Acknowledgments

In February and March 2020, Mat and Paul were delighted to host Stacy as Hallsworth Visiting Professor at the University of Manchester. Mat and Paul held aspirations for holding a range of engaging workshops and guest lectures with Stacy regarding the latest in environmental politics. Sadly, a combination of the worst floods in years, strikes over pensions, and an impending accelerating pandemic rendered these events impossible. Nevertheless, we – Mat, Stacy, and Paul – did have a lovely walk in the Peak District and vowed to return to our initial discussions when context allowed.

Undeterred, we rearranged the research workshop as an online event, which was held across two days (a week apart) in October 2020. The vibrant and engaging discussions on attendees’ ongoing research showed that the field of environmental politics was increasing straddling an antagonism about how to secure long-term climate action. We depicted this challenge by publishing a short Forum article in the journal Global Environmental Politics entitled “Climate Governance Antagonisms: Policy Stability and Repoliticization.” The discussions at the online workshop were pivotal to the development of this research agenda, and we are most grateful to the attendees of the workshop, especially Elizabeth Bomberg, Charlotte Burns, Neil Carter, Brian Doherty, Robert Falkner, Andrew Jordan, Brendan Moore, Kate O’Neill, Rebecca Willis, Rüdiger Wurzel, and Anthony Zito, who were unable to participate in this subsequent edited volume but whose original insights are much appreciated.

Following positive responses to the initial Forum article, we proposed exploring this research agenda through an edited volume – the one you now read. To Matt Lloyd and Maya Zakrzewska-Pim at Cambridge University Press, thank you for your constant support for our project, for your patience as we navigated various deadlines and paperwork, and for your dedication to ensuring the resultant volume could be as strong as possible.

The support of the Economic and Social Research Council is gratefully acknowledged, having funded Paul Tobin via grant ES/S014500/1 during the editing of this book. Moreover, we are most appreciative of the UK Research and Innovation funding for Long-Form Outputs, which ensured that this volume could be published Open Access on Cambridge Core.

To the twenty-three outstanding scholars who joined us in this book project – thank you. We are grateful for your excellent work, engaging discussions, comments, and constructive critiques, and for your patience and good cheer.

We are extremely grateful to Mesilla, New Mexico-based artist Jeanne Rundell for allowing us to use her painting on the cover.

Paul, Mat, and Stacy are especially appreciative of the excellent research assistant work undertaken by Brian P. Harding, a doctoral candidate at the University of Massachusetts Boston, whose diligence in formatting the final manuscript was of the highest possible standard. Of course, any errors lie at the hands of the three editors.

Paul would like to thank Mat and Stacy for their mentorship and friendship, during this book project and beyond. Their combination of scholarship and kindness is a template that Paul will strive to emulate throughout his career. Further, the Department of Politics at the University of Manchester has been the ideal crucible in which to research environmental politics. Paul is grateful to his friends and family for their support throughout the editing of this book. Finally, as ever, from Paul to Ciara – thank you.

Mat would like to thank Paul and Stacy for being such good collaborators and friends. Paul did the lion’s share of cat herding to keep us moving forward – thanks for that Paul! Mat has also benefited from regular conversations with a highly interdisciplinary group of colleagues at Manchester who work on various aspects of peat, led by the archaeologist Melanie Giles.

Stacy would like to thank Manchester University and its Department of Politics, and for support from the Hallsworth Visiting Professorship. He is also grateful for support from Uppsala University, its Department of Earth Sciences and its Climate Change Leadership (CCL) program – and to Niklas Zennström and the Zennström Visiting Professorship at CCL which he held for the 2023–24 academic year. He is also grateful to the University of Massachusetts Boston and his colleagues in the department of Conflict Resolution, Human Security and Global Governance for their tolerance of his inclinations to wander far afield. Lastly, many thanks to Paul and Mat for intellectual engagement and creativity and the good meals, long walks, park meet-ups, and occasional pub visits that make coauthoring and collaborating so much fun.