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The Organization of Global Environmental Governance

Gunilla Reischl, 25 February, 2014

Intro• What has the global community done to tackle

environmental problems?

• The history of global environmental politics/governance is tied to contests of ideas and it is affected by wider developments in global political economy

• It is also a history of international cooperation, diplomatic efforts, institutional creation, treaty making and negotiations

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Outline of the lecture

• Foundations of global environmental governance

• From interstate regimes to global governance• Practice and functions of GEG/GEP

The emergence of the environment as a political issue

• 1960s: Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, 1962, Jacques-Yves Cousteau’s The Living Sea, 1963

• Paul Ehrlich’s Population Bomb, 1968

• Single events such as the Torrey Canyon oil spill

• Photographs of the Earth taken by astronauts from the space

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The emergence of the environment as a political issue

• 1970s: Environmental issues on the UN agenda, Stockholm meeting

• 1980s: World Commission on Environment and Development – The Brundtland report on sustainable development (1987)

• 1990s: Creation of multilateral environmental treaties (MEAs), Rio meeting, The Kyoto Protocol is adapted 1997

• 2000s: Johannesburg meeting, The Kyoto Protocol is ratified 2005, discussions on a post-Kyoto agreement, Copenhagen failure

Broadened scope and public awareness of environmental issues to include both protection of the natural environment and curbing destructive effects of industrialization: also reflect different perceptions of the environment

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Global conferences (summits)Stockholm 1972

UN Conference on the Human

Environment

•Tension between environment and development –developing countries viewed it as a problem for the developed countries

•Principle of national sovereignty over natural resources

•Creation of UNEP

•’Awareness-raising’

Rio de Janeiro 1992UN Conference on Environment and

Development

• End of Cold war –’window of opportunity’

• Environment and development. Developing countries saw opportunities for ODA

• Political success?

• Agenda 21 – ’To do list’

Johannesburg 2002World Summit on

Sustainable Development

•Follow up of Rio

•Marked by 11 September – war on terrorism

•Focus on social development -’poverty eradication’

•Implementation

Rio de Janeiro 2012UN Conference on

Sustainable Development

Green economy

Institutional framework

The emergence of the environment as a political issue

• From independent problems to connected, global problems

• From bilateral cooperation to global cooperation, increased number and types of actors and agreements

• From apolitical issue to an acknowledged issue on the international political agenda

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International environmental politics (IEP)

• The field of IEP has formed an important subject for studies over the last twenty years

• It has been approached from an institutional angle, i.e. studies have focused on international treaties, organizations and other arrangements

• Political science and IR has focused on the field of regime theory and more recently on the field of global governance

International environmental politics

• The relations between political actors and the structure within which they operate

• Within the field, institutions are seen as “the main social force both as causes of change and as prescription for solving problems” (Young 2002: 3)

• Some would argue that the field is not concerned principally with the improvement of the problem studied expect as a political, an institutional, or a policy issue

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Interstate cooperation and regimes• When the international dimension of environmental problems was

first being considered seriously, there was a dominant academic concern: international cooperation as a mean to their solution

The problem was:

“Can a fragmented and often highly conflictual political system made up of over 170 sovereign states and numerous other actors achieve the high levels of cooperation and policy coordination needed to manage environmental problems on a global scale?”

(Hurren and Kingsbury 1992: 1)

Interstate cooperation and regimes

• The necessity for international cooperation and the primacy of states in this enterprise was usually taken for granted

• The view rested on the assumption of international anarchy and the need to provide some functional equivalent to a world government if these transboundary problems were to be addressed

• A liberal institutionalist approach came to dominate the field

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Source of confusion

• International institution• International regime• International organisation

International institutions• Though a range of usages exists, most scholars have

come to regard international institutions as sets of rules meant to govern international behavior.

• For example: ‘sets of rules that stipulate the ways in which states should cooperate and compete with each other’ (Mearsheimer1994/95) (ironically a neorealist who doesn’t believe that institutions are effective)

(Rules are often conceived as statements that forbid, require, or permit particular kinds of actions (Ostrom1990:139). )

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International Regimes

• Response to the demand of governance in a specific issue area

• Institutional frameworks with formal rules and informal practices

• Shape and constrain actors behaviour

Interstate cooperation and regimes

• Intellectually based on the works that had emerged in the field of international political economy since the 1970s

• The regime concept was deployed to understand how cooperation under anarchy could occur in international economic relations

• The concept of a regime often attributed to Ruggie (1975) and developed and defined by Krasner (1983) as means of describing and analyzing international cooperation

• The regime centered liberal institutionalist approach provided means to comprehend the rapid development of MEAs during the 1980s and 1990s

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International Regimes: definition

• International regimes can be defined as sets of implicit or explicit principles, norms, rules, and decision-making procedures around which actors’ expectations converge in a given area of international relations. (Krasner, 1983, p2)

Regime theory

The main focus on regime analysis has been fours sets of questions:

• how regimes are maintained; • how regimes are formed; • consequences of particular regimes; • the effectiveness of regimes

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Non-regimes• One debate has concerned if an issue area is a regime or not. This

discussion has been particular prominent in the context of environmental issues.

• The concept of ‘non-regimes’ has emerged:

• “A public policy arena characterized by the absence of an interstate policy agreement where states have either tried or failed to create one, or when governments have not even initiated negotiations”(Dimitrov, 2006: 9).

• Example: deforestation

International organisations

• Most international organizations are embedded in larger international regimes.

• International bureaucratic structures connected to norm and rule systems

• Characterized by: permanent headquarter, secretariat, members, budget

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Functions of international organizations

• Forum: providing a place for exchange of views and decision-making

• Informational: gathering, analyzing and disseminating data

• Normative: defining standards of behaviour• Rule creation: drafting legally binding treaties• Rule supervision: monitoring compliance with rules,

taking enforcement measures, adjudicating disputes• Operational: allocating resources, providing technical

assistance in relief, deploying forces

International institutions

• International institution: Though a range of usages exists, most scholars have come to regard international institutions as sets of rules (explicit and/or implicit)meant to govern international behavior.

• International regime: describes principles, norms, rules and decision-making procedures within an issue area.

• International organization: international bureaucratic structures connected to norm and rule systems: characterized by: permanent headquarter, secretariat, members, budget.

Within international politics the term international institution increasingly is used as an umbrella term for all forms of institutionalized cooperation at international level

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Rise of Global Governance

2 major trends over past 50 years:

1. Gradual loss of national sovereignty

2. Rise of complex policy problems

Increased focus on global governance

Global governanceGovernance has become one of the key themes in international environmental politics

Capture the overarching set of arrangements, which goes beyond individual issue areas or thematic concerns

Connects IEP to more general patterns of global politics by showing how broader global political forces and trends shape IEP

However, there is still great variation in how the term global environmentalgovernance is used.

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Global environmental governance• The most conventional account of GEG arises out of (neoliberal)

institutionalism. Here, “global environmental governance” refers to the sum of the overlapping networks of inter-state regimes on environmental issues.

• There is little substantive change in the origins, agents, and processes of environmental governance; these remain those associated with interstate governance as in regime theory. (See e.g. Young, Haas, Vogler)

• A more critical view embed GEG in broader patterns of governance developed to promote globalization of the economy

reflect the diversity different, and sometimes competing, conceptualizations of GEG.

Global governance as characterized:

• By the increasing participation of actors other than states ('multiactor governance').

• By new mechanisms of organisation such as public-private and private-private partnerships, alongside the traditional system of legal treaties negotiated by states.

• By different layers and clusters of rule-making and rule-implementation, both vertically between supranational, international, national and subnational layers of authority ('multilevel governance') and horizontally between different parallel rule-making systems.

(Globgov project)

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Pieces of global governanceCooperative problem-solving arrangements and activities that states and other actors have put into place to deal with various issues and problems. E.g.

• International organizations• International rules and laws (multilateral treaties)• International norms or soft law (R2P, framework agreements)• International regimes • Ad hoc groups, global conferences (Global environmental conferences)• Private and hybrid public-private governance (Mastercard and Visa have

created the Secure Electronic Transaction protocol to enable secure transactions via the Internet)

Pieces of global environmental governance: Environmental organizations

Some were created specifically to address environmental problems, e.g.:

• United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP)• Global Environmental Facility (GEF)• Commission of Sustainable Development (CSD)

Some were originally tasked with development and trade but have been pressured to respond to environmental issues, e.g.:

• World Bank (WB)• World Trade Organization (WTO)

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Pieces of GEG: Framework convention

• Initiative: World Meteorological Organization and United Nations Environmental Programme conference in 1985, growing consensus of climate change as a reality

• Framework convention and protocol

• Conference of the Parties (CoP), last year in Warsaw, this year CoP 20 in December in Lima

• Secretariat in Bonn

• Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

The practice of GEP/GEG

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Global Environmental Politics

Main determinants of policy:

– Scientific knowledge– Finance– Veto power and coalitions– Trade– Economic power

Global environmental politics

• Actors and coalitions • Decision-making: negotiations

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Actors in global governance

• States• IGOs• NGOs• Experts• Transnational corporations• Transnational networks

States and GEG

• Key actors in GEG: creating many pieces and carrying out many of the activities

• Have sovereignty has historically given them authority over their territory and people, but also over powers delegated to IGOs. Set the mandates, create international law and norms and determine the effectiveness through their compliance or failure to comply.

• More than 190 states, vary dramatically –different importance in GEG

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Transnational actors

• Transnational actor participation in international institutions can open up an open and informed public debate, underlines the potential for arriving at legitimate decisions

• However, there are a number of pitfalls:• Who gets to participate? • How do transnational actors participate?

Who?

• Economically powerful TNCs tend to have more access points

• Among civil society actors: well organized and well funded NGOs tend to be overrepresented whereas marginalized groups tend to be highly underrepresented

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How?• Formal participation by transnational actors on

decision-making bodies of international institutions remains extremely rare

• Other forms of collaboration and coordination are most common

• Transnational actors increasingly enjoy access to international institutions and contribute to agenda setting, implementation, and enforcement but largely remain excluded from the core of international cooperation: the decision-making stage

Non-state actors• Non-governmental organizations• Transnational Corporations • Experts

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Influence of non-state actors

• The increase of influence by other actors does not ipso facto mean a decreasing influence by states.

• The increasing influence of other actors should be seen as causing changing dynamics of politics, rather than in terms of a power transfer.

• TNCs, NGOs and governments can sometimes form coalitions of various interesting sorts.

So the point here is that states and transnational actors share “the stage”, and this creates new dynamics of politics.

Actor strategies

• States: coalitions

• NGOs: networks• Organization of NGOs and sub-national

actors, self-organization. Important for implementation , innovative mechanisms such as benchmarking

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Negotiations• Negotiations are a mode of decision-making, or

management tools in international politics

• Meaning that negotiations are used to identify common interests, bring parties closer together and work out acceptable solutions to a variety of issues

• Every negotiation has its own characteristics depending on which area it concerns.

• The characteristics relate to the issues being discussed, the actors and the solution or outcome of a negotiation.

Discussion

• Some would argue that the field is not concerned principally with the improvement of the problem studied expect as a political, an institutional or a policy issue. Do you agree?

• How can we take account of environmental challenges that do not fit the existing pattern of existing institutions?