Environmental Change and Foreign Policy

Paul G. Harris, Paul G. Harris

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781134014804
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Politique

Environmental Change and Foreign Policy: Theory and Practice and its companion volume, Climate Change and Foreign Policy: Case Studies from East to West, examine and explain the role of foreign policy politics, processes and institutions in efforts to protect the environment and natural resources. They seek to highlight international efforts to address human-induced changes to the natural environment, analyze the actors and institutions that constrain and shape actions on environmental issues, show how environmental changes influence foreign policy processes, and critically assess environmental foreign policies.

Focusing on theory and practice, this book:

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• Introduces the concepts and theories of Environmental Foreign Policy, providing a theoretical overview as well as addressing the construction of nature, the symbolism of environmental policy, and business and government responses to climate change.

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• Explores the practice of Environmental Foreign Policy, describing how both developed and developing countries have approached a variety of environmental issues, including persistent organic pollutants, water, biodiversity, climate change and the trade-environment nexus.

This book will be of strong interest to scholars and students of environmental policy and politics, foreign policy, public policy, climate change and international relations.

1 Environmental foreign policy in theory and practice

Paul G. Harris

Environmental changes are among the greatest threats to the well-being and possibly the long-term survival of humankind, and they present profound challenges to many other species. It is therefore crucial that scholars and policy-makers do all that they can to understand the human relationship to the environment and the potential means of mitigating our impact on the planet. Much has been done to do this, but it is clear from ongoing global pollution, overuse of natural resources, and the failure of international regimes to adequately address most environmental problems, that the trend is – despite some successes – very much in the wrong direction. Species and habitats are being destroyed, water and air quality deteriorate unabated in most parts of the world, greenhouse gas emissions grow even as signs of climate change become increasingly unmistakable and dangerous – in addition to a huge range of other problems arising from industrialization and modern life. Given our failure to stop, let alone reverse, this trend, it seems reasonable and even imperative to look for new ways of understanding what is happening and why, and to find new ways for people and their governments to respond to environmental problems.

The bulk of literature on environmental policy and politics has tended to focus on various aspects of international cooperation and regimes, on one hand, and the processes of domestic environmental management and sustainable development, on another (see, for example, Lafferty and Meadowcroft 2001; Breitmeier et al. 2006). However, less attention has been given to what falls between and across the domestic and the international levels of analysis.¹ There is a “level” of policy that is both internal and external to states that also deserves attention. We can call this level of policy practice (which is also a level of policy analysis) foreign policy. Foreign policy can play an important, even central, role in determining whether governments and other environmental policy actors actually take steps to address ecological problems effectively. The aim of this book is to define and explore that role.

From a scholarly perspective, foreign policy is a subfield of political science and the study of international relations. It involves the interplay between domestic forces, institutions and actors – such as democratic principles, civil society, executive and legislative power structures, government agencies, and diplomatic personnel – and international forces, institutions and actors – such as the processes of globalization (economic, environmental, cultural), international organizations and regimes, and powerful countries, corporations, and nongovernmental organizations. As Gerner (1995: 17) observes:

Although no subfield in political science is completely self-contained, the study of foreign policy is somewhat unusual in that it deals with both domestic and international arenas, jumping from individual to state to systemic levels of analysis, and attempts to integrate all of these aspects into a coherent whole.

In this chapter, I want to introduce the case studies that follow by starting to answer several questions: What is foreign policy? How can we analyze, understand and explain foreign policy. That is, what is foreign policy analysis? What is environmental foreign policy? How can studying environmental foreign policy, and how might environmental foreign policy analysis, help us to better understand how people and especially governments organize themselves to address pollution and ecological decline?

Foreign policy and foreign policy analysis were popular subjects among political scientists in past decades. I want to step back and look at it again. I then want to ask how more concerted, conscious and systematic scholarly attention to foreign policy and foreign policy analysis might aid in finding solutions to environmental problems. I want to point out what is special about the processes of foreign policy for domestic and international environmental action, and to suggest how foreign policy analysis can move us closer to understanding important variables influencing that action. I devote attention to the second question – What is foreign policy analysis? – because foreign policy analysis has been largely closeted for a generation, and because its methodology has not been widely applied to environmental problems. Environmental foreign policy analysis can help to close the gap between the problems we face and our understanding of them.

Subsequent chapters in this book explore conceptions and theories of environmental foreign policy and analyze environmental foreign policy as practiced in a number of important issue areas. Those chapters are summarized below. Together, they help to delineate the field of environmental foreign policy analysis and demonstrate its utility in helping to illuminate the human dimensions of environmental change.

Foreign policy

“Foreign policy” is a concept that means different things to different people, so it can be difficult to define.² Generally speaking, foreign policy is and is not that which is normally the central focus of many other approaches to understanding international relations: it is what comes between strictly or mostly domestic politics and what is strictly or mostly happening at the international and global levels, while being connected to and affected by both. Foreign policy is not purely about either international policy (as the term might suggest) or domestic policy, but neither is it separate from either. James Rosenau (1968: 310) defined foreign policy as “governmental undertakings directed toward the external environment.” Foreign policy is, in one sense, the “interpenetration of individual states by interests and forces that necessarily restrain or limit the freedom of action of their political leaders and decision makers” (Thompson and Macridis 1976: 2). F. S. Northredge, one of the most prescient observers of foreign policy, wrote of the “paradox of foreign policy”:

that its aims, the product of interaction between pressures internal and external to the state, have a certain perennial quality about them … and yet the implementation of these aims in the concrete circumstances of the time has to bow to ever-changing realities.

(Northredge 1968: 12)

Indeed, globalization and other forces of modernization, notably transboundary and global environmental changes, mean that more of what was once purely national is now the subject of foreign policy. Thus, Morse (1970: 376) points out that “linkages between domestic and foreign policies constitute the basic characteristic of the breakdown in the distinction between foreign and domestic affairs in the modernized, interdependent international system.”

In short, foreign policy – albeit related to the external world (as the term suggests) – cannot be divorced from domestic affairs. It is about the interactions between domestic and international affairs. From a policy perspective, foreign policy encompasses the objectives that officials of national governments seek to attain; the values and principles underlying those objectives; the methods by which the objectives are sought; the processes by which these objectives, principles and methods are developed and implemented; and the actors and forces – international and domestic – shaping these attributes (cf. Kegley and Wittkopf 1996: 7). As Rosenau (1968: 314) acknowledged, to the dismay of many foreign policy analysts, foreign policy encompasses “a vast range of phenomena. Circumstances can arise whereby virtually every aspect of local, national, and international politics may be part of the initiatory or responsive stage of the foreign policy process.” To be sure, this suggests a high degree of complexity in foreign policy processes and analyses of them. But all is not lost; we can use theory and method to tease out key actors, variables and forces. What we cannot do is ignore the vast range of phenomena to which Rosenau points.

Foreign policy analysis

How can we analyze and thereby understand and explain (and possibly help officials and stakeholders manipulate) foreign policy? What is foreign policy analysis? It is here where the idea of foreign policy may be useful in understanding today’sefforts to address environmental problems that – like foreign policy itself – are so often about what happens both within and beyond national borders. Foreign policy analysis, a discipline that arguably had its heyday more than a generation ago, captures variables that are seldom fully examined by methods of studying environmental issues from mostly national or mostly international perspectives.

How can foreign policy be analyzed? Kenneth Thompson and Roy Macridis describe “ideological” and “analytical” approaches to analyzing foreign policy, advocating the latter (Thompson and Macridis 1976: 2–5). The former approach sees foreign policies as the consequences of “prevailing political, social, and religious beliefs” (ibid.: 2). From a psychological view-point, foreign policy analysis “looks to the motives or ideologies of leaders or governments as essential, if not the sole, determinant of policy” (ibid.: 3). In contrast, the analytical approach proposes that policy “rests on multiple determinants, including the state’s historic tradition, geographic location, national interest, and purposes and security needs. To understand foreign policy, the observer must take into account and analyze a host of factors” (ibid.: 3). Thompson and Macridis argue that foreign policy is “susceptible to analysis in terms of a checklist of elements that exist, that can be identified, and that merge and comprise the bases of foreign policy” (ibid.: 5). This checklist of significant factors in the study of foreign policy includes: (1) “relatively permanent” material elements (i.e., geography and natural resources), “less permanent” material elements (i.e., industrial and military establishments, changes in industrial and military capacity), quantitative human elements (population) and qualitative human elements (policymakers and leaders; the roles of ideology and information); (2) foreign policy-making process (executive agencies and legislatures) and non-governmental agencies (political parties, interest groups, media, public opinion); and (3) trends and ideas, such as national purposes of security, power and economic development (ibid.: 6). To these national purposes we can add environmental sustainability and “environmental security” (Pirages and Cousins 2005).

Michael Brecher, Blema Steinberg and Janice Stein propose an approach to foreign policy analysis, the “foreign policy system,” which comprises a classification of foreign policy components into three categories – inputs, process and outputs – and which is “constantly absorbing demands and channeling them into a policy machine which transforms these inputs into decisions or outputs” (Brecher et al. 1969: 80). The inputs include the external (global, bilateral, etc.) and internal (economic capability, political structure, interest groups, etc.) environments, communication (including the media), and the “psychological environment” (ideology, personalities, pressure from elites, etc.). The process consists of the formulation of strategic and tactical decisions in traditional foreign policy areas (e.g., military– security, political–diplomatic, economic–developmental, cultural–status) and the implementation of decisions by governmental actors. The outputs are the substance of those decisions (ibid.: 80). Brecher, Steinberg, and Stein believe that this sort of foreign policy analysis will achieve “an operationally viable method to explore state behavior in depth and breadth” (ibid.: 93).

Harold Jacobson and William Zimmerman argued that “traditional” explanations of foreign policy can be categorized according to five variables: systemic, environmental, societal, governmental and idiosyncratic/psychological (Jacobson and Zimmerman 1969: 7–9). The systemic approach sees foreign policy behavior resulting from the “nature of the international system of which [states] are a part, or because of the role which they [states] have been assigned or have chosen to play within the system” (ibid.: 7). In contrast, the other approaches focus on the characteristics of individual states as being the key variables. The environmental approach focuses on a state’s geography and raw materials. The societal approach sees societal forces and national “personality” as important explanatory variables for analysis. The governmental approach examines the characteristics of the ruling regime and the state’s system of government. The idiosyncratic/psychological approach focuses on personalities. As Jacobson and Zimmerman see it, of these approaches to explaining foreign policy, the systemic approaches are “the most elegant and esthetically attractive. [But] They are also the most difficult to relate to empirical reality” and they “give little indication of the dynamic of state behavior” (ibid.: 9). This is not to say that any one of the other approaches is ideal; each provides valuable insights even while failing to establish a validated theory of foreign policy (ibid.: 10).

Valerie Hudson and Christopher Vore (1995: 212–38) describe three types of foreign policy analysis: comparative foreign policy, foreign policy decision-making and foreign policy context.³ Comparative foreign policy has sought to “tease out cross-nationally applicable generalizations about the foreign policy behavior of states in a systematic and scientific fashion” (ibid.: 212).⁴ Rosenau, perhaps the foremost proponent of comparative foreign policy (see Rosenau 1968), in particular, wanted scholars to develop “middle-range theory – theory that mediated between grand principles and the complexity of reality,” and he emphasized the integration of information derived from several levels of analysis – from the international system, at one extreme, to the individual decision-maker, at the other (Hudson and Vore 1995: 213; see Rosenau 1966). Rosenau wanted explanations of foreign policy that were “multilevel and multicausal, synthesizing information from a variety of social science knowledge systems” (Hudson and Vore 1995: 213). He took a behavioralist, “scientific” approach to comparative foreign policy (ibid.: 215).

Analysis of foreign policy decision-making (ibid.: 213–17; see Snyder et al. 1963 and Gold 1978) seeks to illuminate the roles of foreign policy-making in groups, organizations and bureaucracies (the so-called bureaucratic politics approach), and notably the nexus of policy objectives and implementation. This perspective seeks to show how “‘rational’ foreign policy-making can be upended by the political entities through which decision makers must work,” often because there is “slippage” between policy-making and implementation (Hudson and Vore 1995: 217). The study of foreign policy context examines the “psycho-milieu of the individuals and groups making a foreign policy decision” (ibid.: 213) notably the “beliefs, attitudes, values, experiences, emotions, and conceptions of nation and self,” as well as the “milieu of decision making that includes culture, history, geography, economics, political institutions, ideology, demographics, and innumerable other factors [that] shape society context in which the decision maker operates” (ibid.: 217; see Sprout and Sprout 1965). From this perspective, the characteristics of individual decision-makers, their perceptions and misperceptions, national attributes of countries, opinions of elites and the masses, societal groups, cultural and social factors – as well as the international system in which these actors operate – matter greatly in determining (and understanding) foreign policy (Hudson and Vore 1995: 217–19, 226). Importantly, the boundaries between these approaches – and of course the real-world actors, institutions and forces they illuminate – often overlap.

Much of foreign policy analysis is about ascertaining how domestic politics, agencies and forces shape foreign policies. Northredge (1968: 23) argued that:

There is...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• Preface
• List of abbreviations
• 1 Environmental foreign policy in theory and practice
• PART I Theory
• PART II Practice