Conducting Research On Global Environmental Agreement Making

Bringing together contributions from diplomats, UN agency officials, lawyers and academics, this book provides insight into the evolution of international environmental law, diplomacy and negotiating techniques. Based on first-hand experiences and extensive research, the chapters offer a blend of practice and theory, history and analysis, presenting a range of historical episodes and nuances and drawing lessons for future improvements to the processes of law-making and diplomacy. The book represents a synthesis of the most important messages to emerge from the annual course on Multilateral Environmental Agreements, delivered to diplomats and negotiators from around the world for the last decade by the University of Eastern Finland and the United Nations Environment Programme. The book will be of interest as a guide for negotiators and as a supplementary textbook and a reference volume for a wide range of students of law and environmental issues.

This study examines weaknesses in the existing system of environmental treaty-making and suggests key changes necessary both to confront emerging global environmental threats (such as climate change, loss of biodiversity and pollution) and to achieve sustainable development.

International environmental agreements provide a practical basis for countries to address environmental issues on a global scale. This book explores the workings and outcomes of these agreements, and analyses key questions of why some problems are dealt with successfully and others ignored. By examining fundamental policies and issues in environmental protection this text gives an easily comprehensible introduction to international environmental agreements, and discusses problems in three areas: air, water and on land. It traces the history of agreements in broad thematic areas related to long-distance air pollution, ozone-depleting and greenhouse gases, ocean management, biological diversity, agricultural plant diversity and forest stewardship. Drawing on experts in their respective fields, this book provides an insightful evaluation of the successes and failures, and analysis of the reasons for this. Concluding with an insightful examination of research to show how performance of agreements can be improved in the future, this volume is a vital contribution to our understanding of the politics associated with establishing international environmental consensus. International Environmental Agreements will be of interest to scholars, students and researchers in global environmental politics, international relations and political science. Steinar Andresen is Senior Research Fellow at the Fridtjof Nansen Institute, Norway, and formerly professor at the Dept. of Political Science, University of Oslo. Elin Lerum Boasson is Research Fellow at the Fridtjof Nansen Institute, Norway. Geir Hønneland is Research Director at the Fridtjof Nansen Institute and adjunct professor at the University of Tromsø.

Civil society participants have voiced concerns that the environmental problems that were the subject of multilateral environmental agreements negotiated during the 1992 Rio processes are not serving to ameliorate global environmental problems. These concerns raise significant questions regarding the utility of negotiating agreements through the UN. This book elucidates the complexity of how participants engage in these negotiations through the various processes that take place under the auspices of the UN--primarily those related to climate and biological diversity. By taking an ethnographic approach and providing concrete examples of how it is that civil society participants engage in making policy, this book develops a robust sense of the implications of the current terrain of policy-making--both for the environment, and for the continued participation of non-state actors in multilateral environmental governance. Using data gathered at actual negotiations, the book develops concepts such as participation and governance beyond theory. The research uses participant observation ethnographic methods to tie the theoretical frameworks to people's actual activities as policy is generated and contested. Whereas topics associated with global environmental governance are traditionally addressed in fields such as international relations and political science, this book contributes to developing a richer understanding of the theories using a sociological framework, tying individual activities into larger social relations and shedding light on critical questions associated with transnational civil society and global politics.

An examination of three major trends in global governance, exemplified by developments in transnational environmental rule-setting. The notion of global governance is widely studied in academia and increasingly relevant to politics and policy making. Yet many of its fundamental elements remain unclear in both theory and practice. This book offers a fresh perspective by analyzing global governance in terms of three major trends, as exemplified by developments in global sustainability governance: the emergence of nonstate actors; new mechanisms of transnational cooperation; and increasingly segmented and overlapping layers of authority. The book, which is the synthesis of a ten-year “Global Governance Project” carried out by thirteen leading European research institutions, first examines new nonstate actors, focusing on international bureaucracies, global corporations, and transnational networks of scientists; then investigates novel mechanisms of global governance, particularly transnational environmental regimes, public-private partnerships, and market-based arrangements; and, finally, looks at fragmentation of authority, both vertically among supranational, international, national, and subnational layers, and horizontally among different parallel rule-making systems. The implications, potential, and realities of global environmental governance are defining questions for our generation. This book distills key insights from the past and outlines the most important research challenges for the future.