Global Environmental Governance

Today's most pressing environmental problems are planetary in scope, confounding the political will of any one nation. How can we solve them? Global Environmental Governance offers the essential information, theory, and practical insight needed to tackle this critical challenge. It examines ten major environmental threats-climate disruption, biodiversity loss, acid rain, ozone depletion, deforestation, desertification, freshwater degradation and shortages, marine fisheries decline, toxic pollutants, and excess nitrogen-and explores how they can be addressed through treaties, governance regimes, and new forms of international cooperation. Written by Gus Speth, one of the architects of the international environmental movement, and accomplished political scientist Peter M. Haas, Global Environmental Governance tells the story of how the community of nations, nongovernmental organizations, scientists, and multinational corporations have in recent decades created an unprecedented set of laws and institutions intended to help solve large-scale environmental problems. The book critically examines the serious shortcomings of current efforts and the underlying reasons why disturbing trends persist. It presents key concepts in international law and regime formation in simple, accessible language, and describes the current institutional landscape as well as lessons learned and new directions needed in international governance. Global Environmental Governance is a concise guide, with lists of key terms, study questions, and other features designed to help readers think about and understand the concepts discussed.

Aligning global governance to the challenges of sustainability is one of the most urgent environmental issues to be addressed. This book is a timely and up-to-date compilation of the main pieces of the global environmental governance puzzle. The book is comprised of 101 entries, each defining a central concept in global environmental governance, presenting its historical evolution, introducing related debates and including key bibliographical references and further reading. The entries combine analytical rigour with empirical description. The book: offers cutting edge analysis of the state of global environmental governance, raises an up-to-date debate on global governance for sustainable development, gives an in-depth exploration of current international architecture of global environmental governance, examines the interaction between environmental politics and other fields of governance such as trade, development and security, elaborates a critical review of the recent literature in global environmental governance. This unique work synthesizes writing from an internationally diverse range of well-known experts in the field of global environmental governance. Innovative thinking and high-profile expertise come together to create a volume that is accessible to students, scholars and practitioners alike.

Theoretical and empirical accounts of the role of business in shaping international environmental policies.

ÔThis book is a novel, sophisticated, broad ranging and insightful study of the idea of global environmental governance but from a legal dimension and perspective. While recognising that concepts and ideas used to describe governance are generally abstract, vague and slippery, this project brings clarity to the field by being theoretically informed, contextually sensitive and pragmatically circumscribed. Its conclusions and arguments open up a field of inquiry that has to be genuinely interdisciplinary and in that sense has great potential to contribute to a better understanding of environmental themes and issues. This book is destined to become a landmark for legal academics who will write about environmental governance in that its concern is with the global governance of nature rather than a text that uses the environment as a pretext for understanding governance. It is well written, easy and enjoyable to read and while it traverses through diverse bodies of literature it manages to effectively communicate with a variety of scholarly communities.Õ Ð Afshin Akhtarkhavari, Griffith Law School, Australia ÔFourth generation global environmental regulation attempts to address the complex realities of an interconnected environment, global environmental problems and collective regulatory responses. It merits conceptual clarity. Louis KotzŽ reveals the legal contours and content of global environmental governance by chipping away such parts of the conceptual marble block as are not needed. For the environmental lawyer, it is a welcome Ð and much needed Ð process of elimination. This book provides a toolkit for lawyers to engage critically with the extra-legal concept of environmental governance. Its scrutiny and careful analysis contribute meaningfully to the environmental discourse.Õ Ð Christine Voigt, University of Oslo, Norway ÔGlobal Environmental Governance is a truly important book. Drawing on a multitude of disciplines, award-winning environmental law Professor Louis KotzŽ masterfully explains the emerging concept of Òglobal environmental governanceÓ and its elements of globalism, environmental law, regulation, and governance theory. He makes a compelling case that the world has outgrown the ÒsustainabilityÓ model and moved toward this more all-encompassing approach to environmental regulation. This admirable book makes global environmental governance theory understandable and pertinent so environmental leaders, lawyers, and regulators can engage comfortably with this new vision for an ecologically and economically healthy world.Õ Ð George (Rock) Pring, University of Denver Sturm College of Law, US ÔThis book, in examining the relationship between global environmental governance and environmental law, provides an important and timely contribution to the quest to fashion a more viable approach to regulating the relationship between humanity and the environment. While the term ÒgovernanceÓ is much employed in international environmental law scholarship, its conceptual underpinnings have not, on the whole, been adequately addressed in the legal sphere and understanding of the symbiotic relationship between the two areas has suffered as a result. This book makes a welcome start to tackling these issues and, it is to be hoped, will trigger renewed vigour in this socially and legally vital area of inquiry.Õ Ð Karen Morrow, University of Swansea, Wales, UK ÔFor years, scholars of international law and international relations have developed parallel literatures. In Global Environmental Governance, Louis KotzŽ offers a common conceptual, theoretical, and normative ground in the global environmental field. As a skillful lawyer, he dissects terminology, explains core assumptions, and constructs causal chains. But he does not stop there. His shrewd analysis of power and authority, individual incentives and collective action, management and regulation builds a bridge between law and politics as disciplines concerned about what global environmental governance is and how it can be improved.Õ Ð Maria Ivanova, University of Massachusetts, US ÔIn search of shelter from the buffeting blasts of climate change, biodiversity loss, resource depletion, famine and disease, states and public agencies, community representatives, resource users, advocacy networks and citizens huddle together under the vast and varied institutional umbrellas of environmental governance. Louis KotzŽÕs innovative study systematically describes the role of environmental law as the springs, stretchers, ribs and handles of the decision-making umbrellas we so desperately hope will hold firm when they are opened up in times of need.Õ Ð Jamie Benidickson, University of Ottawa, Canada ÔThe concept of Òglobal environmental governanceÓ has been part of the lexicon in accounts of global environmental politics for some time. Yet to date it has escaped comprehensive assessment from a legal perspective. This groundbreaking work fills this gap in the literature. It offers a masterful analysis of the theoretical underpinnings of the environmental governance, and highlights the critical importance of environmental regulation in ensuring that environmental governance lives up to its promise as a means for achieving truly ecologically sustainable development.Õ Ð Tim Stephens, University of Sydney, Australia This timely book brings much-needed clarity to the concept of Ôenvironmental governanceÕ as manifested in the global regulatory domain. The author argues that despite being used as a fashionable term by many Ð including economists, political scientists, environmentalists and, increasingly, lawyers Ð its theoretical contours and conceptual content remain unclear, incoherent, and inconsistent. In addressing this problem, the book begins by describing globalization as a general context of governance. It comprehensively interrogates and clarifies both the governance and global governance concepts, and then explains aspects and components of global environmental governance. Finally it investigates the role of law in global environmental governance. Providing a much-needed definition of environmental governance and global environmental governance, this comprehensive study will appeal to academics and researchers, post-graduate and under-graduate students, intergovernmental organizations such as UNEP, WTO, IUCN, as well as governments and governmental agencies involved with environmental regulation.

More than twenty years after the Bruntland Commission report, Our Common Future, we have yet to secure the basis for a serious approach to global environmental governance. The failed 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development showed the need for a new approach to globalization and sustainability. Taking a critical perspective, rooted in political economy, regulation theory, and post-sovereign international relations, this book explores questions concerning the governance of environmental sustainability in a globalizing economy. With contributions from leading international scholars, the book offers a comprehensive framework on globalization, governance, and sustainability, and examines institutional mechanisms and arrangements to achieve sustainable environmental governance. It: considers current failures in the framework of global environmental governance addresses the problematic relationship between sustainability and globalization explores controversies of development and environment that have led to new processes of institution building examines the marketization of environmental policy-making; stakeholder politics and environmental policy-making; socio-economic justice; the political origins of sustainable consumption; the role of transnational actors; and processes of multi-level global governance. This book will be of interest to students and researchers of political science, international studies, political economy and environmental studies.

An examination of whether accountability mechanisms in global environmental governance that focus on monitoring and enforcement necessarily lead to better governance and better environmental outcomes. The rapid development of global environmental governance has been accompanied by questions of accountability. Efforts to address what has been called “a culture of unaccountability” include greater transparency, public justification for governance decisions, and the establishment of monitoring and enforcement procedures. And yet, as this volume shows, these can lead to an “accountability trap”—a focus on accountability measures rather than improved environmental outcomes. Through analyses and case studies, the contributors consider how accountability is being used within global environmental governance and if the proliferation of accountability tools enables governance to better address global environmental deterioration. Examining public, private, voluntary, and hybrid types of global environmental governance, the volume shows that the different governance goals of the various actors shape the accompanying accountability processes. These goals—from serving constituents to reaping economic benefits—determine to whom and for what the actors must account. After laying out a theoretical framework for its analyses, the book addresses governance in the key areas of climate change, biodiversity, fisheries, and trade and global value chains. The contributors find that normative biases shape accountability processes, and they explore the potential of feedback mechanisms between institutions and accountability rules for enabling better governance and better environmental outcomes. Contributors Graeme Auld, Harro van Asselt, Cristina Balboa, Lieke Brouwer, Lorraine Elliott, Lars H. Gulbrandsen, Aarti Gupta, Teresa Kramarz, Susan Park, Philipp Pattberg, William H. Schaedla, Hamish van der Ven, Oscar Widerberg

Yet many of its fundamental elements remain unclear in both theory and practice.