From the Planetary to the Global

Organised by

• Department of History

In 2023, the appointment of an ‘oilman’ to lead one of the most important climate change conferences of our time, COP28, raised some controversy. But it was not the first time that oilmen have taken the lead in international environmental governance.  In this seminar, Professor Glenda Sluga looks at how ‘oilmen’ were involved in the earliest examples of international environmental governance. She argues that this historical focus helps us see the extent and significance of early 1970s’ debates focused on the ‘planetary’, and the conceptual shift at the intersections of environmental and economic thought towards ‘globalisation’, the paradigm that dominated international and global thinking in the latter decades of the 20^th century.