This collection of specially commissioned essays aims both to broaden understanding of environmental issues, and to explore their implications for politics. The book discusses the concepts of the 'risk society' and 'ecological modernisation', examines the relationship between science, public policy and democratic renewal, and analyses green politics in Germany, the Netherlands and the UK.

Michael Jacobs is Visiting Professor in the School of Public Policy at University College London. An environmental economist and political theorist, his work has focused on the political economy of environmental change. His books include The Green Economy: Environment, Sustainable Development and the Politics of the Future, Greening the Millennium? The New Politics of the Environment - ed, Blackwell, 1997 -, The Politics of the Real World and Paying for Progress: A New Politics of Tax for Public Spending - Fabian Society 2000 -. From 2004-10 he was a Special Adviser to the UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown, responsible for domestic and international policy on environment, energy and climate change, and before that a member of the Council of Economic Advisers at the UK Treasury. He was formerly General Secretary of the Fabian Society, Co-Editor of The Political Quarterly and a research fellow at Lancaster University and the London School of Economics. He has also been a Visiting Professor at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the LSE, a Visiting Fellow at the Institute for Public Policy Research and Senior Adviser to the Global Commission on the Economy and Climate, which he helped to found.