Information is critical for understanding the conditions of what we care about and cumulative threats to it, so that we can design rules for intervention to protect or restore it. This is about more than just predicting cumulative impacts in the context of project-level environmental impact assessment. It requires gathering and aggregating, in an ongoing way, comprehensive, high-quality and shareable data and analysis, allocating and managing the costs of doing so, and ensuring that information is shared and can be accessed by governments, affected communities, and other stakeholders. Regulatory systems for addressing cumulative environmental problems should be information-makers rather than information-takers. Rules should actively shape the information that is produced, aggregated, analyzed, shared, and understood as legitimate to understand and respond to cumulative environmental problems. More than just a technical issue, information is about power and accountability for cumulative harm and responding to it – a critical influence on environmental democracy, environmental justice, and the rule of law. Real-world examples are provided of regulatory mechanisms that deal with information-related barriers to addressing cumulative environmental problems.

This introductory chapter reflects on the conceptual building blocks of the book: transnationalism, virile imperialism, the hybrid media–political system, celebrity politics, and participation in the political. It then describes the imperialist political figures – Wilhelm II, Bernhard von Bülow, Joseph Chamberlain, Cecil Rhodes, Leopold II, and Theodore Roosevelt – media events, and digital and analogue media and political sources that form the backbone of the book. The chapter introduces the argument that the hybrid media ensemble around 1900 created a new type of ‘publicity politician’ operating in a system of ‘transnational media politics’. In this system of media politics, the publicity politician placed media management at the centre of politics and gained hitherto-unimaginable visibility on the world stage. This mass mediation broadened political participation – and thereby politics itself. Yet this democratic participation through media simultaneously jeopardized democratic participation through institutions, as representative parliaments had to vie for media attention with these media-savvy and mediagenic publicity politicians. The concepts of the publicity politician and transnational media politics transform our understanding of politics around 1900. These fin-de-siècle publicity politicians, in turn, are essential for comprehending the relationship between media and personalized politics in subsequent times – including today.

This chapter explores the intersections and distinctions between One Health, EcoHealth, and Planetary Health: three leading interdisciplinary approaches to global health. While aligned in their holistic focus on human, animal, and environmental health, these paradigms differ in scope, priorities, and their influence on legal frameworks. Recent efforts to merge these approaches offer practical benefits but raise critical questions about their individual contributions and legal implications.

The chapter examines three key areas: (1) the similarities and differences in how these approaches advocate for legal inclusion and reform, (2) how each approach frames its initiatives in relation to the others, and (3) the impact of these paradigms on existing national and international laws.

By analysing these paradigms’ contributions, the chapter highlights how One Health can learn from EcoHealth and Planetary Health to better integrate into legal systems. This comparative study underscores opportunities for these approaches to complement each other, advancing innovative, sustainable, and equitable frameworks for addressing global health challenges.

Cas Wepener argues that there is a closer connection between liturgics and homiletics than one usually assumes. The proclamation of the Word has always been a crucial part of the Church’s liturgical services, but, maybe more significantly, it continues to co-shape the contexts in which its relevance can be shown and lived.

AI-supported crowdsourcing for knowledge sharing is a collaborative approach that leverages artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to facilitate the gathering, organizing, and sharing of information or expertise among a large group of people, known as crowd workers. Despite the growing body of research on motivations in crowdsourcing, the impact of AI-supported crowdsourcing on workers’ motives remains unclear, as does the extent to which their participation can effectively address societal challenges. A systematic review is first conducted to identify trends and gaps in AI-supported crowdsourcing. This chapter then employs a case study through a crowdsourcing platform to look for missing children to demonstrate the pivotal role of AI in crowdsourcing in managing a major societal challenge. Emerging trends and technologies shaping motivations in AI-supported crowdsourcing will be discussed. Additionally, we offer recommendations for practitioners and researchers to integrate AI into crowdsourcing projects to address societal challenges.

Chapter 2 explores the constitutive elements of global environmental governance. International environmental governance works when states fulfill the commitments they undertake under international law, such as the obligation to exchange information on transboundary environmental risks and impacts and the duty to notify and consult with other states with regard to such risks and impacts. Mechanisms of global environmental governance include also environmental impact assessments and strategic impact assessments. The chapter examines, furthermore, how the monitoring, control, and surveillance (MCS) of compliance with international environmental obligations has been modernized by the wide application of technologies. It explores whether green democracy has become a universal aspirational principle, and how the system for the protection of human rights has been used as a tool for the protection of the environment, lending support to the emergence of a right to a healthy environment. Whether nature, as a legal entity, should be accorded rights and have a say on the development plans of states is also analyzed.