David A. Sonnenfeld and Peter Leigh Taylor, eds. published the special issue on “Society and Natural Resources in an Illiberal World,” in Society & Natural Resources 31(5), 2018.

Environmental social science faces daunting theoretical and empirical challenges today, as the modern political ideas of liberalism that shaped its historical development encounter the growing influence of illiberal ideas and politics. “Liberalism”, in this sense, refers to the philosophical stance in which the rights and perspectives of individuals and minorities of various types and persuasions are protected or at least tolerated, and given due personal, political, and institutional space by states and civil society majorities (Zakaria 1997: 26).

Along with mainstream environmentalism and environmental policy, contemporary social theory of the environment emerged during the 20th century in close engagement with, and frequently in critique of, classical Western liberal values that include the rights of individuals, citizenship, pluralism, representative democracy, etc. Many nation states around the world are predicated at least nominally on the rule of law and the establishment of responsive/representative institutions, including those related to natural resources and the environment. Global institutions, including environmental institutions, are founded to a large degree on liberalism as well, including the United Nations, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Rio Declaration, the recently endorsed global Sustainable Development Goals, and others.

Western liberal democracies hardly are universal today, however. Illiberalism seems increasingly prevalent, including within historically liberal states. Illiberalism appears in institutional arrangements ranging from centralized states to illiberal democracies, theocracies, monarchies, and nonstate diverse “rights” movements promoting millenarian societal transformation. In much of the world, liberal states and institutions coexist with, and are at times overshadowed by, illiberal counterparts, rivals, and critics. Yet at the same time, strained by a seemingly endless series of actual and perceived social and environmental crises, all states face increased calls for environmental intervention, often even over the rights of individuals, communities, and dependent territories.

This special issue seeks to advance social scientific understanding of society–environment relations in illiberal political and institutional contexts through evidence-informed analysis of a series of cases around the world. Its central question is: What are the implications of today’s wide variety of sociopolitical forms and ideologies for a social science of the environment that seeks to study the full range of nature–society interactions and to support the attainment of a more sustainable future across the globe? Before delving into the six research-based articles at the core of this collection, it may be useful to define key terms and articulate the outlines of an overarching analytical framework.

Read their full guest editorial as well as the publication here at Society & Natural Resources, Volume 31, 2018 – Issue 5: Society and Natural Resources in an Illiberal World.