Search

A recent article in this journal (Jackson 2021) validly emphasized that debates about the Anthropocene need to recognize a diverse range of perspectives, worldviews, and forms of knowledge. In doing so, however, the author mischaracterized scholarship on earth system governance as being antithetical to a critical and pluralistic stance on the Anthropocene. In this commentary we address key concerns about the article: selective and misleading quotations regarding the earth system governance literature’s diversity; unwarranted insinuations that juxtapose the implications of this literature with those of slavery and holocausts; and neglect of the breadth and diversity of scholarship on earth system governance. We underscore the need for scholarly debates on the Anthropocene to be informed by a balanced and rigorous assessment of existing scholarship, and for a constructive dialogue between global and locally situated ways of understanding the earth.

In 2019, the Indonesian government released its post-Paris Agreement report Low Carbon Development: a paradigm shift towards a green economy in Indonesia, in which it set out an economic rationale ...

Conceptual innovations are a central feature of global environmental governance. Confronting degradation and unsustainability, scholars and practitioners turn to new concepts to identify, make sense of, and chart new directions towards meaningful governance solutions. But why do some concepts create lasting changes to governance institutions and governance practices, while others do not? Ideational theories of international relations highlight the importance of normative fit. In this paper we analyze the concept of ecosystem services to show that normative fit is just one dimension of governance fitness, which also includes practical fitness. Ecologists and economists coined the concept of ecosystem services to make biodiversity conservation intelligible to decision-makers versed in economic thinking. It has gained rhetorical traction, but ultimately failed to change how we treat nature because it lacks practical fitness. We interviewed fifty-six individuals working in twelve international organizations that have sought to translate the concept of ecosystem services into practice. Our analysis reveals forces limiting practical fit and constraining institutional uptake at three levels of analysis: structural, organizational, and agent. We present a cautionary tale that pushes scholars to carefully consider practical fit alongside normative fit when suggesting new concepts as organizing frames for how we govern global environmental challenges.

There have been clear calls for enhanced international cooperation to meet the environmental, economic and criminal challenges of transnational environmental crime (TEC), defined here to include illegal wildlife trade, timber trafficking and the black market in ozone-depleting substances. In the absence of an overarching international or transnational environmental crime legal framework, institutional settings are characterized by regime density and complexity amid a growing number of actors across related but distinct institutional settings. Scholars of international cooperation have worried that this kind of complexity leads to legal indeterminacy, normative ambiguity and regulatory uncertainty that will make cooperation more difficult. In the TEC sphere, these propositions remain under-researched and untested. This article sketches the contours of a study that would bring some conceptual and empirical clarity to these issues. In doing so, it outlines the constitutive elements of the TEC regime complex and the nature of institutional interplay between and among those elements.

In the last 30 years, environmental challenges in the Asia-Pacific have gone from sitting at the margins of political discourse to featuring prominently in academic and policy debates about institutional capacity, economic sustainability and regional futures. Those challenges are extensive: they include loss of biodiversity and species, land degradation and deforestation, water pollution and scarcity, drought, wildlife smuggling, ozone depletion, other forms of atmospheric pollution, and climate change. This article explores regional responses to environmental challenges through a global governance lens. It examines the ways in which vertical and intergovernmental arrangements have been supplemented by institutions and networks that reflect horizontal and transnational approaches. It reveals that this has been an uneven process, with coherence and fragmentation equally represented. In its focus on the two key subregions of Southeast Asia and Northeast Asia, it shows how environmental cooperation h...

This article offers a genealogy of human security and environmental security set against the background of the 1994 United Nations Human Development Report and its demands for a profound transition in thinking. It shows how these two concepts have intersected and overlapped on the one hand, and diverged on the other. The debates within the UN system about what human security does or should mean have taken some account of the impact of environmental degradation on people and their communities though this has often lacked any analytical depth. The concept of environmental security, on the other hand, has become increasingly divorced from its potentially heterodox and critical roots in human security. Rather it has been captured by an orthodoxy that focuses primarily on non-traditional threats to traditional referents (i.e. the state) and that increasingly perceives ‘environmental security’ as a synonym for the threat multiplier dimensions of climate change. Rather than empowering a people-centred approach t...

Nations will try to negotiate a successor treaty to the Kyoto Protocol by the end of 2015. Can they agree on how to share the burden of cutting emissions and funding mitigation and adaption measures?

Most studies of regionalism in Southeast Asia pay little attention to environmental concerns as part of the region's empirical dynamic. In contrast, this article examines the ways in which governments have come to “govern” environmental issues at a regional scale under the auspices of ASEAN, against the backdrop of debates about the political topography of Southeast Asian regionalism. The framework adopted here brings together analyses of the public space of formal regional governance arrangements, the inter-subjective space of regional identity building, and the private space of regional social practices. Underpinning this is the question of whether moves to supposedly “flatter” forms of regional governance have been accompanied by for more democratic or participatory forms of regionalism. I conclude that regional environmental structures under ASEAN are more akin to “invited spaces” and have generally failed to offer effective channels of communication for, or democratic representation of, a wider range of stakeholders, including civil society groups and local communities. © 2012 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

In his 2009 report on the world financial and economic crisis and its impact on development, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon expressed concerns about a range of direct and indirect impacts on the environment. Those concerns included the impact of a slow-down in investment in environmentally sustainable technologies, as well as the impact of stimulus packages that relied on poorly planned infrastructure and resource development. They included worries about whether higher levels of unemployment would result in greater and unsustainable use of subsistence resources. Against the backdrop of these concerns, this article examines the impact of both the 1997 Asian financial crisis and the current global financial crisis on environmental sustainability in East Asia. It shows that both crises generated similar patterns of environmental impact, but that those impacts were at times counter-intuitive and ambiguous. Positive impacts were short-lived and negative impacts were little affected in the longer term.

This contribution is based on a set of reflections presented at the REGov Workshop. These reflections were offered as part of a panel discussion around the topic “Environmental regionalization, democracy, and civil society.” Additional presentations provided in the context of this panel discussion include those of Andreas Klinke, Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology (this volume), and Nicolas Evrard, European Association of Elected Representatives from Mountain Areas (this volume). Webcasts of all presentations are available at http://www.reg-observatory.org/outputs.html .

Australian scholarship on “International Relations and the environment” rests on the shoulders of a comparatively small number of researchers. Their contribution to scholarly debate and policy analysis, however, belies the numbers. The corpus thus produced offers both breadth, through the range of environmental issues explored, and depth through a strong commitment to theoretical inquiry and a willingness to challenge and defy traditional disciplinary boundaries. Underpinning this is a recognition that the agenda of “IR and the environment” has long moved beyond policy-tracing analysis of inter-state cooperation, diplomatic negotiations and multilateral institutions. Robust intellectual, conceptual and empirical “conversations” on global environmental issues mean that there are often points of divergence among those working in this field. Nevertheless, the Australian scholarly output on International Relations and the environment can be characterized by three important themes: a critique of neoliberalism, a commitment to ethical inquiry (and, indeed, to a politics of solidarity) that reveals a complex politics of knowledge, discourse and power; and a disciplinary heterodoxy accompanied by a critical interrogation of theoretical constructs and organizing principles embedded in ideas about the state, sovereignty and security. This is not, I argue here, an interest in theory for theory's sake. Rather, Australian scholarship on International Relations and the environment is motivated by real concerns about how best to protect the environment and by a real commitment to those who are most affected by the ecological, social and economic consequences of environmental change.

While other forms of transnational crime in the Asia Pacific have been securitized – that is, represented by policy elites and security actors as crucial or existential threats to national and regional security – transnational environmental crime has been un(der)securitized. It warrants little mention in regional security statements or the security concerns of individual countries. Yet the consequences of activities such as illegal logging and timber smuggling, wildlife smuggling, the black market in ozone-depleting substances and dumping of other forms of hazardous wastes and chemical fit the (in)security profile applied to other forms of transnational crime. This article surveys the main forms of transnational environmental crime in the Asia Pacific and assesses the ‘fit’ with a ‘crime as security’ framework. It shows that transnational environmental crime generates the kinds of ‘pernicious effects … on regional stability and development, the maintenance of the rule of law and the welfare of th...

Recent surveys in Australia show that improving the global environment rates high as a public policy concern. Responding to these challenges at a global level requires more than finding the best or most appropriate scientific, economic and technical approaches. It also requires that global environmental governance be based on sound normative principles. Two of the most important principles respond to the challenge that, while humanity is outstripping its ecological footprint, contributions to global environmental change are uneven and the experience of environmental harm is being displaced across time and space. Improving the global environment should therefore take into account the precautionary principle and the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities. Improving the global environment also requires a more robust institutional framework. The model favoured here is to build on UNEP to establish a more coherent, more authoritative and more independent environmental organization.

The black market in ozone-depleting substances (ODS) is a direct consequence of international agreement on targets to reduce and phase-out the production and consumption of such chemicals. Yet the Montreal Protocol says nothing about illegal trade (as opposed to unauthorised trade) and it is widely accepted that the Parties had not anticipated such an outcome and were slow to respond. In effect, then, the Protocol itself created the opportunity structure for illegal activity in situations where perverse incentives generate high profits and low entry costs. This chapter draws on criminology, economic sociology and public policy to examine the logistic trails and smuggling networks that sustain the ODS black market. It examines how ODS smuggling has gone global, how that black market blurs the boundaries between legitimate industry and white collar crime, and how those involved have been able to adjust their strategies for illegal transboundary activity in response to changing structures of demand and supply.

The global politics of the environment is increasingly a politics of transnational harm that raises important questions about injustice and global ethics. One response to the injustices of environmental harm is found in the demands for cosmopolitan harm conventions—social practices that define what is permissible in relations between human beings in a way that does not privilege the interests of insiders over outsiders. This article explores the theory and practice of cosmopolitan environmental harm conventions with particular attention to the issues of rights, obligations and a politics of consent. It concludes that while many existing environmental harm conventions are often only marginally cosmopolitan, despite appearances to the contrary, cosmopolitan ideas are sufficiently robust to provide a theoretical and ethical road map for dealing with global environmental injustice.

Despite the post-September 11 focus on regional security and the continued emphasis on regional economic cooperation, environmental degradation should not be overlooked as an important issue for US policy in and relationship with the Asia-Pacific. It is an important issue in its own right, presenting the countries of the region with ecological, economic and social (human security) challenges. There are both ethical and instrumental impulses for the United States, as a rich indus­trialised country and as a disproportionate consumer of resources and polluter of global waste, to provide environmental assistance to the Asia-Pacific. Despite global demands that the ‘new’ new world (environmental) order should be based on solidarity and collective responsibility, neither US environmental policy towards the region nor the regional consequences of its international environmental policy more generally meet this test. The US is fundamentally self-regarding rather than other-regarding in the various dimensions of it...

While statements by the United Nations Security Council and the Secretary-General demonstrate that environmental degradation is accepted as a possible non-military threat to international peace and security, none of the relevant documentation proceeds to consider how the Security Council might respond to such new threats and sources of instability and conflict. This article examines and evaluates a number of options available to the Security Council should its members choose to address this agenda in more detail. It argues that the UN Charter, international humanitarian law and operational precedent provide an environmental mandate for the Security Council. Any authorization of force, however, is most likely to be confined to environmental war crimes. A more important environmental role for the Security Council lies in preventive diplomacy, conflict resolution and postconflict reconstruction.

Environmental degradation in Southeast Asia has been implicated in what some describe as a failure of regional cooperation and a crisis of regional identity and credibility within ASEAN. This article examines environmental decline in Southeast Asia as a consequence of the region’s changing political economy and modes of production and suggests that regional cooperation on environmental challenges is more likely to be successful if it reflects some form of bounded cosmopolitanism embedded in a regional community of rights and duties. Drawing on identity-based accounts of regional cooperation to explore the relationship between ideas, interests and policy in the region, it identifies three phases of environmental cooperation since 1977. It argues that, despite apparent ideational and institutional advances over this period, ASEAN has been unable to respond effectively to regional environmental challenges for normative as well as material reasons. Yet while environmental cooperation has been constrained by t...

(1997). French nuclear testing in the pacific: A retrospective. Environmental Politics: Vol. 6, No. 2, pp. 144-149.

This paper examines the disconnect between the literature on and practice of legality verification (LV) in the forest sector and what would seem to be a logical extension into the literature on and responses to forest crime and, more specifically, transnational criminality associated with the trade in illegally logged timber. The apparently logical overlap between these two areas of endeavour arises because both are dealing with aspects of supply chains or chains of custody involving raw timber, forest products or timber products more generally. The disconnect, I suggest here, arises because of a lack of ‘joined up thinking’ between the two themes that are central to forest law enforcement and governance (FLEG) -- that is, enforcement on the one hand and governance on the other. The former is frequently perceived to be relevant mainly to issues of criminality and the development of coercive responses by the state, the latter to normative standards and rules for defining legality and implementing verification in which actors other than the state have assumed a substantial role. The second purpose of this paper, then, is to explore the role of 'agents beyond the state' in the spaces of transnational legality verification and forest law enforcement. It does so as an initial response to the call from Biermann et al 'to document these various forms of governance through which actors exercise agency [beyond the state] and … to better understand the conditions for the emergence of agency at different levels and within different architectures.'

Much attention has recently been focused on the concept of environmental security. Two main schools of thought regarding environmental security have arisen, those of the "environment-and-security" scholars and those of the "securing-the-environment" school. This article examines and compares the two schools of thought as they address the issue of environmental conflict, concluding that the less militaristic focus of the second is better suited to identifying and preventing causes of such conflict.