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The Information Age has fuelled many transitions in thinking about environment, security and world politics, including the growing need for states to engage in and secure access to space technologies not simply for power projection, but because of the lifeline they provide to the world economy and knowledge about resources and the environment. From a backdrop of economic liberalization, growing dependencies by large and small states on Earth observation and communication satellites, and the tenuous balance between private, civilian and military interests in space for commerce, environment and defence, this paper will address the potential opportunity for international collaboration in Earth observation to hedge against policies of unilateral space control by dominant military actors. Through an examination of a need for cooperation in global change research utilizing Earth observation from space, the paper characterizes this cooperation as a form of environmental governance consistent with a power shift beyond U.S. dominance. As an original leader in global change research and a growing stakeholder in the competitive commercial remote sensing market, the U.S. has created unique challenges, responsibilities and opportunities for itself in balancing dominant military discourses of space control with global demands for environmental information. Past and present proposals for institutionalized cooperation in Global Earth Observing Systems, the European Union's recent Global Monitoring for Environment and Security initiative and the U.S. Earth Observation System will be discussed as potential models for responding to these challenges. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From its inception, the European space programme has been part of a self-concious political project. The original developments in the early 1960?s were driven by a desire that Europe develop the use of space for purely peaceful purposes, in contrast to suggestions that NATO should play the lead-role in developing European space capabilities. Secondly it was felt that space exploration lent itself to the structural integration approach to European unification and that a joint space programme would help to bridge the divides in democratic Europe between the NATO and neutral states and between the EEC and EFTA groupings. This rationale was even more explicit after the merger of the existing European space organisations into the European Space Agency in 1975. Since 2000 ESA has begun to formalise a more explicit relationship with the EU, so that while the EU has its own space policy, ESA is essentially the body tasked to implement that policy, effectively creating the possibility of a future European Space Community. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]