Traditions and Trends in Global Environmental Politics

International Relations and the Earth

Olaf Corry, Hayley Stevenson, Olaf Corry, Hayley Stevenson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351800792
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Économie
• Subtopic: Développement durable

How can a divided world share a single planet? As the environment rises ever higher on the global agenda, the discipline of International Relations (IR) is engaging in more varied and transformative ways than ever before to overcome environmental challenges.

Focusing in particular on the key trends of the past 20 years, this volume explores the main developments in the global environmental crisis, with each chapter considering an environmental issue and an approach within IR. In the process, adjacent fields including energy politics, science and technology, and political economy are also touched on.

Traditions and Trends in Global Environmental Politics is aimed at anybody interested in the key international environmental problems of the day, and those seeking clarification and inspiration in terms of approaches and theories that decode how the environment is accounted for in global politics. It will be an essential resource for students and scholars of global environmental politics and governance, environmental studies and IR.

1

IR and the Earth

Societal multiplicity and planetary singularity

Olaf Corry and Hayley Stevenson

If the basic problem of the international is societal multiplicity – the simple but surprisingly consequential fact that the world is divided into distinct societies (Rosenberg 2006) – the basic problem of the global environment could be said to be planetary singularity; that we all inhabit, in the end, one finite interconnected space. Together these two starting points make for the basic conundrum of International Relations and the Earth: how does a divided world live on a single globe?

The discipline of International Relations (IR) has not always been considered the appropriate place to take up the challenge of providing answers to this question. To some, ‘the environment’ was a subject on the periphery of the practice and discipline of International Relations. Being ‘just another issue’ like race it would demand a reaction but not ‘alter the mechanisms of international politics’ (Smith 1993: 32). The trans-border or global nature of many environmental problems sits awkwardly alongside concepts such as the national interest, sovereignty and territoriality. Likewise the normative dimensions of some conceptions of environmentalism arguably go against more materialist and interest-based approaches to IR. For example, why should the basic idea of sustainable development – ensuring that meeting the needs of the current generation does not compromise the needs of future generations – have traction in a world plagued by competition even within the current generation?

Yet, IR is in a sense the obvious home for considering how humanity (divided as it is) deals with the challenge of sharing a singular and finite space. The raison d’être of International Relations as a subject is to grapple with problems of coexistence: societal multiplicity is a challenge precisely because multiple polities have to share the same spaces. For Hedley Bull the international system was a ‘system’ only in so far as the individual units interacted enough to have to take each other into account (Bull 1977). The environment is now a major sphere in which the many different actors of the world have to take each other into account.

This book takes stock of and explores the ways in which International Relations has confronted and contributed to understanding how a divided world deals with and manages the environment; but it also aims to provide an overview of how IR as a discipline has itself changed and developed as a result of doing so, particularly over the past two decades. Which perspectives have been conceived and/or shaped through analysis of environmental problems? Which actors, processes and images have become part of the IR tapestry as a result of environmental political analysis? Which approaches, theories and concepts have, due to environmental themes, been imported from other disciplines and to what effect, tugging the focus and perhaps even the identity of the discipline itself in various directions? The broad argument is that IR has impacted on the politics of the environment, but the reverse is also true: IR is not what it hypothetically would have been without the international politics of the environment.

This introduction first provides an overview of the recent rise of ‘the environment’ in international politics and offers an account of how this builds on older ways in which the natural world has made up part of the stuff of international politics. Second, it surveys the main traditions and approaches to studying International Relations of the environment, painting a picture of diversification in two senses: from the study of ‘environmental multilateralism’ towards a broader ‘global environmental politics’, and from ‘problem-solving’ to a greater diversity of ‘critical’ approaches, some of which originate in disciplines outside core IR territory. While the traditional problem-solving approaches have tended to treat the environment as just another issue for International-Relations-as-usual, critical approaches have begun reflecting on the theoretical implications of taking environmentalism seriously (see also Eckersley 2013). Third, the direction of enquiry is therefore reversed to ask, in effect, ‘what has the environment ever done for IR?’, before the plan for the rest of the book sketches the content and direction of the ensuing chapters that explore the problematique of International Relations and the Earth.

The short and long history of international environmental politics

The politics of the environment is in some ways considered a somewhat marginal theme in International Relations – one issue area among many, and of relatively recent import. At the same time, the natural world is part of the foundations and deep history of International Relations. Recently, the two perspectives – the environment as an ‘issue’ on the one hand and nature as a fundamental condition for the international system on the other – have gradually begun to align. But first it is worth considering each in turn.

As a recognisable concept and political issue, ‘the environment’ is thought to have emerged onto the international scene as a result of what is now sometimes called the Great Acceleration: the dramatic post–Second World War surge in human impact on the Earth in terms of population, resource use, pollution, energy use and the spread of technology (Costanza et al. 2007). Environmental change caused by human activity is as old as hunting and agriculture, but it became visible, eventually on an international and later planetary scale, when the sheer scale and velocity of human activity rose with the expansion of fossil fuel power and the spread of industrialisation. The post-war boom continued and accentuated earlier local and regional politics of pollution and/or resource management, lifting it to a new level of prominence. Sometime around the 1960s the concept of ‘the environment’ itself emerged (Vogler 1996: 7). In its simplest terms, ‘environment’ refers to whatever is around or next to something of more central concern. In anthropocentric terms, the environment referred to whatever is around humans and human societies. Key ideational landmarks such as Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962), the 1972 Club of Rome report on population and scarcity, and the rise of global environmental popular culture, fed by images of planet Earth taken from space in the late 1960s, all pushed ‘the environment’ gradually up the political agenda. In contrast to earlier elite notions of environmentalism (such as Manifest Destiny, wildlife management, and conservationism) (Brulle 2000), modern environmentalism was more of a popular movement, and more global. In particular it also became centrally concerned with human development (see Falkner 2012).

By 1972, the idea of an environmental crisis had gained sufficient momentum to prompt the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment (UNCHE) held in Stockholm. This saw environment put explicitly onto the agenda of the world’s central international institution and established 26 principles of environmental protection within a framework of human rights and development. The foundations of much of the world’s subsequent legal and political infrastructure for conducting global environmental politics can be traced back to Stockholm and the processes leading up to it. Multilateralism, international law and scientific guidance were established as the cornerstones of international environmental negotiation and governance. The UNCHE conference, the Club of Rome publication Limits to Growth in 1972 (Meadows et al. 1972) and the global oil shock of 1973 meant that debates about global resources, population and pollution filled out the environmental agenda for at least a decade. The 1972 Stockholm conference had kicked off a flurry of negotiations on issues ranging from the protection of birds and the control of desert locusts to the prevention of marine pollution and the regulation of whaling (IEA database, Version 2014.3). As a result, some 142 multilateral environmental agreements were signed by the end of that decade. These were designed to address problems of a trans-border or beyond-border nature and their geographical scope was largely limited to specific regions rather than the entire globe.

The ensuing global recession in the 1970s and then the debt and development crises of the 1980s, saw environmental concerns dampened somewhat, partially predicted by issue attention-cycle theory (Downs 1972). But around the mid-1980s, after the Chernobyl nuclear accident, and the beginning emergence of public concern about global warming and ozone depletion, the environment again rose up the political agenda. Even many Eastern-bloc protest movements and the subsequent revolutions of 1989–1991 began life as environmental or conservation organisations and dissidents such as Václav Havel in Czechoslovakia and Rudolf Bahro in East Germany fashioned themselves as ‘third way’ critics of unsustainable capitalist and state socialist systems (Corry 2014a). Meanwhile the rise of green parties and environmental non-governmental organisations (NGOs) in the West also gained traction while at the top, leaders as different as Mikhail Gorbachev and Margaret Thatcher put global environmental concerns on the geopolitical map. Within the United Nations (UN) system, the 1987 World Commission on Environment and Development produced the Brundtland Report linking development and sustainability formulaically in the term ‘ sustainable development’ (Brundtland Commission 1987).

The last decade of the twentieth century can in many ways be viewed as the golden age of environmental multilateralism. During this time, the international community negotiated hundreds of new agreements, amendments to agreements, and new protocols with global and regional scope (IEA database, Version 2014.3). The 1992 Rio Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) brought the countries of the world together around ‘sustainable development’ and Agenda 21. Another mega-conference was arranged for 2002 in Johannesburg, continuing the globalising and institutionalisation of sustainable development ideas, tying environmental and social issues together within an international legal framework. In addition, single issues such as ozone depletion and climate change were tackled in separate processes and summits: the Montreal Protocol was agreed in 1987 and the Kyoto Protocol in 1997. More recently climate change has taken a central and leading role in global environment politics, and the 2009 Copenhagen COP15 summit and COP21 in Paris represent high watermarks of expectations and environmental regime-building activity. In this sense, as a discrete issue, the environment has a relatively short history behind it, albeit with a sharply rising profile in international politics.

If, however, ‘nature’ rather than ‘environment’ is taken as the central concept, international politics was already long ago deeply concerned with it: geopolitics is embedded in the distribution, exploitation and management of natural resources – what today might be termed ‘ecosystem services’. Since Thomas Malthus’ ideas about scarcity met with Charles Darwin’s theory of competitive selection, population, territory, soil and other resources were thought to be central to politics between nations and indeed to the cardinal issue of war and peace (Bashford 2014). The idea of Lebensraum is most infamous for its use by Nazis to legitimate Eastern European expansion, but the idea is considered an early contribution to geopolitics, and originated from a German geographer, Friedrich Ratzel, interested in human migration and the impact of the physical environment on societies. The idea that war was caused by population pressures and the requirement of ‘dynamic’ peoples to have access to resources became a common theme in imperial capitals and at international conferences and institution-building efforts from the nineteenth century onwards.

Even further back in history, geography and the climate itself was considered the starting point for explanations of international politics. As Daniel Deudney has pointed out, whereas ‘recent literature typically casts nature as a new factor in politics, the idea that nature is a powerful force shaping human political institutions is extremely old’ (Deudney 1999: 25–26). For Aristotle, climate and agricultural aspects of territory were behind the rise and spread of empires and modern writers such as Robert Kaplan or Jared Diamond have taken up similar themes, exploring the importance of topography, oceans, land fertility and technological innovation (Kaplan 2009; Diamond 1997). For Marxist thinkers, ‘material’ factors have always been central to the trajectory of the capitalist system within which the modern international system developed. Nature was not simply a factor of production acquiring value when mixed with labour. It is fundamental to a historical materialist view of human history (see Foster 2000). Even in the abstract world of game theory during the Cold War, John von Neumann (1955) warned: ‘“The great globe itself” is in a rapidly maturing crisis – a crisis attributable to the fact that the environment in which technological progress must occur has become both undersized and underorganized.’ Whereas the spread of industrialism and world political integration had provided the expansion of technology with a ‘geographical and political Lebensraum’, the limits and finite nature of the Earth were now being felt, von Neumann wrote.

Nevertheless, contemporary ideas about global environmental politics cannot be understood simply as a continuation of earlier ones. They differ in part because natural factors are no longer considered purely natural. That geography might be a variable rather than a constant condition of geopolitics is one example of an increasing awareness of an accelerated rate of change in Earth systems. With the advent of climate change and the prospect that not only climatic conditions but even territorial borders themselves may change as a result of human-induced sea level rises, the variability of geophysical conditions has become an emerging theme in global politics itself (Dalby 2014). Climate was once simply average weather, but with the growth of a ‘vast machine’ of globalist infrastructures including satellites, measuring stations, masses of data and models to process it (Edwards 2010), ‘the climate’ has been rendered governable – it has become a global governance-object with a potentially major structuring effect on the dynamics of the international system (Corry 2013). President François Hollande of France declared that the COP21 Paris Summit on climate change would ‘change the world’, either by securing an agreement and transforming energy and climate technological economics, or by failing and leaving the world open to radical climatic changes. It could be added that the politics of the climate have already changed international relations as such, with the Paris United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) summit in 2015 being the biggest gathering of state leaders in history.

Studying international environmental politics

IR has tackled environmental politics in a number of ways. If classical scholars studied the impact of nature on humans, contemporary international environmental scholarship began first with realist examinations of anarchy and environmental security, and then with liberal examinations of environmental multilateralism. More recently scholars have expanded their analysis to multilevel global environmental governance and sought insights in a more diverse set of theoretical traditions.

Anarchy and environment

While international institutions and cooperation became core themes of post-Cold War International Relations, for many ‘realist’ scholars the bread-and-butter of the discipline throughout the 1990s and beyond continued to be power, conflict and national security. Realist examinations of international environmental politics have fallen largely into two camps: those focusing on environmental conflict, and those exploring institutional environmental regimes established through hegemonic power.

In the first camp, realist scholars analyse the potential for violent conflict over natural resources, and observe environmental factors in existing inter-state conflict. Realists assume that environmental change is more likely to lead to conflict because states are driven to compete for scarce resources while maximising their relative power and security. Notable early environmental realists include Robert Kaplan, David Wirth and Thomas Homer-Dixon. Kaplan (1994) invoked a dystopian vision of a ‘coming anarchy’ in which ‘surging populations, s...