Environmental Cooperation in Southeast Asia

ASEAN's Regime for Trans-boundary Haze Pollution

Paruedee Nguitragool

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781136923296
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

One of the most challenging environmental threats to the ten countries of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) has been the haze, the sickening and deadly cloud of smoky pollution caused by widespread burning of land and forests in Indonesia. This book examines both the threat and response to it by analysing environmental cooperation in Southeast Asia from an international regime perspective.

Tracing the development of regional cooperation on the haze and evaluating the effectiveness of the cooperation, the author argues that the haze crisis, combined with the economic crisis of 1997, has profoundly challenged the ASEAN modus operandi, and resulted in ASEAN's efforts to establish an environmental regime to cope with environmental challenges. The emerging ASEAN haze regime is a unique case study of a regional environmental institution in multi-levelled global environmental governance.

Based on in-depth original research, this case study is integrated into international relations, political science, and comparative political analysis literatures and contributes to a better understanding of processes within the regional organisation.

1
Introduction

Southeast Asian haze and Indonesia’s land and forest fires

Politics of the environment is one of the most contentious political matters in the modern globalized era. It covers issues ranging from basic urban pollution to nature conservation, distribution of scarce resources, international trade and human rights. In Southeast Asia, environmental problems such as hazardous wastes, transboundary water pollution and depletion of fish stocks have caused domestic confrontation and strained inter-state relations. Despite various efforts to solve these problems, unsustainable economic activities and the unequal distribution of power continue to be the causes of ecological degradation and regional insecurity.

As a regional organization, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) is struggling to protect its stunning ecology. That ASEAN is now working hard to cope with environmental problems may seem against the conventional view and the association’s historical records. In the 1980s and the early 1990s, ASEAN fought vigorously to reject the developed countries’ proposals to establish environmental trade rules and other green obligations. Throughout the following decades, however, the perception of ASEAN leaders towards the environment, along with their political stances, has changed gradually. The association has become increasingly active in combating many transnational environmental problems and in fostering an environmentally sustainable community in Southeast Asia. It has developed a range of strategies to cope with environmental challenges, including sub-regional projects, regional action plans and environmental agreements. Beyond the regional borders, it has also engaged the Plus Three counterparts (China, Japan and Republic of Korea) in a dialogue to exchange their views on global environmental issues such as biodiversity, climate change, clean technology and hazardous waste management.

Although ASEAN has not succeeded in creating a unified environmental standardregion-wide, its environmental cooperation, at least in principle, constitutes an important layer within the multi-level environmental governance, linking the somewhat disparate and detached local and international environmental institutions. Its importance lies in a belief that regional frameworks can reasonably cope with environmental problems that are too large for a single state to solve, but too small to attract global attention. The success of regional cooperation and effective governance in Western Europe confirms this. The European Union (EU) has developed directives and legislations to ensure compliance with many international regimes. Even without being a party to these institutions, it has established supranational enforcement mechanisms and supported effective implementation by its member states.

Like the EU, ASEAN was established and has evolved to foster regionalism. It has, however, taken a different path for regional integration and institution building. Given the different historical development and circumstances of the EU and ASEAN, this book does not aim at drawing a comparison between the European and ASEAN environmental governance. Rather, in order to provide a useful lesson on environmental cooperation in the developing world, it is more fruitful to examine regional efforts in a particular issue area that is linked to other environmental and social problems and has international implications. This account not only contributes to an understanding of environmental cooperation within a specific regional institution, it also illuminates the underlying problems as well as dynamics of environmental politics in a particular region.

Although there are many environmental problems threatening the security of Southeast Asia, it is Indonesia’s land and forest fires and its associated haze – the sickening cloud of smoke pollution – that contribute to the awareness of common vulnerability and shared ecology. Land fires normally refer to the burning of bush and scrublands, grasslands, areas of shifting cultivation and areas under permanent agriculture and settlements. Forest fires, on the other hand, occur mostly in degraded forests, where humidity dramatically decreases as a result of unsustainable exploitation of rain forests. Between the second half of the 1997 and early 1998, both types of fires burned down a total area of about 11.7 million hectares in Indonesia, killing a number of endangered species and leaving many homeless. The associated haze covered a total area of three million square kilometres, affecting more than 70 million people in Brunei, Malaysia, Singapore, southern parts of Thailand, some parts of the Philippines and the Northern Territory state of Australia (Barber and Schweithelm, 2000; Tacconi, 2003). Million tons of carbon dioxide (CO₂) and other greenhouse gases (GHGs) were emitted into the atmosphere, surpassing emissions from the entire Western Europe over the same period (Tay, 1999). The hovering haze also caused a sharp drop in tourism, cancellation of flights and suspension of work and school activities, not to mention the long-term effects on ecology.

The fires during 1997–98 were neither the first nor the last flames ever occurred in the region. Serious burning took place in 1982–83, 1987, 1991 and 1994. Only after the 1997–98 disaster, however, did the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) as well as the international community turn their attention to this problem, announcing the incident an environmental disaster. Terms such as ‘forest fires’ and ‘hot spots’ have been used constantly by the media, Southeast Asian governments and some international and local organizations to identify the supposedly ‘unwanted’ fire that causes hazy smoke and needs to be extinguished.

Since 1999, the problems of land and forest fires and haze repeat almost annually. Their international impacts have triggered assistance and cooperation both bilaterally and multilaterally. Among the most active organizations working to solve the problems is ASEAN. The association has initiated a series of programmes and policies aimed at extinguishing ongoing fires and preventing future fires that could result in transboundary air pollution in the region. Although this cooperation is mostly non-binding and is based on soft legal instruments, it has produced some positive changes at both the regional and domestic levels.

At its core, this book argues that the haze crisis, combined with economic crisis of 1997, has profoundly challenged the ASEAN modus operandi – characterized by the ASEAN way of diplomacy and the norms of non-intervention/ non-interference – and resulted in ASEAN’s efforts to establish an environmental regime to cope with environmental challenges. The regime should, at least in principle, play a pivotal role in combating the regional haze and its fire causes in a particular country. This is because, first, cooperation at the regional level provides a framework large enough to address the ecological interdependence of the member states. Second, the geographical proximity of these countries also allows for rapid assistance should one country promptly request. Besides, institutionalized cooperation under an international treaty is possible because of the limited number of cooperating parties which generally make negotiation not too difficult to achieve. Indeed, cooperation at the regional level such as ASEAN is an appropriate option for effective solutions to transboundary pollutions and many other environment problems.

Regime theory and ASEAN cooperation

Although there are many publications on ASEAN response to Indonesia’s land and forest fires and haze (Florano, 2004; Jones, 2004, 2006; Tan, 1999, 2004b, 2005; Tay, 1998, 1999, 2002), most literature is restricted to an evaluation of the effectiveness of ASEAN cooperation in terms of problem solving. Using problem solving as the only criterion, most scholars and observers hasten to criticize ASEAN. They condemn either the association’s environmental negligence or its adherence to the principle of non-interference as the root of the organization’s failure to prevent the recurrence of haze and fires. Although their accounts are valid, without examining ASEAN’s internal structure and the underlying causes of Indonesia’s land and forest fires, a fair judgement of ASEAN’s collective operation cannot be made.

This book takes a different approach. It examines the ‘processes’ by which a regional environmental institution has emerged and affected the environment of ASEAN, including the problems of land and forest fires and haze. It starts with the question of why ASEAN has adopted, instead of others, certain strategies and instruments to solve the burning problems and haze. This question is particularly important, as it leads to an examination of the prospects of the strategies ASEAN policymakers perceived, and to the underlying problems that constrain these policymakers from pursuing other solutions. An understanding of these conditions is crucial for an examination of both the rationale and effectiveness of ASEAN cooperation. It also signifies the association’s role and relevance as an actor in the multi-layered global environmental governance.

ASEAN was seen as a successful regional organization in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The financial crisis of the 1990s, however, has changed this view almost completely. ASEAN became discredited, mainly because of its inability cope with the crisis. However, the organization neither collapsed, nor became irrelevant. Rather, under the recent institutional restructuring, ASEAN has taken centre stage in Southeast Asian politics. Indeed, one cannot completely understand inter-state relations and politics of the environment in Southeast Asian without considering ASEAN.

Important is the fact that ASEAN regionalism, which began with the security concerns in 1967, has spilled over into the area of the environment in the following four decades. Regionalization of the environment is driven by the diffusion of environmental norms and the pressing ecological problems resulted from rapid industrialization, urbanization and steady population growth. The impacts of these problems are closely intertwined with the security of the member states as well as that of the region as a whole. Indonesia’s land and forest fires and the associated haze are cases in point. They plunged the region severely affected by the crumbling economy into another ecological chaos. Consequently, ASEAN political leaders perceived the increased environmental risks and vulnerability. They eventually negotiated an Agreement on Transboundary Haze Pollution – an international binding treaty they traditionally abhorred.

Like elsewhere, the adverse impacts of environmental problems accelerate the inclusion of environmental issues into the political agenda. The degree of these impacts, however, does not always lead to certain policy option, although it may result in the prioritization of environmental issues. Rather, the policies adopted are the results of extensive negotiations at both the regional and domestic levels. In order to cope with the haze, ASEAN negotiate the Regional Haze Action Plan (RHAP) (1997) and the Haze Agreement (2002). The negotiations for the two accords, however, took place at different points in time and had different objectives, although both share a common goal of mitigating the impacts of the haze. The action plan is an ad hoc, non-binding accord created to cope with the immediate haze impacts during the haze crisis of 1997–98. The haze agreement, in contrast, is a legally binding treaty. With a long-term aim of providing an institutional framework for cooperation, it incorporates the earlier haze-related policies, including the action plan and institutionalizes them as binding obligations.

Regime theory

While an analysis of the treaty’s provisions and other haze policy contents is useful in an examination of ASEAN cooperation, this analysis alone is inadequate. Indeed, what is needed is a larger approach to examine the reality of cooperation, the processes influencing cooperation and how this cooperation could contribute to problem solving. A theoretical framework that can be applied in this case is regime theory. Although International Relations scholars define international regimes differently, international regimes in most literature refer to social institutions. According to the most accepted and oft-cited definition, international regimes comprise principles, norms, rules and decision-making procedures. While principles refer to beliefs of facts, causation and rectitude, norms are standards of behaviours defined in terms of rights and obligation. Rules are prescriptions and proscription for action. Decision-making procedures are practices for making collective choices (Krasner, 1983: 2). The four components govern the interactions of actors in a specific issue area. They may be enshrined in one or more treaties, but altogether they give rise to an international regime.

Although the concept of international regimes has been widely applied, particularly in the issues of trade and the environment, it is worth addressing a few conceptual problems to avoid confusion that may arise in this book. First, the concept of international regimes, as provided by Krasner (1983) above, does not include organizational arrangements created to reinforce the regimes, making the effectiveness of the institutions difficult to measure. This limitation is also related to the second problem, that is, the confusion between international regimes and international organizations. In many cases, policymakers create international organizations to implement the principles, norms, rules and decision-making procedures of an existing or emerging regime. These organizations are, therefore, operational mechanisms, and by themselves not international regimes. At times, these organizations may become so salient that they obscure the underlying principles, norms or rules that underpin their existence. A good example is the World Trade Organization (WTO), the successor to the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). It dominates the international discourse on trade, although its actual responsibilities are to facilitate the negotiation and implementation of new trade agreements, and to ensure compliance by all member countries. WTO is thus part of the global trade regime that arises from the underlying principle of trade liberalization, norms, rules and decision-making procedures enshrined in various treaties.

Other problems include the vagueness of the definition and the difficulties in differentiating the four components of regimes from one another. Rules, for example, are ambiguous, because it can be applied to both in the sense of regulation and prescription (Levy et al., 1995). So as to avoid these confusions, Robert Keohane (1993) suggests that an international regime should be defined in formal terms such as explicit rules agreed by more than one state. It must also be recognized as having continuing validity. This is indeed a significant criterion, distinguishing a living regime from a tiger paper – an international contract that yields no consequence. For an international regime to emerge, it is important that a regime has observable impacts, either on actors’ behaviour or on the problem the regime is created to address.

In order to examine ASEAN cooperation and to understand the dynamics of environmental politics in Southeast Asia, a number relevant theories and assumptions deserve special attention and must be reviewed at length. To start with, regime theory, the overarching approach applied in this book, is grounded in game theory and the liberal tradition of international relations. It has, however, incorporated the various streams of theory to explain international cooperation in specific issue areas. The realist assumptions, for instance, stress power factors, such as power configuration, the distributional aspects of cooperation and the hegemonic stability theory. The emergence and strength of international regimes, therefore, depend on the existence of a dominant state, or leadership, in a specific issue area. The liberal assumptions, however, underline mutual interests as a precondition for cooperation. According to the functionalist arguments, regimes provide states with information, particularly about their partners, and thus reduce information costs as well as uncertainty caused by the lack of information (Keohane, 1983). Important, however, is the fact that even though states normally have a mutual interest in combating a common environmental problem, conflicts may occur over preferred means and strategies. This situation resembles that of the Battle of Sexes, where couples have divergent preferences about what to do when they spend time together. In this situation, several options exist, forcing states to select one of the available choices collectively. In case they fail to reach a compromise, cooperation is unlikely to take place.

Many theorists accept the liberal assumption of interest as a major driving force for international cooperation. Nevertheless, instead of seeing interest as the only significant variable for a regime formation and existence, they acknowledge the importance of cognitive factors such as knowledge and ideas in shaping the perceptions, beliefs, expectations and preferences of actors. In other words, decision-makers are influenced by knowledge in defining the interests at stake in solving a problem (Haas, 1990).

Some scholars have gone further to reject the rationality of actors. Instead, as Hasenclever et al. (1997) note, they inquire into the origins and dynamics of the self-understandin...