Studying and Protecting the Global Environment: Protecting the Trees but Sometimes Missing the Forest

Studying and Protecting the GlobalEnvironment: Protecting the Treesbut Sometimes Missing the Forest

Elizabeth R. DeSombre

Wellesley College

There are few issue areas within international relations in which thepolicy realm has followed the scholarship quite as quickly or as far as inthe area of the environment. After simple identification of the existenceand causes of existing environmental problems, both scholarship andpolicy initially focused on formal institutional approaches for addressingthese problems, and both have expanded that focus to include greaterconsideration of informal approaches, expansion of the environmentalissues considered, and concentration on the importance of nonstateactors. Critical scholarship, the one area of scholarship with little con-nection to policy, calls attention to the interests, power structures, andassumptions that underlie environmental behavior and suggests thatsmall-scale improvements over business-as-usual are misleading and evencounterproductive. But most environmental politics scholarship hasdrawn direct influence from, and contributed to, policy pertaining tothe environment. Ultimately, it is likely that both scholarship and policyhave been strengthened by this close connection, but at the same time,both have perhaps been narrowed by it as well, so that some importantissues or approaches have been understudied. While there are advanta-ges to the close relationship in this subfield between scholarship andpolicy, there may be some advantages in the future to encouragingsome distance between the two, even for those ultimately concernedabout the fate of the global environment.

There are few issue areas within international relations in which the policy realmhas followed scholarship quite as quickly or far as in the area of the environment.Although those in the field bemoan the failure of politicians to fully regulate thenegative impacts of human effects on the environment, the incredible change inhow the policy world observes and addresses environmental problems, less than ahalf-century after academia has come to focus on these issues, is impressive.

Moreover, the focus of the two has worked nearly in parallel until recently,with scholarship and international action following a similar trajectory. Aftersimple identification of the existence and causes of existing environmental prob-lems, both initially focused on formal institutional approaches, and then expand-ing to include greater consideration of informal approaches and concentrationon the importance of nonstate actors.

The one exception to the closer relationship between scholarship and policyin this area has been the critical scholarship on the environment, focusing onthe underlying economic and political dynamic of environmental degradation.This scholarship observes, for instance, that the global capitalist system, private

doi: 10.1111/j.1468-2486.2010.01004.x� 2011 International Studies Association

International Studies Review (2011) 13, 133–143

property, and wealth underlie the environmental problems that the world faces.This focus has, not surprisingly, not been taken up within the policy process.The observations are almost certainly correct, but the policy implications are soradical that existing political structures, embedded as they are in the systemsthese scholars critique, would be simply unable to address them. Moreover,critical scholars view the world’s effort to address environmental issues not asprogress but as perpetuation of the underlying dynamics that created the prob-lems in the first place.

This article evaluates, first, the trajectory and knowledge generation from theinternational relations (IR) scholarship examining global environmental issues. Itthen examines the evolution of international policy to address environmentalproblems and concludes by looking at the extent and effect of interrelationsbetween scholarship and policy. Ultimately, it is likely that both have beenstrengthened by this close connection, but at the same time narrowed by it aswell, so that some important issues or approaches have been understudied. Theremay be some advantages in the future to encouraging some distance between thetwo, even for those ultimately concerned about the fate of the global environ-ment. This distance can give scholarship the space to evaluate the source ofenvironmental problems more fully and examine the range of desirable responsesto them without only considering those that are currently politically feasible.

State of Global Environmental Scholarship

The IR examination of global environmental issues is quite recent. Although scat-tered examinations of specific environmental problems or institutions (or gen-eral overviews of the concept) were published in the 1970s and 1980s, it wasreally in the 1990s that the subfield gained a significant presence. Since then, thefield has broadened from an early focus on states and institutions to greater con-sideration of the full range of (especially nonstate) actors that influence interna-tional environmental behavior. More recent attention to norms and networkscomplements a thread of critical scholarship that has existed almost since thebeginning but that is becoming more prominent as the shortcomings of currentgovernance efforts become clear. Throughout this process, much of the focus ofscholarship has either implicitly or explicitly been on how to persuade people totake action on environmental problems and how to design international institu-tions capable of mitigating these problems. Even the critical literature, which hasbeen less policy-focused than other types of environmental IR scholarship, hasnevertheless taken its cue from what scholars have seen as policy approaches toenvironmental problems that are likely to be ineffective. It is worth examiningwhat this scholarship has produced that is of relevance to understanding how theworld does, or should, address environmental problems.

Institutional Analysis: Regime Creation and Success

The most prominent early IR approach to studying international environmentalissues was institutional. Scholars recognized the gains to be found from inter-national cooperation to address shared problems and saw international institu-tions as obvious mechanisms for addressing environmental problems. Mostneoliberal institutional analysis begins with the underlying assumption thatinternational cooperation is worth examining because it will help states addressglobal environmental problems, and that scholarship can help advocate forwell-designed institutions to address these issues.

This analysis often begins from the perspective—modeling international envi-ronmental cooperation as a prisoner’s dilemma game—that cooperation, evenwhen beneficial, is by no means assured. The ‘‘tragedy of the commons’’

134 Studying and Protecting the Global Environment

metaphor (Hardin 1968) suggests that self-interested actors, fearing their worstoutcome or pursuing their best, will instead arrive at a collective outcome thatno one prefers. These game-theoretic approaches nevertheless suggest that actorsthat cooperate could improve outcomes both individually and collectively.Insights from the general international cooperation literature suggest that itera-tion, communication, transparency, and issue linkage can help states cooperateto achieve collective ends.

Institutional analyses identified a set of conditions required for the formationof international environmental regimes: concern, capacity, and a cooperativeenvironment (Haas, Keohane, and Levy 1993). In order for cooperation to takeplace, states need sufficient concern about the issue, capacity to undertakedomestic and international efforts to address it, and a contractual environmentin which commitments will likely be honored. While these may be necessary con-ditions, they can often be created or augmented by existing institutions, or by asmaller subset of initially cooperating states. Environmental cooperation, becauseof its important reliance on information and resolution of uncertainty, the likeli-hood that it will involve repeated interactions and progressive tightening ofrules, and the extent to which successful cooperation requires involving all ormost states, relies particularly heavily on these factors.

Concern rests on a scientific understanding of the environmental problems inthe first place, and the IR contribution to an understanding of this functionidentified epistemic communities, a set of professionals who share an under-standing of cause-and-effect relationships and the scholarly process by whichsuch knowledge is evaluated and turned into policy-relevant conclusions (Haas1990), as key actors in bringing awareness to the political realm. If a sharedunderstanding of the existence, and cause, of a problem does not exist, it is diffi-cult to undertake international action to address it.

Concern is not neutral, however, and the environmental issues that make it onto the global agenda are frequently those of the states and populations withmore power. Early scholarship looked at the preferences and power of states asinitial determinants of agenda-setting on international environmental issues, aswell as determinants of the actions of states in international cooperative efforts(Sprinz and Vaahtoranta 1994). A contribution of the environmental subfieldto the broader IR literature is the observation that interest, and the power ofstates, is not consistent, but varies based on the environmental issue of concern(DeSombre 2000).

The process of negotiation often involves clear and consistent state interests(Young 1998) that are then subject to trade-offs in the search for mutually bene-ficial arrangements, or frequently to least-common-denominator agreement(Hovi and Sprinz 2006). Preferences may be malleable, however, in light of newinformation (as in the case of states that determined they were more harmed byacid rain than they imagined in the negotiations over acid rain in Europe) or areshaping of concerns of states so that they come to be interested in an issuepreviously considered unimportant (Young and Osherenko 1993).

Scholars of international environmental negotiation also point to the influ-ence that developing countries have in negotiation (Miller 1995). The issuestructure of most environmental agreements—non-excludable but rival (Barkinand Shambaugh 1999)—means that any actor that does not participate in collec-tively addressing the problem can potentially undermine any cooperative effortto address it. In practice, developing countries have been especiallywilling—because of other pressing domestic priorities—to remain outside ofinternational cooperative arrangements unless their concerns are met. Theprominence of economic assistance for developing countries and differentiatedobligations within global environmental agreements is a structural response todeveloping country bargaining influence.

135Elizabeth R. DeSombre

Once international agreements are reached, it is useful to determine the extentto which states change their behavior in ways consistent with—and, more impor-tantly, determined by—the regime in question. Scholars from an international lawperspective have begun to answer this question by looking at compliance: Are statesfollowing the rules? Usually—although not always—they are (Brown Weiss andJacobson 1998). But this observation may not be important if the reason is that therules as negotiated are sufficiently weak (as with some fishing limits), or that theymay have done anyway even without their international obligations (as in the caseof Eastern Europe, or even France, and climate change). Moreover, a focus oncompliance misses the importance of states that may not yet have met a legal obli-gation but have changed their behavior dramatically because of an internationalcooperative process (such as states that have failed to fully phase out an ozone-depleting substance whose use they have nevertheless cut dramatically).

Scholars have therefore also examined implementation of the goals of aregime and the extent to which the regime itself has influenced that behavior.Regimes might create incentives (such as funding or penalties for non-compli-ance) to change behavior, or provide information that changes a state’s view onthe issue (by demonstrating that a problem is worse than originally imagined, orby making alternatives economically viable), and help overcome collective actionproblems that have interfered with the desire of states to address global issuesindividually. They may also change global norms or attitudes, and shame thoseactors that do not advance the goals of an agreement.

Not all environmental problems are equally difficult to address, and an aware-ness of the conditions of a problem that make it more malign or benign (Young1999; Underdal 2001) can play a more important role in the effectiveness of institu-tions than institutional design does, so comparing design across different issuesmay be misleading. Asymmetries among states (Mitchell and Keilbach 2001), suchas differences between who causes and who suffers from an environmental prob-lem, can influence state behavior. In short, institutional analysis of internationalenvironmental efforts has concluded that examining the question is extremely dif-ficult.

But if existing international action is insufficient to address the problem, oreven unrelated or counterproductive to the necessary outcome, it does not mat-ter how well states implement or comply. It is much more difficult to measurethis type of effectiveness. In addition to the complex social analysis needed toevaluate the relationship between institutions and state behavior, it is necessaryto evaluate the extent that the environmental situation is improved by thisaction, which is much harder.

The initial prominence of institutional analysis, however, masked the numberand type of environmental problems that are not well served or studied by theseapproaches. Despite their success at addressing many environmental problems,international institutions have done less well to address the vast number of thosethat Conca characterizes as ‘‘physically local but globally cumulative’’ (2006).That category includes problems that are not addressed at all at the global level(such as those facing water, land, and soil) as well as those that are the subjectof either unsuccessful international negotiations (forests) or internationalregimes that do little to address the underlying problems (desertification). Schol-ars have therefore begun to study these phenomena from outside an institution-alist framework.

Other Issues, Other Actors

States are clearly not the only, or even primary, actors when it comes to thecreation and mitigation of global environmental problems, and an importantelement of scholarship has focused on the nonstate and substate actors that


influence the ways in which environmental problems are, or are not, addressed.This scholarly focus often represents some combination of belief that nonstateactors are important influences on behavior relating to creating or addressingglobal environmental problems, and that they should be.

Environmental non-governmental organizations can, of course, act as enginesof concern within states, focusing attention on environmental problems, so thatgovernments can be persuaded to act (Princen and Finger 1994). At the same time,industry actors, often responsible for the activities that cause environmentalproblems in the first place, can act as a drag on state action (Raustiala 1997) or thetwo can interact to influence how states behave internationally (DeSombre 2000).

Nonstate actors can also work around or independent of states (Betsill andCorell 2008) attempting to influence behavior or values of individuals directlyworldwide, work in locations other than their home states to empower local peo-ple to influence their participation in environmental decision making, or createinternational linkages among nonstate actors rather than working internationallythrough the mechanism of states (Wapner 1996).

Similarly, the role of industry is key to understanding and addressing environ-mental problems. Often the underlying activity responsible for environmentaldegradation is industrial, and businesses that profit from activities that causeenvironmental harm often oppose efforts that would require the change inbehavior. Nevertheless, regulation can be created in ways that can gain industrysupport, often by increasing competitiveness or limiting entry by others (Oyeand Maxwell 1994).

Networks and Norms

More recently, scholars have turned their attention to mapping out governanceprocesses on issues (particularly those, like climate change or fisheries, that arecomplicated and where meaningful political action has been slow or ineffective).Building off earlier efforts to expand the view of the relevant actors and arenasbeyond states and international institutions, network-based approaches examineall the relevant actors engaging in behavior relevant to decisions about globalenvironmental issues. For instance, some trace the networks of people involved inconceptualizing or promoting carbon markets from the beginning of the idea(Bernstein, Betsill, Hoffmann, and Patterson 2010), and others examine thetransnational cooperation between subnational governmental entities (Andonova,Betsill, and Bulkeley 2009). These scholars are able to trace ideas as they movethrough different communities, to examine their adoption (or abandonment)more broadly, through such mechanisms as information-sharing, capacity-build-ing, and creation of rules. A related focus on what might be termed ‘‘adaptivegovernance’’ examines the complex ways in which governance systems develop oradapt to changing natural circumstances (Webster 2009).

Another way in which the search for explanations for environmentally relevantbehavior is broadening is an increased focus on the role of norms, identity, anddiscourse. A rationalist explanation misses the extent to which expectations ofhow actors should behave can have a causal impact on behavior. Although notall scholars who look at norms in this issue area find their roles to be central(Okereke 2008), others argue that the contentiousness of political issues such aswhaling cannot be understood without examining the underlying issues of normsand identity (Blok 2008; Epstein 2008).

Critical Scholarship

There is also an important thread of scholarship that criticizes not only theinstitutional approach, but also the underlying extent to which most of the


mainstream solutions work with, rather than against, the industrial capitalistsystem that is, some argue, at the heart of environmental problems.

Early critiques of international environmental institutions identified the ‘‘com-promise of liberal environmentalism’’ (Bernstein 2001), pointing out the extentto which international environmental governance reflects the interests of theunderlying economic structure of a globalized market economy. This assessmentapplies to the forms of international environmental cooperation at the govern-mental level, but could apply as well to the celebration of voluntary environmentalstandards, certification, and other systems that work to minimize the environmen-tal damage of, and thereby perpetuate, some form of business-as-usual.

Similarly, Ronnie Lipschutz (2004) points out that both the epistemology andontology with which one approaches the study of the environment in IR containassumptions that impact the questions one even thinks to ask, and renderthe ability to make objective observations problematic. The assumption of self-interested individual action (as well as aggregated state action) is so central tosome of the theoretical approaches to examining environmental politics that itbecomes impossible to evaluate that assumption.

Critical scholarship on the environment thus calls attention to the interests,power structures, and assumptions that underlie environmental behavior. Forexample, the social embeddedness of consumption underlies environmentalproblems to such a degree that simply tinkering at the margin of consumerbehavior is unable to make a real difference (Princen, Maniates, and Conca2002). In a similar vein, Paterson (2007) criticizes the ‘‘automobility’’ that under-lies the culture and political economy of car ownership. Mandating greater fuelefficiency of cars misses the broader question of the sustainability of economicand geographic systems built around the automobile. Critical theorists of globalenvironmental politics suggest that small-scale improvements over business-as-usual are misleading and even counterproductive.

State of the Global Environment

The extent of international action to address global environmental problems isremarkable, especially in the context of uncertainty, long-time horizons, and dis-juncture between location of cause and effect (especially across state bound-aries). Environmental problems are, almost by definition, externalities—theunintended and unpriced consequence of conducting other activity. Althoughactors rarely intend to cause environmental problems, it also means that chang-ing behavior so as to no longer contribute to these problems is, at least initially,more costly than conducting business-as-usual. And even when environmentalproblems have been identified on the domestic level, it is more of a challenge toconceptualize them as international issues. The ability of the international com-munity to address at least some major international environmental problemsunder these difficult conditions has been noteworthy.

At the same time, industrial activity continues apace and in increasingly global-ized ways, and new harms are discovered regularly. The underlying politicaleconomy that produces environmental problems continues, even as substituteproducts and processes are found to replace those that gain attention as environ-mentally damaging. Many of the newly discovered harms involve major impactsto global biogeochemical cycles, with large and long-term consequences forthe planet. Moreover, they spring from activities considered fundamental toeconomic development. The global environmental problems that remain to beaddressed are thus likely to be even harder than those before, and even morecentrally tied in to a way of life that people, and industry, are reluctant tochange. The political difficulty in working to prevent or mitigate climate changeis emblematic of the difficulties that remain.


An important first step in the effort is the identification of the environmentalproblem. Unlike other global problems like human rights abuses or exchangerate volatility, environmental problems face basic elements of uncertainty—whether a problem even exists, and what its cause might be—that must beaddressed before tackling the question of what should be done about it. Bothsides of this question have been increasingly addressed in a close connectionbetween scholarship and policy.

The sources of, for example, pollution may not always be clear, especially asthey may be subject to threshold effects (as may resource extraction as well) orharm experienced a long distance from its cause. In addition, we are coming toidentify environmental problems that may exist, but that we had not yet imag-ined, precisely because of their increasingly complex cause-and-effect relation-ships. Global environmental problems often involve a major disjuncture betweenthe location of the harm and the location of the activity that causes it. Effectsare felt further geographically from their causes. Persistent organic pollutantsappear in fatty tissues of geographically isolated native peoples thousands ofmiles from where these chemicals are used. Acid rain falls thousands of milesfrom the coal plants that emit sulfur dioxide.

Even more important is the change in the time period at which global envi-ronmental problems are now discovered and, at least initially, addressed. Themost significant, and most global, environmental problems have extremely longtime periods between the activity that causes harm and the human experience ofthat harm. This time lag may be caused by time required for a sufficient quantityof emissions to accumulate to be able to affect global processes (as in the case ofthe carbon dioxide emissions that contribute to climate change), or the simplepersistence of the substances in question so that they can cause harm long aftertheir initial use. Ozone depletion, for example, is caused by a class of industrialchemicals the most common of which have an atmospheric lifetime of a century(and some considerably longer). The long lifetime both allowed atmosphericconcentrations to gradually increase and meant that the harm caused could per-sist well after their use ceased. These chemicals were initially considered to besafe, substituting for volatile substances (early refrigerants, for example, werelikely to explode). But it was precisely this stability that has allowed them topersist and accumulate in the stratosphere (Parson 2003).

More importantly, though, this time lag means that if we do not begin toaddress these environmental problems before their primary effects are manifest,it may be too late. But politics makes short-term certain cost for long-term uncer-tain benefit a difficult trade-off, especially the longer it takes for the potentialbenefit to appear. That the world has begin to address these environmentalproblems before the specific human harm has been widely felt is impressive, butas more and more environmental problems follow that format, it is clear that themagnitude of the problem is growing.

International environmental institutions have contributed greatly to the crea-tion and coordination of information about existing and pending internationalenvironmental problems. Most international cooperation begins with creating aprocess for continued scientific research, with scientific assessment bodies form-ing part of the institutional structure of most international agreements. Thesescientific committees study the resource in question, determining the level andcause of environmental harm. Associated requirements that states examine andreport on their own behavior and environmental conditions generate furtherinformation to use in evaluating a given problem.

International environmental cooperation is often progressively deepened asnew information is gathered about the extent, severity, or causes of a problem.Ozone depletion again serves as a useful example: an international agreementinitially provided for an eventual halving of global use of a small set of chemicals


known to deplete the ozone layer was, then progressively renegotiated over timeto require a complete phaseout of the initial chemicals and a decrease (andsometimes eventual phaseout) of additional substances, as research demon-strated the severity of the problem (Parson 2003). Similarly, the Intergovernmen-tal Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has been central to the creation andaggregation of knowledge leading to the scientific consensus that global climatechange is a serious problem, attributable to human activity (Kittikhoun andWeiss 2011).

These intergovernmental processes have made real progress in managing anumber of global environmental problems, such as ozone depletion, acid rain,and ocean pollution, but have stalled at addressing more complicated issues likeclimate change and even some that would appear to be simpler, like fishery con-servation (DeSombre 2006). And they have failed to take up, in a meaningfulway, many of the environmental problems that affect much of the world’s popu-lation, like access to safe drinking water, soil quality, and deforestation.

Even in the areas where international environmental action has seen to be suc-cessful, it has happened in ways that reinforce the power structures of the inter-national system. At the micro level (both nationally and internationally),solutions pursued rarely question the underlying relationship humans have withthe environment but instead substitute one type of technology for another type.If CFCs deplete the ozone layer, use HCFCs (which deplete it less) or HFCs(which do not deplete it at all). If HFCs turn out to contribute to global climatechange, find a different substitute that does not. One of the (many) reasons, infact, that climate change is such a difficult problem of international cooperationis that substitute technologies or chemicals are not easily available; addressingthe problem adequately will require fundamentally changing our relationshipwith fossil fuels.

At the global governance level, it should not be surprising that states addressthe governance of international environmental issues in ways that reinforce theirpower and play to their interests. What is surprising is the extent to which somestates that would not have power in traditional international relations contextsdo have some degree of negotiating leverage. Developing states have (whileadmittedly pursuing their interests in economic development along the samepath as developed states) occasionally demonstrated bargaining power in envi-ronmental negotiations that would surprise traditional scholars of IR, as environ-ment scholars (Barkin and Shambaugh 1999) have predicted and explained.

There is much to celebrate in the way the world has addressed global environ-mental issues, moving from little awareness and no action to some majorchanges in collective and individual behavior and deepening international coop-eration in the space of only decades. The locally evident but globally cumulative(and globally influenced) problems are much more resistant to global action, asare the increasingly complex global issues that demonstrate the extent to whichenvironmental problems are integrally intertwined with the political economy.

The Relationship Between Scholarship and Policy

The study of the global environment has always had a normative dimension(Wapner 2008) and thus a concern not only with understanding but also withinfluencing behavior. The fit between scholarship and policy on global environ-mental issues has been quite close (Mitchell 2009).

That relationship is particularly close among young scholars of internationalnegotiations, aided, in part by the International Institute for Sustainable Devel-opment and its Earth Negotiations Bulletin (ENB) publication. This organizationprovides excellent day-by-day coverage and analysis of most international environ-mental negotiations and even meetings of the organizations once they have been


created, and it does so by sending scholars—often doctoral students—to coverthese meetings. It is a wonderful resource for all concerned: young scholars writ-ing dissertations, or even just considering research topics, receive funding andcredentials to attend far-flung international negotiations, and scholars elsewherecan access the reports to ascertain the important developments in the negotia-tion or meeting. Scholars frequently either study negotiations they are them-selves conducting research on or later use their familiarity with the topics andpolicymakers to inspire later research projects. There are more than 200 currentor former ENB reporters, most of whom are in PhD programs or academic jobs(IISD 2010) and who publish scholarly articles on topics relating to the negotia-tions or meetings they attend. At least one former ENB reporter has made theleap to serving in his country’s delegation to an international environmentalnegotiation. The types of intergovernmental negotiations and meetings that arethe primary focus of ENB coverage (because there is an actual event to cover)therefore receive more scholarly attention than other, more diffuse, develop-ments. ENB thus reinforces the institutionalist approach to international envi-ronmental politics scholarship.

That institutionalism is also reinforced by the way in which international envi-ronmental negotiations, and other interactions, are conducted. Large, publicevents (the UN Conference on Environment and Development in Rio, or therecent Copenhagen climate change negotiations, for example) are held for gov-ernments and non-governmental actors to get together in the public view. Criti-cal scholars might argue that these events are the circuses meant to appeasethose who would otherwise demand bread, and they certainly gain scholarly, andmedia attention.

Some scholarly focus likely had roots outside the empirical situation, however.The environment rose as a focus of IR scholarship during a period of interna-tional focus on regimes and institutions more generally. Did regime scholarsstudy the environment because it provided a good set of cases for their theoreti-cal interests? Or did IR scholars of environmental issues turn to regime theorybecause it provided the most compelling explanation for what they saw? Eitherway, the co-evolution of the scholarly and policy approaches likely aided thedevelopment of both.

Regardless of the genesis of the early institutionalist focus, it had a clear policyconnection. Scholars studied existing environmental institutions to develop andevaluate hypotheses to explain the policy they witnessed, but also out of a beliefthat institutions could help improve the global environment (Haas et al. 1993).Empirical analysis on what worked well or poorly in international environmentalgovernance could influence negotiation and design of institutions in order tomake the cooperating states genuinely better off.

The same questions can be asked about the focus on nonstate actors andnorms or networks, which can be seen as preferable approaches to addressingenvironmental problems because they involve a greater and more-dispersed setof actors. It is not necessarily clear whether the normative perspectives of schol-ars influence their focus or the empirical. On the other hand, that question maynot matter if hypotheses are tested in a transparent way; relationships that arefound are there no matter the reason that one went looking for them.

The same thing is true of the approaches to addressing international environ-mental problems. A scholarly focus on efficiency has coincided (and to a certaindegree can be credited) with an increasing trend toward market mechanisms.While those efforts began on the domestic level, they are increasingly advocated,and tentatively used, at the international level. Although seen elsewhere, it is inthese market approaches that the mismatch between critical scholarship and thepolicy world is the clearest. If critical scholars are correct that the underlying eco-nomic and political system should be held responsible for creating environmental


problems, then policy approaches that make markets work more efficiently are,eventually at least, actively counterproductive.

More importantly, scholarship may also have directed attention to certain typesof environmental problems in ways that contributed to overlooking others. Exist-ing problems, most frequently those local but cumulative ones that are notframed as appropriate for intergovernmental cooperative efforts are more likelyto be ignored. In some cases, this framing can seem almost arbitrary; local-cumulative issues like biodiversity and desertification are indeed addressed(although not especially successfully). It is nevertheless the case that the com-plexity of these types of problems may be greater than those that have receivedgreater attention, and the fact that they do not have likely technical fixes is atleast as big a disincentive for the focus of both policymakers and scholars as anybroader epistemological or ontological blinders.

This final point brings up the complicated relationship between the criticaland traditional scholarship on the global environment and the connection ofeither to the policy world. It is easier, from a scholarly perspective, to focus onexamining actual policy action, to evaluate the determinants of action or ofsuccess. It is more difficult, but perhaps more important, to examine the causesof inaction on certain types of issues, and the underlying causes of the types ofenvironmental problems created by the way human activity is economicallyand politically organized. This type of scholarship will produce analysis that isanathema to standard politics and with few policy recommendations. Ratherthan being less important because of that disconnect with policy, it is moreimportant.

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Documents

Studying and Protecting the Global Environment: Protecting the Trees but Sometimes Missing the Forest