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The "post-materialist" values hypothesis, positing heightened concern for the environment, should predict convergence in environmental policies. Yet variation persists, even when controlling for income levels. This puzzle deserves further scrutiny: is it attitudes, policies, or both that diverge? What, in the end, are the roles of public opinion and political institutions in determining outcomes in environmental policies? Greater understanding into the causal mechanisms linking attitudes to policy outcomes is required. This will be sought by building upon Congleton's (1992, 1996) median-voter model of environmental policy-making, whereby we develop an extension to include voter-information characteristics and test its effects by applying the model to outcomes for various air pollution issues. The results provide evidence for significant voter-information effects and suggest that two critical antecedent conditions are necessary for political-institutional and voter-information variables to have an effect: opportunity for redistribution over time (or across economic sectors), and the presence of a credible framework for addressing collective action problems. The most important implication of this analysis is that relying on democratic reform alone may not suffice to improve environmental policy outcomes if there is a failure to address underlying collective action problems. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

U.S. global environmental policy during the Bush administration was widely considered to have fallen short of both global and national needs. Among other actions, critics faulted the administration's disparagement of scientific consensus on climate change and its withdrawal from the Kyoto Protocol, its ideological opposition to multilateral population assistance, its failure to exercise leadership on global sustainability initiatives, and a diversity of foreign policy decisions that have cost the United States much needed political support in critical regions of the world. This paper reviews some of the most important of these policy actions and looks ahead to the challenges Barack Obama will face as the 44th U.S. president. In particular, the paper examines the unique opportunities in 2009 and over the next several years for policy reassessment in energy use and climate change, population and development assistance, and sustainable development initiatives. It also considers the key policy actors who will likely play significant roles in the design, adoption, and implementation of a new generation of policies that can better address existing and emerging global environmental and resource problems. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the foundations for pessimistic expectations in the European Union (EU). It discusses the underlying models and variables and extent to which they succeed in capturing the essence of enlargement and the nature of EU environmental policy. It claims that reluctant member states and insufficient EU institutional capacity will lead to slowdown in EU decision making. It details the basis for domestic environmental policy in new member states.

The article presents the conference paper "Modeling Capabilities for Environmental Policy-Making in Global Environmental Politics" that was prepared for the "46th Annual International Studies Association Convention in Hawaii. It discusses the benefits and strategies of national front-running in environmental policy. It presents an aggregation of the rank in introduction of 4 policy innovations in climate protection policies which include the CO2-reduction targets and quotas for renewable energies.

So far, the Europeanisation of energy policy has occupied a remote place in the European integration literature. However, current developments such as the Energy Policy for Europe launched in 2007 and the Lisbon Treaty Title XXI on Energy have given greater prominence to this policy area within the integration process. Hence, there are several indications that the Europeanisation of energy policy is already taking place, even though the understanding over this process is still weak. And indeed, European studies are just beginning to shed light on this policy area. Against this backdrop, this article examines the EU environmental performance, supported by the Environmental Policy Integration (EPI), as a driver for the energy governance during the process of Europeanisation. Its main argument is that EPI is not only a variable for explaining the governance changes in the EU level concerning energy - defined here as 'green Europeanisation'-, but also a useful instrument for pursuing coherence within the emergent EU energy policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on research of policy instruments in the U.S. and Russia. It argues that the development of policy instruments is conditioned through the subsisting institutional practices, the source of policy provisions, and the place and nature of environmental policy authority. The historical institutional and comparative analyses, and the theories of governmental regulation and instrumental approaches in public policy of both countries are also discussed.

The article examines the state of environmental law and policy in the South Caucasus, focusing on amendments in the environmental law and policy in Armenia and Georgia since independence from the Soviet Union in 1991. The general political environment and institutional structures in Armenia and Georgia and the amendments in environmental laws, bureaucracies and in each country are discussed. It assesses the relative impacts of such political and institutional characteristics on the effectiveness of environmental protection.

Comparative studies on cross-national policy transfer and diffusion emphasize an impressing degree of policy convergence in many areas. This holds true, in particular, for the environmental field. However, we are still confronted with limited knowledge about the mechanisms accounting for this phenomenon. Against this backdrop, we theoretically investigate the impact of three different convergence mechanisms that are generally seen as central sources of cross-national policy convergence: regulatory competition, international cooperation and transnational communication. We focus not only on the isolated effects of each mechanism, but also on the effects of their interaction. As will be shown, the empirically rather likely interaction of different mechanisms constitutes a plausible explanation for the still puzzling gap between the theoretical prediction of a race to the bottom through regulatory competition and the lacking empirical support for this hypothesis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the EU's capacity to play a pioneering role in international environmental policy. The objective is to explore the circumstances under which political entities possess the capacity to act as a policy pioneer. It proposes a conceptual framework for policy pioneership and applies these considerations to the EU.One could distinguish three major ways in which the EU influences international environmental policy: international negotiations, the use of coercion and conditionality, and voluntary diffusion of ambitious EU environmental rules. The voluntary diffusion of policy from one political entity to another can be an influential alternative and supplementation to the more traditional mode of global policy-making by nation states through international agreements and coercive measures. Policy diffusion is triggered by globalisation and the increasing interaction between various jurisdictions and other stakeholders. Through policy diffusion, not only nation states but also political entities such as the European Union can play an influential role at the global level. The first section of this paper discusses policy diffusion. The second part outlines the different factors and conditions that determine a political entity's capacity to pioneer policy. In section three, these conceptual considerations are applied to the EU. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In international climate policy as much as in the EU multi-level system of governance, the question how to distribute emission reduction efforts among parties (or member states in the latter case) is a crucial precondition for successful and ambitious climate policy. As in the global climate arena, burden sharing requires policy-makers to strike a balance between prescribing emission abatement where it is most cost-effective, while taking account of largely diverging national circumstances and social and economic development objectives. With the accession of 12 new member states, these questions have only become more salient in the EU, to the degree that one may consider the European Community as a microcosm which may anticipate some of the future global debates on climate policy. As Lacasta et al. (2006) state, the EU might even "become a testing ground for policy development and negotiation challenges of increasingly complex and differentiated future global climate developments." In this vein, how EU policy-makers have addressed questions related to burden-sharing may yield valuable lessons also for the broader evolution of the global climate regime. The EU has had not one, but several stabs at developing a durable burden sharing arrangement. The first dates back to 1991/1992, when the European Commission tabled a proposal prior to the signing of the FCCC, but failed in the face of Member State resistance. A second attempt in 1996/1997, mainly orchestrated by the Dutch Presidency in early 1997, eventually produced an agreement prior to the Kyoto summit, but subsequently even this had to be re-adjusted (see Chapter 3). The burden sharing issue reared its head a third time in 2007-8 when the Commission started to prepare its 20-20-20 package. In early 2008, as part of its 'climate policy package', the EU Commission published a draft decision in early 2008, outlining an approach and proposing emission reduction targets for Member states in order to implement the unilateral EU objective of a 20 percent (or 30 percent in case of an international agreement) emission cut by 2020. After protracted negotiations on the package, it was finally adopted in December 2008, including the new 'effort sharing' Decision. This paper analyses and compares the key dynamics and outcomes of decision-making on burden-sharing in the 1990s with the recently concluded effort-sharing negotiations, based on literature review and a series of interviews with policy-makers and experts. Conclusions point to the following: The basic dynamics of the negotiations, opposing wealthier and poorer member states in the EU, have not changed much between the 1990s and today, whereas key actors have to some extent: the newly acceded countries have taken over the role of the 'cohesion countries' in the 1990s, which themselves 'graduated' into taking over more responsibility as middle income countries. The European Commission has markedly increased its agenda-setting capacity in an enlarged Community, providing evidence to Europeanisation tendencies in climate policy. The grounding of member state targets in economic models has in both cases increased their acceptability, although final decisions are still most likely taken in a negotiations setting. Finally, while the 1998 agreement embraced both efficiency and equity considerations, the pending effort-sharing proposal is exclusively based on equity criteria, with efficiency being a major driver of other parts of the proposed climate package. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper analyzes the degree of environmental policy institutionalization among 21 OECD countries from 1960 to 2005. The institutionalization of environmental policy will be analyzed on the one hand, by focusing on the way domestic policy instruments have been applied in OECD countries. On the other hand I will investigate international institutionalization of environmental policy by means of involvement in international treaties and agreements. The paper concludes that highly industrialized societies have institutionalized a high degree of environmental policy over the last decades in both areas. However, environmental institutionalization is clearly divided into a domestic and international realm. Although both areas are linked, different factors explain their respective implementation. Domestic environmental institutionalization is above all determined by domestic political factors (environmental movements, government positions, veto player functions) and international factors (EU membership, diffusion). The analysis is much less successful in explaining international environmental institutionalization. The most robust results of the analysis clearly contradict the findings of earlier studies in this field. International integration does not seem to be a driving force for international participation in environmental treaties among OECD countries. While the paper can answer a great deal of open questions concerning domestic environmental institutionalization, further research is needed in order to explain international environmental institutionalization and why some OECD countries participate in international treaties more often than others. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The global environmental agenda, alongside the broad neoliberal agenda, may be viewed by developing states and societies as a neo-imperialist adventure to be resisted. This paper considers the theoretical parameters of resistance to global environmental governance and argues that the idea of 'eco-imperialism' reflects the uncertain location of politics, the ambivalent role of states, and challenges assumptions in the mainstream study of world politics. However, this is an unusual case of imperialism, in so far as it reflects diverse interests and actors which may not be pursuing the same objectives. It appears that eco-imperialism may be both hegemonic force and anti-capitalist movement. In order to explain this apparent contradiction, we must note some of the contradictions in capitalism and globalization, but also how the mix of underlying political orientations create strange bed-fellows of developing country activists and oil company executives. In doing so, some view of the universal dynamics of global environmental policy and the prospects for matching these to particular political contexts may be arrived at. While the exploitative and dominating aspects of environmental policy deserve to be challenged and studied closely, this may have less bearing on environmental governance per se than on the globalized world in which it occurs. In recognising the importance of the critique, the paper also notes the mutual constitution of governance and resistance, and concludes that the requirement of bottom-up support for any eco-imperialism implies 'participatory empire' at worst, and challenges should inform rather than create obstacles to necessary if not entirely satisfactory forms of global environmental governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Provides initial thoughts on the relevance of hegemony in the study of international environmental politics and U.S. environmental diplomacy. Perception of America's foreign environmental policy; Disengagement of the U.S. from multilateral environmental policymaking; Correlation between America's hegemonic position and the type of environmental diplomacy it is likely to pursue; Domestic sources of U.S. foreign environmental policy.

It has been evident for some time that trade policy and environmental policy cannot long pretend to ignore each other’s existence. Conceptually, each is an integral element of sustainable development; which, ostensibly, is a stated goal of both. Practically, they already cast long shadows on each other and the actual implementation of each influences, and is influenced by, the other. After years of tortured public discussion on the subject, the Fourth Ministerial Meeting of the World Trade Organization (WTO), held in Doha, Qatar, finally placed a limited set of trade and environment issues on the negotiating agenda of the multilateral trading system. The World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD) held in Johannesburg, South Africa, reaffirmed the need to establish more coherence between trade policy and environmental policy. Limited as these incursions might be, they suggest a trend and a tendency that is likely to be irreversible. It has been argued that within the context of the WTO, the question is no longer whether trade and environmental policy are going to be linked, but how. The answer, of course, is far from clear because a) the Doha mandate on trade and environment was left purposely vague; b) the issue is new to multilateral trade negotiations and its many implications and manifestations have not yet been fully explored; and c) because of that, parties have yet to fully develop and firm their positions on this subject as they have on many others. For all of these reasons, there is an opportunity for all parties to shape the agenda on future trade and environment negotiations in rather more profound ways than might be possible on many other issues. This opportunity is particularly pertinent to the developing countries of the South because they, for most part, have been generally suspicious of environmental issues seeping into trade deliberations and accepted the Doha mandate for trade and environmental negotiations rather hesitantly, if not grudgingly. The purpose of this paper is to better understand Southern concerns about the forthcoming trade and environment negotiations and to explore how an emergent Southern agenda might take shape. The analysis presented here derives directly from a review of Southern views on trade and environment issues compiled as part of an ICTSD/IISD/RING research project on the ‘Southern Agenda for Trade and Environment.’ While a budding literature on the subject does exist, this project was an early attempt to systematically collect and analyze the views of developing country delegates themselves. Methodologically, two distinct ‘data’ sets were constructed. The first compiles together the various formal interventions and proposals made by developing countries within the WTO; most particularly within the WTO Committee on Trade and Environment (CTE). The second data set of Southern views on environment and development is drawn from several months of consultations and discussions with developing country negotiators in Geneva and Brussels. These small group discussions sought to elicit a first-hand articulation of Southern concerns and interests in relation to trade and environment issues from developing country delegates, especially in terms of the post-Doha negotiation agenda. This paper presents a review and synthesis of the learning from these two data sets of Southern views on trade and environment. The research concludes that although the developing countries are likely to adopt a conservative strategy in negotiating the environment and trade aspects of the Doha workplan, this is to be expected. This is because developing countries a) had initially resisted these provisions, b) are the historically weaker parties and therefore prone to risk-minimizing strategies, and c) the newness of this issue for trade negotiations coupled with the resource and time strains on Southern delegations will itself limit the scope of innovation by any party. The previous section has outlined three key ingredients of the South’s post-Doha concerns that are likely to influence the defensive aspects of the South’s negotiation position between now, and January 2005. However, the more important conclusion relates to the emerging willingness within the developing countries to begin engaging the trade and environment agenda and to possibly re-craft it within the framework of sustainable development. This is neither going to be easy, nor automatic. While it is to the obvious benefit of the South (and many other parties) for the developing countries to adopt a proactive strategy, doing so will require much effort from the South itself and a supporting environment from other actors interested in a furthering the links between trade, environment and sustainable development. What can the South do itself to move from a reactive agenda defined by its apprehensions about trade and environment to a proactive agenda that seeks the opportunities to be realized by defining sustainable development as the goal of international trade? How can other international actors assist? The paper will outline four key steps in this direction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The linguistic turn in philosophy and in understandings of politics should have made clear the constructed nature of our political realities, and this has become an influential aspect of theoretical developments, yet the main features of the international system are not necessarily amenable to reconstruction in practice. In this paper an examination of the emerging discourses of global environmental politics will indicate the challenges it faces in coping with existing political practices, and the prospective patterns of conformity to environmental policy norms that may be candidates for future strategies in global environmental politics. In doing so it aims to relate theory and practice in GEP. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent research has focused attention on the impact of political institutions on various types of policy outputs. The influence of political institutions has been examined for redistributive policy, health care, and environmental policy just to name a few. This paper looks at the relationship between formal political institutions and the enforcement of intellectual property rights. Using cross-national data the paper examines the impact of intellectual property right security from domestic political institutions. It tests a variety of theoretical propositions on the role of government in securing property rights, as well as suggesting unexamined areas of inquiry. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

International and transboundary governance is increasingly characterized by the disentanglement from traditional political institutions and the emergence of new, horizontal and dialogue-oriented governance modes. Within the Great Lakes-regime between the USA and Canada, deliberative governance across national boundaries has been evolved, which produces democratic legitimacy and effectiveness through the inclusion of civil-societal and economic actors, argumentative procedures and common good oriented problem solving. This raises a challenging research question: Is the deliberative mode of governance within the Great Lakes-regime a model case, which allows drawing conclusion on institutional prerequisites and means how to “democratize” governance in similar issue areas? Guided by this research question the paper develops a three-dimensional model (input, throughput, output) of deliberative democracy, which serves as normative-analytical framework in order to identify and to appraise, generally speaking, the potential of deliberative politics in international governance and, in particular, the deliberative potential within the Great Lakes-regime. Equal access to political influence for non-state actors in the political communication and decision making is conceptualized as input-legitimacy. The throughput-proceduralism relies on the communication and action modes between state and non-state actors aiming at collective preference formation. The output-effectiveness relates to the search and formulation of factual and common good oriented problem solving options, which can be recognized by the public as such ones. My long-term empirical study on the Great Lakes reveals that a deliberative network and multilevel governance system of a bilateral decision making body, expert advisory bodies and public participation has been established. Six different public participation procedures on different political-institutional levels have been identified and analyzed by means of an interpretive analytical approach including policy analysis, discourse analysis and speech act analysis: public hearings, workshops, meetings, round tables, focus groups, and public advisory bodies on the regional and local levels. The results of the expert and public participation within a two-years-working cycle are aggregated in biannual reports, which provide the basis of the Canadian and US environmental policy making on the Great Lakes.Against the background of the theoretical-conceptual research on deliberative democracy and the empirical analysis of the Great Lakes-regime, generalizing conclusions can be drawn on the institutional and procedural design of deliberative governance in transboundary and international spaces in form of a loose coupling of decision making bodies, scientific advisory bodies, public participation, and epistemic community. For this purpose the merits and weaknesses of the Great Lakes-regime were carefully considered and the normative thoughts reflected. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Does news coverage of environmental issues shape U.S. environmental foreign policy? Our theory is that the influence of news coverage on environmental policy depends on whether or not the news coverage of the particular environmental issue is tied to an actual event. By themselves, environmental issues tend to be abstract and are therefore less likely to promote the level of public concern that would force policy makers to make the issue a top priority. However, when environmental problems like global warming are connected to major news events, like hurricanes, heat waves and droughts, they gain the salience necessary to raise public concern about the issue which in turn encourages and often pressures the government to address the problem. To test this hypothesis, this study includes a time series analysis of the relationship between television news coverage of global warming both with and without connection to extreme weather events, public opinion about global warming and government attention to this problem. Here we consider both attention, in the form of congressional hearings on pertinent environmental issues, and action, in this case, government funding of research on environmental issues. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cross-national policy convergence is a widely recognized and analyzed empirical phenomenon in international relations and comparative political science literature. Hitherto many studies picked out one particular cause and assessed its effects on domestic policy changes and cross-national policy convergence, while neglecting others. This paper takes a more holistic perspective by integrating several conceivable mechanisms in the analysis and exploring their interactions. Drawing on studies from international relations as well as comparative political science this paper first of all introduces the analytical framework encompassing three distinct mechanisms which have so far been identified in the relevant literature to contribute to cross-national policy convergence: diffusion, harmonization and imposition. On a broad empirical basis of more than twenty environmental policies and instruments the paper subsequently explores observable interactions between these mechanisms and those interactions' effects on cross-national policy convergence. On the one hand, the paper identifies circumstances when diffusion, harmonization and imposition are likely to reinforce and complement each other and, thus, significantly increase the prospect of cross-national policy convergence. On the other hand, the paper identifies conditions when diffusion, harmonization and imposition are likely to constrain each other and, thus, hindering the emergence of cross-national convergence. In conclusion, the results show that the understanding of processes contributing to cross-national policy convergence is significantly improved when taking into account the interactions of diffusion, harmonization and imposition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Changes in the science and technology sectors of Central and East European states since the 1980s have resulted in enormous changes to the composition, access, and influence of the scientific community upon environmental policy. Such changes were drastic enough during the transition from communist rule, but when combined with subsequent accession into the European Union, the influence of the science community upon the environmental debate has become even more complicated and less well understood. This paper examines the role that the scientific community of the new EU member states plays in legitimating the EU's environmental discourse of risk and the precautionary principle, and argues that the accession process has posed severe challenges to the ability of the science and technology communities to positively influence larger environmental debates. By comparing the experience of the United States in increasingly centralized decision-making processes, the EU risks marginalizing vital criticism in the same manner as has occurred in the US and Canada. The consequences of this may include a move from the precautionary principle to NIMBY-ism in CEE states, and loss of international environmental leadership on the part of the EU. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is growing interest in comparative studies of EU and US federalism and its implications for environmental policy. US and EU approaches to atmospheric pollution issues, such as acid rain and climate change have been the subject of various studies and have pointed to the different approaches of the US and the EU towards common air pollution problems. This paper will examine policy making styles towards air pollution problems in federalist systems. Of particular interest is how an expanding EU may influence the policy approaches of the EU towards air pollution problems and will consider whether an enlarged EU will lead to greater convergence between EU and US approaches to air pollution issues or will instead, reinforce the divergent approaches of these federal systems towards problems such as acid rain and climate change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper will take as its departure point the February 2010 UNEP Governing Council's Special Session debating UNEP's role in Global Environmental Governance. The Nusa Dua Declaration has pointed out that the instruments of global environmental governance are complex and fragmented, and that UNEP should make this governance process more effective. I shall then put these recent developments in the context of the 2010 session of the CSD which has also been looking at some of these issues. Finally, I propose to conclude the paper by placing the environmentally sound management of hazardous chemicals and wastes into the interlinked two frameworks of UNEP's efforts regarding International Environmental Governance (the 'Belgrade Process'), and of its Green Economy Initiative. The Geneva-based 'Strategic Approach to International Chemicals Management' (SAICM) plays an important role here. UNEP is essential in supporting SAICM by carrying out its secretariat services. SAICM's explicit multistakeholder-approach encompassing IGOs, industry, NGOs, and academia represents a particularly innovative instrument of global environmental governance. The objective of this paper is to make a contribution to the understanding of the dynamics driving the global environmental governance negotiations with a focus on their trade and North-South ramifications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The failure of US Congress to ratify the Kyoto Protocol on climate change mitigation has led to renewed scholarly interest in the conditions under which states join international agreements, and in particular multilateral environmental agreements (MEAs). We study the effects of two key factors, namely treaty design and domestic legislative hurdles, on the ratification behavior of states with respect to MEAs. Specifically, we are interested in whether (1) strong legalization mandated by a treaty such as demanding obligations, and strong monitoring and enforcement mechanisms, and (2) high domestic institutional hurdles such as requirements for explicit legislative approval and constraints on executive power deter countries from ratifying a treaty. To test our theoretical claim we use a new time-series-cross-sectional dataset that includes information on the ratification behavior of 164 countries with respect to 314 MEAs in 1950 - 2000. We find that treaties that can be characterized as hard law indeed deter ratification. Furthermore, explicit legislative approval requiring supermajority also makes ratification less likely. In contrast to our theoretical expectations countries with a higher number of veto players are more likely to ratify environmental treaties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Transnational networks have demonstrated increasing impact on international policy outcomes in various issue areas, as demonstrated by many case studies on international political mobilization or the influence of private actors such as NGOs and multinational corporations on international politics. International climate policymaking in particular has gained growing scholarly interest as an area with important transnational interactions between state actors from different governmental levels and nonstate actors from various societal sectors. However, quantitative assessments of the structures emerging from such interactions, not to mention their impact on policymaking, have been very limited. In this paper, I make a first attempt to measure transnational network structures in international climate policymaking using event data coded from international news wires for the years 2000 to 2010. Event data encode who did what to whom and when based on reported actor interactions and can then be analyzed using techniques from Social Network Analysis. In a further step, I will test if specific characteristics of these network structures can be associated with the progress and regress of the international policy process to establish an effective international climate protection regime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The impact of religious groups on Global Environmental Politics is significant and largely under examined. Religious views on ecology in relation to human behavior have been studied mainly by sociologists, anthropologists and theologians, primarily focusing on the interpretation of religious texts and surveys of members of various religions' approaches towards the environment. Given the recent rise in activism of groups advocating religious environmentalism and their attribution of religious beliefs towards humanity's role in safeguarding the environment or "creation", a limited understanding is available of the effect of this trend on global governance. This study examines the impact of religious environmental groups (REG) on climate change politic. REG network structure is examined from the perspective of groups based in the US and the EU. The impact of REGs on the environmental movement is evaluated in the context of climate change politics and policy implementation. A comparative assessment is made between REG's political impact on climate change policies in the US and the multilateral level. Networks formed by REGs as an emerging environmental social movement are mapped to trace local, regional, global and transnational dynamics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On February 8, 2009, the decommissioned French carrier Clemenceau was towed into port in Hartlepool, UK, for dismantling. This marked what French officials hoped would be the end to a nearly decade-long controversy surrounding the disposal of a ship labeled "toxic" by environmentalists concerned about the tons of asbestos and other dangerous chemicals it contained. Plans to process the Clemenceau at India's Alang shipbreaking yards in 2006 became the focus of an international debate over the practice of shipbreaking, one made more pointed as shipbreaking activities have shifted from developed to developing countries like India and Bangladesh where environmental and safety regulations are either non-existent or poorly enforced. This paper explores the legal and policy issues posed by the dispute over the Clemenceau. Intersecting several environmental regimes, shipbreaking has attracted the attention of the Basel Convention on the Transboundary Movement of Hazardous Waste, the International Maritime Organization, the International Labor Organization, and other international and nongovernmental organizations. Reconciling their different perspectives on how to manage this lucrative and important, but highly risky industry represents a serious challenge for international environmental governance. This paper examines that challenge and the steps taken thus far to meet it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Policy-making is based on the attempt to control and steer future events. To do that, rationality, mainly in the form of scientific expertise, is required both to anticipate possible events and to bring legitimacy to the whole process. However, no rationality can cross-out the very elementary fact that, concerning future events, policy-making is inherently subjected to uncertainty: as for any activity involving some opportunity-risk, probabilities can be known but the outcome stays unforeseeable. This implies that policy-makers must always be able to assume responsibility for their decisions. The paper will explain that the complexity inherent to the climate change issue severely complicates this very basic truth by de facto asking policy-makers to act upon a kind of rationality that is not that of evidence, but that of choosing among probabilities of errors. Furthermore, starting from the assumption that policymaking is structurally entangled into the tension between a conservative attitude (the preservation of the comfortable symmetry between past and future events to the benefit of individuals) and a pro-active one (trying to improve their future), the paper will demonstrate how scientific complexity imposes that the first goal be abandoned and how this fact creates a serious problem in terms of policy-making legitimacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the role of state capacity in environmental treaty implementation, by examining National Adaptation Programme of Action (NAPA) development in five Pacific Island Least Developed Countries (LDCs). The central argument is that variation in the success of NAPA development is dependent on the civil service's ability to coordinate and carry out domestic assessments and on the government's ability to approve the plan, and that this capacity reflects state stability. Consequently, state stability - in terms of maintaining confidence in governments, securing peaceful transitions between governing parties, and in having the ability to enforce the rule of law and carry out the tasks of public goods provision effectively - becomes a condition for implementation success of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in these Pacific Islands.Funding for NAPA development is available from the international community, but accessing these funds involves burdensome and conflictual bureaucratic processes; the creation of the action plans also calls for high levels of public participation and consultation. These tasks require dedicated resources and personnel, including consistency in staff, adequate time allocated to policy development, and assistance from funding agency officers - all of which require an "enabling environment" within the state. Differential policy development success across the five LDC cases supports the hypothesis that, given the difficulty of the bureaucratic processes, political upheaval can compromise the government's ability to maintain effective administrative capacity and thus undermines its capacity to implement international agreements.The conclusions suggest that a focus on additional financing through international funds may not be the most effective mechanism for supporting the creation of adaptation policies; instead, the paper speculates that international agencies should focus on streamlining their bureaucratic demands, and should provide additional support for training programmes to strengthen local capacity and governance. The paper contributes to our understanding of the limitations of global treaties for many environmental concerns, and stresses the role of local institutions in addressing sustainability, adaptation, and vulnerability. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the World Bank’s implementation and modification of environmental and social safeguard policy norms. Initially implemented as a series of ad hoc guidelines, environmental and social policies would become entrenched as appropriate “safe ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines international efforts to address climate change at the local level, through organizations such as ICLEI-Local Governments for Sustainability, and other efforts. The introduction looks at the phenomenon from a historical and global per ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that fiction and literary non-fiction should play an important role in the environmental politics classroom, and explores how such works might best be employed. The paper draws on experience with past, present, and future-oriented liter ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The increased awareness of human pressure on nature led to the development of a ‘governance of nature’. One of the most effective mechanisms was the reinforcement of protected areas, whose number and surface increased rapidly over the past decades. The qu ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Almost two decades have now passed since the publication of Peter Haas' Saving the Mediterranean in 1990, in which he employed the concept of "epistemic communities" for his analysis of the "low politics" negotiations on environmental issues for the Mediterranean Action Plan since 1975. A number of similar regional initiatives were launched throughout Europe since then and, for instance, the Barcelona Convention on coastal areas and the UNEP Regional Seas Programme, as well as the Alpine and Carpathian Conventions on mountain regions were developed. As in the case of the Mediterranean Action Plan analyzed by Haas, UNEP played an active role in the development of most of these initiatives, while the EU maintained a certain distance from these initiatives. This submission proposes an appraisal of the Alpine Convention after decades of activity, as well as it sketches an evaluation of the respective roles of UNEP and the EU in the development of this initiative. It also examines the effects on the long run of "low interest" levels, few spillover effects, and loose epistemic communities on overlapping international organizations. Functionalism revisited. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why is it difficult to produce biodiversity conservation even when it is imperative to do so? The present analysis answers this question by applying the logic and dynamics of resource conservation that prevail at the community level to the national level in the context of Madagascar. The analytical framework singles out key actors, their interests in supporting conservation, the institutions that result from their interactions and the actual conservation outcomes institutions ultimately produce. First, the causal links between rules and conservation behaviour outcomes (community level) and between foreign assistance and conservation policy outcomes (national level) are tested. Second, a cross-level analysis is conducted to show that conservation is likely only under specific and limited conditions, hence the challenge of biodiversity conservation. The theoretical implication is that scaling up the analysis from local to national is necessary to explain why biodiversity conservation is difficult to achieve. This challenges the view that local-level dynamics do not apply beyond the local scale. The empirical implication is that conservation policies need to recognize the specific and limited conditions under which conservation is possible so that efforts are better focused and resources more efficiently used. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper critically examines the application and conception of sustainable development, and then seeks alternative theories or visions for the global "economy." In this work distinction is drawn between chrematistics and economics. This approach is extremely helpful in the translation from normative theories to practical politics. As one alternative I look at the "new" old radicalism including "descroissance," a bifurcated theory/cum movement currently inspiring environmentalists, scholars cum/and activists, in Geneva and Paris. A third approach is original in that it builds on the Aristotilean concept of "economic" and "economy," and looks into theories of knowledge and meanings attached to life. The intent is to find fresh concepts for building a global environmental theory with a view to practical application. It involves a search into the history of science and the nature of happiness. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent scholarship has begun to uncover the relationship between various international institutions. However, it has not taken a systematic approach to understanding what types of interactions occur under which conditions. This chapter responds to other research about the "chilling effect" whereby international environmental agreements are supposedly weakened by concerns about conflict with international trade provisions. It analyzes a new dataset that codes deference to existing international law in over 200 multilateral agreements, and finds that the "chilling effect" does exist. Environmental negotiators defer to existing treaties at the same rate as in other issue areas. However, environmental treaties are significantly more likely than other types to defer across policy fields. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One important question in the discussion about new global governance mechanisms is the development of democratic principles. Within this topic the environmental policy as an adjustmed field of public goods is central because globalization is primarily dealing with public goods. An extensive amount of literature was developed to this topic over the last years. However, this mostly normative discussion runs the risk to create a discrepancy between the normative desirability and the empirical reality. Therefore it seems important to discuss the normative coined conception of a democratization of inter and transnational rule setting processes in connection with the traditional acceptance of the conditions of international cooperation (e.g. group size, conflicts of interests, asymmetries of power, uncertainty). The paper focuses on this open question. A theoretical approach extended in this way allows on the one hand a broader theory discussion, and on the other hand an empirical examination. In addition the linkage of theory and empiricism still needs special attention in this discussion. After a theoretical discussion of the normative concept of democratic legitimacy and the possible necessary and sufficient conditions which are based in the collective action and regime theory, the paper concentrates on the empirical analysis of 56 international environmental subregimes and points out some assumptions given from a fuzzy set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fs/QCA). ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A fundamental causal aspiration of international environmental policymaking and associated social movements is to bring about change in the policies and institutions that shape human-environment interactions. Yet the transformation toward more sustainable resource use also requires a measure of stability in the new institutional arrangements, to ensure cumulative institutional strengthening across multiple political administrations, to undertake policy experimentation and lesson learning, to build social constituencies, and to tackle management problems (e.g., forestry, fisheries, watershed management) that require stewardship over long time horizons. Institutional stability is an especially acute concern in the chronically unstable political and economic environments of developing and transition economies. This paper takes stock of the state of our knowledge about institutional stability and change in different national settings, drawing on disparate research literatures on policy agenda-setting and implementation, social revolution and state-building, institutional economics, democratic consolidation, and common-pool resource regimes. The goal is to produce an analytic framework that can facilitate cumulative, cross-national research on the evolution of institutions for environmental management. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Development assistance agencies and banks make much of their funding for resource management conditional on the environmental sustainability of the projects and the use of participatory methods. Unfortunately, the efficacy of these conditionalities is limited by the unwillingness or inability of funders to enforce their own requirements and of recipient governments to abide by them. Nevertheless, these problems may be overcome by alliances of mid-level funding agency officials, officers of the implementing agencies of recipient states, and local NGOs and grassroots stakeholders. These "triple alliances" can avoid attempts by national governments to administer development assistance in ways that undermine the linked goals of sustainability and stakeholder empowerment, and overcome the tendency of funders to make only superficial efforts to enforce their own conditionalities. An examination of two cases from the Eastern Caribbean (a forest policy process in Grenada and a marine reserve in Dominica) shows how particular implementation strategies and dedicated personnel may achieve at least a partial fulfillment of the new conditionalities. The optimistic implication of this research is that development assistance can be a positive factor in sustainable development if it is part of an effort to institutionalize direct, sustained and constructive relationships among funders, recipient governments, and affected communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Globalization and the reconfiguration of political authority have made legitimacy a central concern in global environmental governance. In order to understand the challenge of gaining and maintaining authority in global governance, legitimacy must be examined not only from the common perspective of democratic theory, but also from legal and sociological perspectives that may diverge from the democratic normative ideal. Whereas these different conceptions can sometimes push in contradictory directions, the key to legitimate governance is in their convergence. Global environmental governance is evaluated in light of these conceptions. The prospects for achieving legitimacy are discussed in inter-state governance as well as various forms of hybrid and non-state environmental governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]