The State and Social Power in Global Environmental Politics.

AuthorWerner, Matthew M.

Perceptions vary as to how to achieve global environmental balance. The dominant view is that nation states will meet the challenge through a set of incremental steps whereby individual states unite in a system of collective management. This review elaborates on the counternotion forwarded by the authors of a new book that governments are too paralyzed by numerous conflicts of interest to create an effective system of collective management. The authors instead demonstrate the emergence of a complex social dynamic in global policy making, and they conclude with observations about how this new dynamic may be altering the existing world order.

  1. INTRODUCTION

    There is a growing awareness in all quarters of the need for comprehensive international environmental policies. Depletion of the rain forests, acid rain, global warming--the list of worries grows daily. Just as the number of environmental concerns grow, so does the vastness of each individual problem. Depletion of the rain forests, for example, may once have been thought to be a regional problem of only a select group of third-world nations. However, it has clearly come to threaten us all, as evidenced by the resulting decrease in the planet's oxygen levels and the eradication of countless plant and animal species. "Globalization" has become the environmental banner of the 1990s for nations and social movements alike. But where does "globalization" take us? How do we install effective international environmental policies, and what barriers stand in our way?

    The State and Social Power in Global Environmental Politics(1) tackles these expansive issues from a refreshing and unique perspective. The book's thirteen essays by twelve authors aggressively challenge the dominant notion that states will meet these challenges in the same "business-as-usual" manner in which they handle all other problems (a view the authors consider grossly simplistic). As it tackles this dominant notion, the book does an excellent job of rising above the "self-help guide" approach that so many books on the same topic have adopted.(2) On the contrary, the authors insist that there are simply too many international players, each with too many divergent motives, for any such self-help recommendations to be useful. They argue instead that, as the world becomes increasingly interconnected,(3) the process of struggling to create and implement global environmental policies is causing a fundamental change in the structure of international environmental politics. This fundamental change they term the global ecological interdependence (GEI) dynamic.(4) The book flushes out this dynamic with examples of past and present environmental management policies from various countries.

    To this end, the book breaks up naturally into three sections. Section one, The State and Global Ecological Interdependence, consists of four essays that paint a bleak picture of the notion that states will be able to come together and form comprehensive global environmental policies. A number of real-world examples are effectively used to illustrate the point that such attempts usually fail, and that success, even when it does occur, is limited. The states, inability to reach solutions lays the groundwork for section two, Constructing the Global Environment: Global Ecological Interdependence and Political Contestation. This section, the most developed and insightful in the book, tracks the rise of nongovernmental organizations (NGOS) and their role in the GEI dynamic and develops the more interesting and subtle nuances of the GEI dynamic. The book concludes with section three, Global Ecological Interdependence and the Future of World Politics, which includes two essays that give very brief and speculative analyses of where the GEI dynamic might ultimately take us. Unfortunately, this section is so speculative and brief that it appears more like a tacked-on addition than the completion of the book's analysis. Still, the section does manage to achieve some measure of closure.

  2. THE STATE AND GLOBAL ECOLOGICAL INTERDEPENDENCE

    The first of the book's three sections begins the analysis of the GEI dynamic by focusing on the nation state system. The authors correctly observe that there has been a general global consensus that the problems of effective environmental management fall ultimately within the states, domain.(5) At a fundamental level, this seems intuitive because the purpose of the states is to protect the well-being of their citizens, and environmental management furthers this purpose. Additionally, only states have the power necessary to bind their citizens to agreements and regulations that further environmental policy objectives. States are perceived as "both the locus of causes and consequences and as the level at which appropriate policy responses must take place."(6) The authors note, though, that the recent performance of the states in finding solutions to environmental concerns has not been ideal. The question then becomes whether the states will rise to the challenge on their own over time or if something beyond them must intervene.

    There is a large body of support for the argument that states will eventually be able to overcome the perils of global environmental management through a process of "collective management."(7) This position does not argue for a global state, but advocates the idea that as environmental concerns grow, states will enter into more and more international environmental agreements.(8) Over time, these agreements will weave together to form an expansive global environmental policy "blanket" of sorts.(9) Support for this position comes from the fact that there has been a significant increase in the number of negotiated international agreements since the 1970s.(10) These agreements have also become more inclusive, covering larger geographical areas and becoming more prevention-oriented rather than response-oriented.(11) Karen Litfin notes that many states have taken responsive steps to combat environmental problems:

    Consider, for instance, Japan's whaling practices; or policy shifts by the U.K.,

    and later the U.S., on acid rain controls; or, more recently, Brazil's efforts to

    slow deforestation. In each case, a nation that was slow to enact certain policies

    was persuaded, at least in part, by pressures from abroad to modify its

    practices.(12)

    But is that enough? No doubt, many people believe that it is; however, the authors make a good argument that it probably is not. They assert that there are more forces at work in these situations than the majority's argument acknowledges--forces that may render state "collective management" unachievable.(13)

    The foundation of this argument rests on the glaring observation that the dramatic increase in the number of new environmental agreements around the world has not improved the condition of the global environment.(14) In fact, just the opposite is true: the number of environmental problems is growing.(15) Often this is the case because agreements are not effectively enforced.(16) But this begs the question of why they are not enforced. It is here that the GEI dynamic comes in. The authors explain that as states come together to address their larger common environmental concerns, they invariably must...

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