CHAPTER 5 THE ROLE OF ENVIRONMENTAL ORGANIZATIONS IN INTERNATIONAL ENVIRONMENTAL LAW

• Jurisdiction: United States

International Environmental Law for Natural Resources Practitioners
(Mar 1997)
CHAPTER 5
THE ROLE OF ENVIRONMENTAL ORGANIZATIONS IN INTERNATIONAL ENVIRONMENTAL LAW
David Hunter ¹
Center for International Environmental Law
Washington, D.C.

Under traditional views of international law, only nation-states have rights and responsibilities. Non-governmental actors, industry, and subnational governments are not allowed to participate in international law. Due to general trends of globalization, however, the nature of international law-making is changing.²

Although the demise of the nation-State as the primary political law-making authority can be overstated, the trends do seem unmistakable. Information, capital and people (including activists) now circulate through national boundaries, with little if any restriction from governmental authority. Non-state actors, for example multinational corporations and non-governmental organizations (NGOs), now conduct their own foreign policy, gather their own information, make their own alliances and, increasingly, expect to participate fully in international affairs.

The expanding role of non-State actors may be even more pronounced in environmental law than in other fields.³ The number of environmental NGOs addressing international issues, particularly in developing countries, has exploded in recent years as has their technical capacity to build networks, gather and analyze technical information, and gain the attention of policymakers in every country. Moreover the urgency of environmental issues leads NGOs to look actively for alternatives to the often slow and laborious traditional international law making processes—alternatives which necessarily provide an expanded role for non-State actors.

Part I of this article provides a brief overview of the global, public interest environmental law community and the role of technology in building and strengthening that community. Parts II provides examples of the expanded influence and role NGOs now play in the development and implementation of international environmental law. In providing

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explicit examples, Part II also highlights some of the issues currently high on the public interest agenda.

I. Globalization of the Environmental Movement

The environmental movement is now global. Virtually every country has at least one environmental NGO, many of which actively seek partnerships and cooperative activities with their colleagues from other countries. The U.S. certainly still has the richest assortment and diversity of environmental NGOs, but there are surprisingly sophisticated and effective organizations in all regions of the world.

U.S. Environmental NGOs. Literally thousands of environmental groups exist in the United States. An increasing number of these have both the capacity for and interest in international issues, including most of the largest environmental organizations. According to the National Wildlife Federation's annual Conservation Directory, over 100 NGOs describe themselves as involved in "international conservation," and twenty-five as involved in "global warming."⁴

For our purposes, U.S. NGOs can be divided into three general categories. First, are the large, membership organizations, like the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Environmental Defense Fund, the National Audubon Society, the National Wildlife Federation, and the Sierra Club, which have the resources and technical expertise to work on a full range of environmental issues.⁵ Beginning in the 1980s, almost all of these organizations added international departments to work on global and transnational issues. The second group are organizations, like the World Resources Institute, WorldWatch, or the Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL), which are technical or policy organizations dedicated primarily, if not exclusively, to global and transnational environmental issues.⁶ Some of these organizations may be small and narrowly focused, but still very effective, like Ozone Action (which works on ozone depletion and climate change issues with a staff of four) or Bat Conservation International (which is dedicated to the global protection of bats). A third category of NGOs are those organizations that operate as parts of global networks. Most notable among these are the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) (a federation of over 800 members, both government agencies and nongovernmental organizations in 125 countries), Friends of the Earth-International (a network of 52 affiliate organizations), Greenpeace International

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(a federation of 20 national organizations with more than 3.3 million members), and the World Wide Fund for Nature (a federation of 23 national organizations boasting over three million members).⁷

The diversity among U.S. NGOs, generally, is also mirrored by environmental law NGOs. Most of the organizations mentioned above have at least some legal expertise. In addition, U.S. environmental law organizations like the Environmental Law Institute and the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund are primarily focused on U.S. environmental law issues, but have in recent years expanded their international reach.⁸ The twelve lawyers at CIEL work exclusively on global environmental issues or on issues relating to the development of environmental laws in developing countries. The Environmental Law Alliance Worldwide (ELAW) is a particularly interesting example of the building of an international network of affiliated organizations.⁹ Comprised of public interest scientists and lawyers from over thirteen countries, ELAW is essentially the first global, virtual law firm dedicated to public interest environmental law. Advocates from over fifty countries access the ELAW network each year.

Foreign Environmental NGOs. Foreign NGOs display the same type of diversity as found in the United States; some are professional organizations with expansive technical expertise, while many are local community-based, grassroots organizations. No one knows exactly how many environmental NGOs now exist in the world, but they certainly number in the thousands. Hundreds of them are involved in international environmental affairs. Regional and national networks of organizations strengthen individual efforts by facilitating coordination and focusing campaign efforts. For example, the European Environment Bureau (EEB) is a regional network of environmental NGOs in Europe, including much of the former Soviet Bloc. The EEB is located in Brussels, where it focuses on lobbying and influencing the European Union's institutions. Country directories of environmental organizations are increasingly available and show the diversity of NGOs in many countries.¹⁰

Environmental law NGOs are particularly thriving in the Global South. South America boasts a number of the most sophisticated environmental law organizations anywhere in the world, including for example Sociedad Peruana Derecho Ambiental (Peru), Fundacion Ambiente y Recursos Naturales (Argentina), Centro Mexicano del Derecho

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Ambiental (Mexico), SEDERENA (Costa Rica), IDEADS (Guatemala), and Fundepublico (Colombia). Nor is the growth of public environmental law interest limited to South America. Perhaps the most innovative public interest environmental litigation in the world now emanates from Asia, and in particular from such public interest lawyers as India's M.C. Mehta and the Philippines' Tony Oposa.¹¹ The Indonesian Environmental Law Center, Bangladesh Environmental Law Association, and South Korean Environmental Law Association, are just a few examples of that region's growing public interest environmental law community.

Technology as the Glue. In diversity is strength, but also chaos. Although a common "world view" ultimately binds environmental NGOs together, it is communication technology that turns philosophy into action. The Internet, in particular, provides a vast opportunity for sharing experiences and mobilizing activists to push for stronger environmental policies. Not only do these electronic networks allow for effective lobbying on international institutions such as the World Bank or the conservation of Antarctica, but they can also bring international pressure to bear on purely local issues. For example, last year the Environmental Law Alliance Worldwide (ELAW) network, primarily developed to help environmental lawyers bring environmental cases in developing countries, recently opposed a Korean company's destruction of riparian habitat in Eugene, Oregon (home of the ELAW-US office). Efforts like this suggest that the internet and other communication advances will not only make it easier to "think globally", but also "act locally."

As Jessica Tuchman Matthews observed in the most recent edition of Foreign Affairs:

Technology is fundamental to NGOs' new clout. The nonprofit Association for Progressive Communications provides 50,000 NGOs in 133 countries access to the tens of millions of Internet users for the price of a local call. The dramatically lower costs of international communication have altered NGOs' goals and changed international outcomes. Within hours of the first gunshots of the Chiapas rebellion in southern Mexico in January 1994, for example, the Internet swarmed with messages from human rights activists. The worldwide media attention they and their groups focused on Chiapas, along with the influx of rights activists to the area, sharply limited the Mexican government's response. What in other times would have been a bloody insurgency turned out to be a largely nonviolent conflict. "The shots lasted ten days," Jose Angel Gurria, Mexico's foreign minister, later remarked, "and ever since, the war has been ... a war on the Internet."

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NGOs' easy reach behind other states' borders forces governments to consider domestic public opinion in countries with which they are dealing, even on matters that governments...