Introduction

After a stimulating special issue on the Global Environmental Politics of Food, edited by Jennifer Clapp and Caitlin Scott, volume 18-3 has seven research articles on offer that we see as addressing four crucial themes in our field.

The first article, "Solar Geoengineering and Democracy," explores an ongoing controversy around geoengineering via solar radiation management—deflecting some solar radiation before it reaches the earth in order to counter the effects of global warming. Numerous questions and ethical dilemmas have arisen around this idea, not least among them its compatibility with democratic principles and procedures. Adding a nuanced voice to this debate, Joshua Horton and coauthors contend that solar radiation management is not an inherently undemocratic technological approach to dealing with climate change, provocatively taking on critics who suggest it can promote authoritarianism and technocracy and "stretch democratic institutions to the breaking point." However, they conclude that, should the turn to this kind of geoengineering be necessary, democratic principles are not guaranteed to govern it; thus they call for spending more time and resources now considering how solar radiation management can and should be governed.

The next two articles take on questions that are rightly ever more prominent in our field—the complex and nuanced experiences and agency of actors in the Global South participating in global environmental politics. In these articles, focused in turn on Indian cities pursuing adaptation to climate change and a climate changere search center in South Africa, we learn about the complex nature of agency by examining constraints and opportunities these actors face in transnational relationships, as well as their evolving autonomy.

In the first of these articles, "Transnational Support for Urban Climate Adaptation: Emerging Forms of Agency and Dependency," Eric Chu presents fascinating and immersive material on three Indian cities and their links to transnational resources for climate adaptation. He finds that these cities are able to actively shape their adaptation trajectories, effectively asserting their agency in this area in multiple ways. Yet, his multilevel governance analysis uncovers that the transnational linkages and external resources intended to support these cities' adaptation actions ultimately end up constraining the agency and autonomy of these cities. This dependency can produce particular adaptation trajectories more amenable to the priorities of international climate finance and has major implications for how and in what manner these cities are ultimately able to adapt to climate change.

Then, in "Southern Agency: Navigating Local and Global Imperatives in Climate Research," Ralph Borland, Robert Morrell, and Vanessa Watson take on the question of knowledge production in the Global South and how it is valued in larger knowledge economies. They develop their analysis by examining the activities and output of a climate change research center in South Africa. As with Chu's article, the results show a nuanced relationship between the Global North and Global South. The story here is one of a mix of internal and external incentives for and constraints on the production of knowledge and its reach. This research center is responding to different domestic incentives and making choices to pursue policy-oriented and applied research, which is often discounted in measures of impact embedded in Northern bibliographic metrics. They contend that current impact metrics lead us to undervalue what is by many measures significant knowledge production in the Global South that can have diverse and major impacts on the global response to climate change.

Two articles in this volume focus on certification schemes and standards from different vantage points. In "How Do States Benefit from Nonstate Governance? Evidence from Forest Sustainability Certification," Jesse Abrams and coauthors analyze the complex and hybrid relationships emerging between private sector, civil society, and government actors for implementing certification initiatives in two distinct regions of the world. Drawing upon the cases of forestry certification in Wisconsin (US) and Entre Ríos (Argentina), the authors shed light on how the process of neo-liberalization has both opened up opportunities for such forms of hybrid governance and affected states' capacity for implementing certification programs. As much of the work on forestry certification, to date, has focused on forestry regimes in the Global North, this analysis of two...