International Politics and the Environment

Ronald B Mitchell

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781446243220
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book provides a sophisticated overview of the theories, concepts and methods central to the complex and contentious field of International Environmental Politics (IEP). Ronald B Mitchell carefully introduces students to the political processes involved in both causing and resolving international environmental problems. Each fully integrated chapter:

• Links environmental policy to politics, bringing in a wide range of practical real-life examples
• Deepens students? theoretical understanding, helping them to identify and explain international environmental problems and their solutions
• Goes beyond description and develops students? ability to evaluate claims about outcomes in international environmental politics through empirical testing.

A rounded, in-depth examination of IEP, this book has been specifically written for graduate and advanced undergraduate courses in global environmental politics and modules of broader international relations programs.

SAGE Series on the Foundations of International Relations

Series Editors:

Walter Carlsnaes Uppsala University, Sweden

Jeffrey T. Checkel Simon Fraser University, Canada

International Advisory Board:

Peter J. Katzenstein Cornell University, USA

Emanuel Adler University of Toronto, Canada

Martha Finnemore George Washington University, USA

Andrew Hurrell Oxford University, UK

G. John Ikenberry Princeton University, USA

Beth Simmons Harvard University, USA

Steve Smith University of Exeter, UK

Michael Zuern Hertie School of Governance, Berlin, Germany

The SAGE Foundations series fills the gap between narrowly-focused research monographs and broad introductory texts, providing graduate students with state-of-the-art, critical overviews of the key sub-fields within International Relations: International Political Economy, International Security, Foreign Policy Analysis, International Organization, Normative IR Theory, International Environmental Politics, Globalization, and IR Theory.

Explicitly designed to further the transatlantic dialogue fostered by publications such as the SAGE Handbook of International Relations, the series is written by renowned scholars drawn from North America, continental Europe and the UK. The books are intended as core texts on advanced courses in IR, taking students beyond the basics and into the heart of the debates within each field, encouraging an independent, critical approach and signposting further avenues of research.

EXPLAINING INTERNATIONAL ENVIRONMENTAL POLITICS

International environmental politics is the study of the human impacts on the environment that garner international attention and the efforts that states take to address them. If international relations is the study of both the conflicts that arise among states and the cooperative efforts states make to address such conflicts as well as shared problems, international environmental politics is the study of the cooperation and conflict among governments that surround environmental degradation, natural resource use, and other human-generated impacts on the Earth and the efforts to address them.

Humans have been transforming the natural environment for thousands of years (Turner et al., 1990). So long as humans lived in relatively small groups of hunter-gatherers, their impacts did not differ much in kind or magnitude from those of other species. But, as humans developed tools, they began to use natural resources and the natural environment in ways that differed in kind from other species and that allowed human populations to grow at faster rates and with fewer constraints than other species. The agricultural revolution and, then, the industrial revolution produced explosions in the range and types of human environmental impacts, allowing the human population to grow even faster while also increasing the amount of natural resources each human used, the environmental degradation each caused, and their life span. The fossilized footprints left by early humans in Tanzania have been replaced by the larger and longer-lasting carbon footprints of modern humans. Human impacts increasingly exceed the bounds of natural variation and the environment’s ability to absorb and rebound from them. Although many environmental impacts are local, an increasing number of these cross borders or evoke concern among people in other countries. And much environmental damage has become global in nature, with impacts and implications for people in most, if not always all, countries in the world. In the last several decades, growing concerns about these problems have made international environmental problems an increasingly common and important part of international relations and foreign policy.

If international environmental problems are those impacts that humans have on the natural environment that raise concern in other countries, international environmental politics consists of the self-conscious efforts by some people to reduce these impacts and the response (or lack of response) to those efforts, whether by supporters, opponents, or indifferent bystanders. If we consider international conflict to involve situations in which one or more countries consider the existing state of the world as suboptimal relative to alternative states of the world, then international environmental politics is the study of why and when such conflicts arise over environmental issues and why and when efforts to resolve them succeed or fail.

Goals of the Book

This book seeks to help the reader understand international environmental politics and explain why it unfolds as it does. It focuses on the ‘why’ rather than the ‘what’ of international environmental politics. It engages many, though not all, of the major issues studied by scholars of international environmental politics. It introduces readers to the substance of international environmental politics through an explanatory rather than a descriptive framework. The book defines what international environmental agreements are and then reviews explanations of why humans harm the natural environment, why some of these harms emerge on the international scene, why negotiations sometimes succeed and sometimes fail, and why some international environmental treaties alter behavior and others do not. The book summarizes those explanations while helping the reader to think rigorously about how to identify the most compelling and convincing of several competing explanations of particular outcomes in international environmental politics. Chapters focus on particular outcomes as dependent variables, identify the ‘independent’ variables claimed to cause those outcomes, and delineate the logics by which, and the conditions under which, those causes operate. The book also includes causes proposed by scholars representing a range of schools of thought with the view of providing readers with the theoretical foundations for adjudicating between competing explanations of particular outcomes in international environmental politics of interest to them.

I provide tools designed to facilitate the reader’s own analysis of the major political aspects of any international environmental problem. Careful analyses of each stage of numerous international environmental problems have been, and will continue to be, undertaken in articles, books, and edited volumes by an increasingly large group of international relations scholars. Those analyses provide far more careful and rigorous explanations of particular cases than would be possible here. My goal, instead, is to offer a framework for thinking carefully about how we identify the causes of different outcomes in international environmental politics and to provide a list of ‘likely suspects’ that one must consider in explaining those outcomes. Thus, the book seeks to encourage readers to undertake more in-depth analyses of particular cases, or groups of cases, to expand our knowledge of why and when international society succeeds in addressing international environmental problems.

This book does not attempt to inform the reader in any depth about the many international environmental problems currently facing humanity nor the wide variety of efforts that have been and are being made to address them. Some important international environmental problems receive little or no attention in the pages that follow. Yet, as the number of international environmental problems has grown, generating a comprehensive list of those problems – let alone describing and explaining each – has become an encyclopedic task. The book also does not summarize several major debates that have engaged scholars and policy-makers, including those on sustainable development, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), world civic politics, and multi-national corporations. All of those issues have received extensive and well-informed treatment in other venues. It also focuses on international environmental politics, in the process giving less depth to the many important contributions from the fields of international law and international economics (Birnie and Boyle, 1992; Sands, 1994; Cameron et al., 1996; Swanson and Johnston, 1999; Barrett, 2003).

The book engages the issues of international environmental politics by focusing primarily on intergovernmental politics, the politics of interactions among governments. To be sure, there are limits to ‘green diplomacy’ among governments (Broadhead, 2002). And NGOs, scientists and epistemic communities, and large domestic and multinational corporations play increasingly important roles in how humans respond to international environmental problems (see, for example, Haas, 1992c; Garcia-Johnson, 2000; Betsill et al., 2006; Betsill and Corell, 2008). Such actors often contribute to intergovernmental efforts but also generate and implement innovative new ideas of their own, sometimes with and sometimes without any involvement by governments. Individuals as well as municipal and provincial governments often adopt ‘unilateral’ actions to address international environmental problems, actions that may not be coordinated with efforts in other countries but, nonetheless, help mitigate such problems. My focus here should not be taken as suggesting that non-intergovernmental attempts to address international environmental problems are unimportant or ineffective but instead as simply a choice to concentrate on the dynamics and processes of intergovernmental efforts.

I have structured my discussion of international environmental politics as a series of four policy stages. Those stages include the creation of international environmental impacts, their emergence as international problems, the negotiation of intergovernmental solutions, and the effectiveness of those solutions. Within the international environmental politics literature, differing theoretical, normative, and methodological perspectives generally coexist in complementary ways that enrich our understanding of global environmental politics. Analyzing international environmental politics in terms of the causes of major outcomes at each of these stages facilitates the desire here to have an inclusive list of potentially explanatory variables for such outcomes. The book’s approach also highlights that structural constraints on choices, on the one hand, and the participation, choices, and influence of state and non-state actors, on the other, may differ from one policy stage to the next.

Finally, this book reflects that both explanations based on structure and those based on agency are central to international relations and international environmental politics (Wendt, 1987; Dessler, 1989). Almost all international environmental outcomes in which we are interested reflect the influence of both deep-seated structural variables that are relatively unsusceptible to immediate and direct human manipulation and of people – human ‘agents’ – making decisions that provide more proximate explanations of outcomes, decisions that could have been made differently. Indeed, careful study of international environmental politics can prompt an uneasy tension between pessimism and optimism. Pessimism arises in response to evidence that environmental degradation is globally, historically, and culturally ubiquitous and results from deep-seated, difficult-to-change, structural forces that appear to make the creation of international environmental problems common but their resolution rare. Optimism arises from the (perhaps unwarranted) belief that humans can make better choices and evidence that sometimes such problems emerge on the international agenda, that sometimes states negotiate agreements to address them, and that sometimes those agreements effectively resolve problems. Fully understanding outcomes at different stages requires recognizing that structural factors do constrain the choices agents can make but leave room for political skill and energy in determining which of a more or less narrow range of potential outcomes actually occurs (Keohane, 1996: 24; Underdal, 2002: 37). Equally important, human choices, over time, can transform the ‘normally invariant’ structural forces that ‘shape how publics and officials ... experience and cope with the diverse challenges posed by environmental issues’ (Dessler, 1989: 461; Rosenau, 1993: 262).

A History of the Field

The study of international environmental politics is inherently interdisciplinary, since understanding ‘what is going on’ in a particular environmental realm often requires understanding political science and economics, biology and chemistry, law and philosophy, and atmospheric and oceanographic modeling. Outcomes that seem obvious when only factors of interest to one discipline are considered become puzzles when factors of interest to other disciplines are brought in and, conversely, outcomes that are puzzling from a particular discipline’s perspective make eminent sense when other disciplines’ perspectives are taken into account. Thus, understanding the adoption of protocols under the Convention on Long-Range Transboundary Air Pollution in which countries accepted ‘differentiated obligations’ that entailed significantly different costs for different countries requires an understanding of the political forces that were operating within a context in which atmospheric modelers, ecologists, and economists had demonstrated the environmental ineffectiveness and the economic costs of simply continuing the ‘common obligations’ approach of prior protocols. The application of cost-sharing formulas from a treaty addressing chloride pollution of the Rhine to one addressing chemical pollution of the Rhine becomes surprising only after recognizing the scientific and economic realities that France was the primary source of the former problem but was only one of many sources of the latter (Bernauer and Moser, 1996). The inclusion of a progressively diverse range of disciplines in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change since its first assessment reflects the increasing recognition that climate change cannot be properly understood and effectively addressed without interdisciplinary collaboration and understanding.

As detailed in Chapter 2, environmental problems were already on the international scene by the end of the nineteenth century. Countries had begun protecting various fish species, whales, and seals before the Second World War and had made efforts to address habitat degradation, endangered species, and river and marine pollution by the 1950s. Yet, international environmental politics only emerged as a subfield of international relations in the 1970s, in the wake of growing environmental concern, particularly in the United States. Almost four decades ago George Kennan called for the prevention of a ‘world wasteland’ (Kennan, 1970). Harold and Margaret Sprout, Richard Falk, Lynton Caldwell, and others authored books in the early 1970s that analyzed the issues raised at the United Nations’ 1972 Conference on the Human Environment (UNCHE), including in a special issue of International Organization (Falk, 1971; Sprout and Sprout, 1971; Caldwell, 1972; Kay and Skolnikoff, 1972; Utton and Henning, 1973). Through the 1970s and into the 1980s, several scholars dedicated significant attention to international environmental politics but they were joined by relatively few others (LeMarquand, 1977; Ophuls, 1977; Orr and Soroos, 1979; M’Gonigle and Zacher, 1979; Caldwell, 1980; Young, 1981; Carroll, 1983, 1988; Kay and Jacobson, 1983; Young, 1989b). Articles analyzing international environmental politics appeared infrequently in major international relations and political science journals. However, the field began to expand in the late 1990s, as additional scholars and practitioners took an interest in international environmental politics (Peterson, 1988; Benedick, 1989; Haas, 1989, 1990; Mathews, 1991).

The end of the Cold War, and the 1992 UN Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) held in Rio de Janeiro, made international environmental issues both politically and intellectually more salient. Two journals dedicated to the issues were launched – International Environmental Affairs and the Journal of Environment and Development – and articles on international environmental politics became more common in mainstream international relations journals. Several university presses (including MIT Press, Columbia University Press, and SUNY Press) developed series on international environmental politics that provided outlets for this growing scholarship. Sole authored and edited books dedicated to international environmental issues became more common (Choucri, 1993; Haas et al., 1993; Lipschutz and Conca, 1993; Sjostedt, 1993; Young and Osherenko, 1993b; Young, 1994a; Keohane and Levy, 1996; Underdal, 1998b; Underdal and Hanf, 2000). A new group of scholars began publishing doctoral and subsequent research (Litfin, 1994; Mitchell, 1994a; Princen and Finger, 1994; Sprinz and Vaahtoranta, 1994; Bernauer, 1995a; Miller, 1995; Wapner, 1996; Dauvergne, 1997; O’Neill, 2000). Major debates were engaged related to environmental security and the trade-environment relationship (Deudney, 1990; Homer-Dixon, 1990; Bhagwati, 1993; Daly, 1993; Zaelke et al., 1993; Esty, 1994b; Levy, 1995). Since 2000, this trend has continued as researchers have examined an increasingly broad spectrum of issues including the environmental influence of the World Bank and other international financial institutions (Gutner, 2002), the role of the European Union (Andonova, 2004), the influence of unilateral state policies (DeSombre, 2000), and the influence of science on international environmental policy (Social Learning Group, 2001a, 2001b; Walsh, 2004; Mitchell et al., 2006b). The field has now grown to the point that articles on international environmental politics appear regularly in mainstream journals and as near-essential elements in edited volumes covering the major issues in international relations. Indeed, recent growth in the amount and diversity of the literature has made it increasingly difficult to track.

This research has generated numerous theoretical propositions and a corresponding number of careful empirical studies. Initially, deductive theories generated little follow-up in terms of operationalization and testing while inductive case studies generated useful insights that often were not framed in ways which could facilitate their application and evaluation in other environmental realms. As a result, different terminologies and taxonomies of causal factors often overlapped with, but seemed unaware of, competing or complementary ones. Over the last decade, however, the field has begun to mature in several ways. Concentrated scholarly attention has generated considerable progress in the areas of international environmental regime effectiveness and the role of NGOs in international environmental governance (Underdal, 1992; Haas et al., 1993; Princen et al., 1995; Werksman et al., 1996; Brown Weiss and Jacobson, 1998; List and Rittberger, 1998; Simmons, 1998; Victor et al., 1998a; Wettestad, 1999; Young, 1999a; Betsill and Corell, 2001, 2008; Miles et al., 2002). Scholars increasingly engage critically with the work of other scholars (Sprinz and Helm, 1999; Hovi et al., 2003a, 2003b; Young, 2003) and pay increasing attention to methodological issues (Mitchell and Bernauer, 1998; Mitchell, 2002; Sprinz and Wolinsky-Nahmias, 2004; Underdal and Young, 2004). Databases that allow large-N studies have begun to be developed to complement the extensive set of case studies of global environmental governance (Miles et al., 2002; Mitchell, 2003, 2008; Breitmeier et al., 2006). This book builds on the theoretical and empirical insights developed by this extensive literature, organizing and summarizing it in ways that facilitate its application by the next generation of scholars.

Causation

This book presents a causal account of international environmental politics. It provides a foundation for understanding and explaining the dynamics and outcomes involved in the creation and resolution of the wide range of past, current, and likely future international environmental problems. It also focuses on the ‘whys’ of international environmental politics rather than the ‘whos’, ‘whats’, ‘whens’, and ‘wheres’. As background, this section delineates the perspectives on causation adopted in this book.

The following chapters investigate four analytic questions that correspond to the major stages of international environmental politics. First, why does the world face such a wide variety of international environmental problems? Second, why do some of these environmental problems emerge as issues on the international agenda while others do not? Third, why do countries devise intergovernmental solutions for some of these problems more quickly than for others? Fourth, why do some intergovernmental policies succeed at mitigating – and sometimes eliminating – the problems they address while others fail? These questions are preceded, in Chapter 2, by a discussion of what defines international environmental problems, what distinguishes them from other environmental and international problems, and of the various ways in which such problems can differ in politically important aspects of their ‘problem structure’.

I have also sought to develop the reader’s ability to think carefully about causes, about why certain outcomes and not others emerge during particular policy stages. To do so, it develops a theoretical framework designed to foster empirical explanation. Theory, whether arrived at inductively or deductively, provides insights that allow for generalization across a range of cases and supply the causal logic and predictions that are crucial to convincing explanations. Empirical explanation provides us with nuanced and accurate understandings of existing cases and allows us to provide nuanced and accurate policy advice about future cases. This book adopts an inclusive approach to theoretical claims in the belief that we can best understand and explain outcomes in international environmental politics by exploring all the potential explanations, rejecting them as unsatisfactory after consideration rather than precluding them from consideration.

Causal claims: theory and its empirical application

This book seeks a balance between an excessively theoretical treatment and an excessively empirical one. The usual theoretical distinctions made in international ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• CONTENTS
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Explaining international environmental politics
• 2 Defining and distinguishing international environmental problems
• 3 Sources of international environmental problems
• 4 The international emergence of environmental problems
• 5 Negotiating solutions to international environmental problems
• 6 Evaluating the effectiveness of international environmental institutions
• 7 The future of international environmental politics
• References
• Index