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In recent years there has been much discussion about the relevance of the discipline of anthropology to the various emergent discourses on the environment. Among those researching in the area, reason for concern has been confirmed by a failure to make themselves heard as experts over the growing din of the other branches of social research passionately pleading the case for the relevance of their respective disciplines. This is evidenced to some degree by the lack of anthropological literature in the field of environmentalism and comes into stark relief when compared with the extensive treatment of the area given by the political sciences. This chapter seeks to focus on reactions by anthropologists to this dearth of environmentally concerned research within the discipline over the past decade. The debate over the issues raised by this discussion has evolved principally between a small number of dedicated anthropologists, and although it is now spilling out into the wider anthropological community, it is from these scholars work that a path forward has been constructed.

Japan’s civic environmentalism combines a tradition of local protest and activism with a national environmental movement that is limited in size and policy influence. A strong legislative and administrative response to the country’s severe pollution crisis of the 1960s and 1970s helped tamp down that era’s wave of protests and keep the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) in power. While the state has generally supported local organizations engaged in environmental improvement activities, it has erected barriers that limit the scope of non-governmental organization (NGO) activities and inhibit the development of an influential national environmental movement. The 1990s reforms, inspired in part by the citizen response to the 1995 Great Hanshin Earthquake, made it easier for NGOs to attain legal status and raise funds. Yet Japan’s civic environmentalism – by most measures – still lags well behind that of peer industrialized countries. The 2011 tsunami and nuclear crisis brought another opportunity for major reforms to the nation’s civic environmental culture – but the evidence to date indicates that the much anticipated transformation is turning out to be of a lesser magnitude than many had initially expected.

The nexus between Environmentalism and NGO Accountability can be established through different and diverse contexts. This edition of the journal examined these different contexts in the 6 different articles published in the edition. Taken together, the articles examined issues such as the work NGOs do and how they account for such in Africa, the Asian region and the global economies. The authors did this using differing theoretical perspectives and concepts. These range from use of the stakeholder salience theory, downward accountability perspective, sustainability, holistic integrated framework and critical study analysis within the context of the developing, continental and global economies. Others include the impact of NGOs on vulnerable communities and the need for environmental footprint accountability and disclosure. The edition is a compendium of information on these various themes which promises to be very useful in understanding these issues.

The chapter begins the analysis by showing how the wider concept of ethical behaviour in organisations can be considered as the starting point to interpret the rise of environmental concerns in business operations as well as of greenwashing, primarily seen as a form of business misconduct. The focus on corporate environmentalism, intended as the deliberate process by which companies assimilate environmental concerns into their decision-making, provides the proper background to examine the birth of the concept of greenwashing. The discussion about ever-growing ethical issues, such as the conflict between private gain and public good, the tension between moral principles and profits, intertwines with the discourse on corporate sustainability and corporate social responsibility. Specifically, a distinction is made between mandatory and voluntary CSR disclosures, with the aim of elucidating further reasons behind greenwashing temptations. Lastly, the chapter concludes with the discussion of deceptive communication activities of companies that are described as different forms of identity-washing.

This chapter explores how one company's disclosure contributes to and reflects the broader discourse of environmentalism over time. We select some of Noranda's earliest environmental reports, 1990, 1992 and 1994, and some of its recent sustainable development reports, 2000, 2002 and 2004. Using Eder's framework (1996), we undertake a discourse analysis along three dimensions: moral responsibility, empirical objectivity and aesthetic judgement. This analysis is then linked to environmental philosophy perspectives as per Gray et al. (1996). Even though Noranda's disclosure changes significantly, the reports reflect a mixture of environmental philosophies that remains relatively constant with the social contract perspective being dominant.

This chapter, which is in themes, starts with a survey of the rise of environmentalism for the purpose of sustainability. It then evaluates the roles of nongovernmental organisations' (NGOs') self-regulation and government regulation on the need for accountability that ensures sustainability. NGOs' accountability is a way of making sure that stakeholders' social, environmental and economic sustainability are protected and rigorously evaluated. This chapter further examines what the enduring mechanisms should be if true accountability, which leads to sustainability, will be achieved to suggest a holistic accountability that involves downward and upward accountability. In doing so, this chapter utilised the identified five mechanisms that ensure the continuity of world sustainability, which is prima-facie, the objective of funders/donors, beneficiaries/stakeholders and the NGO's loop.

Spiritual ecology explores the interface of religions and spiritualities on the one hand, and environments, ecologies, and environmentalisms on the other. As an international environmental movement, spiritual ecology involves a multitude of diverse leaders, organizations, and initiatives. They share a common concern and commitment to pursuing the vital role of religion and spirituality in environmentalism to complement secular approaches to environmental problems and issues from the local to the global levels. Here, after some background, spiritual ecology as a component of the phenomena of international environmental movements is exemplified through three cases: the Green Belt Movement beginning in Kenya, the Green Patriarch of the Eastern Orthodox Church, and the Alliance of Religions and Conservation affiliate of the World Wide Fund for Nature (formerly World Wildlife Fund).

Indonesia is one of the world’s “megadiverse” countries, providing ecosystem services that accrue at the global scale. However, control over access to and use of natural resources has historically been a source of tension between the central government and local communities, with the latter usually being marginalized by the former. Since the fall of the authoritarian Suharto regime in 1998, however, a grassroots movement supports the revitalization of customary communities and their traditional systems of social organization (adat). A major part of this quest for legitimacy is the portrayal of indigenous people as environmentally benign. This chapter describes how indigenous systems have been influenced by political processes over time. We then describe how the changing political–administrative landscape has given rise to a national indigenous rights movement. We also analyze international factors that have contributed to the emergence of the indigenous movement before discussing potential challenges facing the movement in the future. This chapter seeks to get beyond the simplistic conflation of indigenous peoples and environmentalism by understanding the strategic articulation of indigeneity and environmentalism.

In this chapter, I want to take some stock of the subdiscipline of environmental sociology. I believe that a productive approach to restoring some of the coherence of environmental sociology is to conceive of mainstream environmental sociology as reflecting several paradoxes. The bulk of this chapter will be devoted to a brief explication of environmental sociology's theoretical and empirical paradoxes. I will begin with three paradoxes that have played a major role in environmental sociology since the 1970s. However, many of the theoretical and empirical paradoxes of the subfield are relatively new ones – and some have not even been thought of as paradoxes. The thrust of the present chapter consists of something of a research agenda for environmental sociology for the next decade or so.