inclusive journal in the sense of starting with a broad conception of “global,” “environmental,” and “politics.” We see this inclusivity as crucial to the ongoing success of the journal. It allows GEP to be a focal point for scholars from multiple disciplines, and it means that the conversations in GEP speak to the broad range of theoretical and methodological approaches and perspectives necessary to push our knowledge of global environmental politics forward. While readers of this journal need no reminder of the importance of the issues it covers, the salience and urgency of improving our understanding of politics in the current global context of environmental challenges could hardly be greater. We will work to ensure that GEP continues to be the go-to source for exploring and explaining those politics to both disciplinary and wider audiences in the academic and policy worlds.

We pledge to build on the already strong foundations for this task and to implement some small changes to continue improving the journal. Our goals and priorities include the following four areas:

1. 1. Further enhance the pluralism of the journal’s offerings along multiple dimensions (issue area, geographic scope, methods, and theoretical approaches, including normative theory that addresses questions such as environmental justice) to capture the full range of scholarship on global environmental politics.

2. 2. Continue to broaden the journal’s audience. The GEP community is one of the great strengths of this journal. We think that this community can be expanded to increase the communication and cross-fertilization of new knowledge and innovative research in GEP. We will thus work to strengthen connections to multiple communities that focus on environmental politics—regional, national, and global academic organizations and scholarly networks. We also intend to engage with scholars of politics beyond political science (e.g., political sociology, political geography, political anthropology, political economy, and legal studies).

3. 3. Actively explore opportunities for greater engagement with practitioners as we collectively seek to understand and act on the multiple environmental crises facing the world and to do so justly. We will seek more work on the practice/theory interface and will encourage forum articles that focus on this nexus.

4. 4. Institute a few practical changes to tweak what is an already well-oiled machine. These include:

   • • an editorial introduction in each issue, to put articles into context and conversation;

   • • more forum articles that focus on the big picture of GEP and the practice/theory connection;

   • • occasional research notes—the first appearing in this issue—that quickly communicate and spotlight new research tools, methods, approaches, and data sources generated by our community.

   • • continue to build GEP’s social media presence so we can maintain and expand the GEP community.

While we hope these modest experiments in...