Transnational environmental policy

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Transnational environmental policies are efforts to confront global environmental issues such as climate change, ozone depletion, or marine pollution. [1] Environmental policies are transnational when they include actors from at least two sovereign states. [2] As of 2018, more than 1,800 multilateral environmental agreements are in effect. [3]

Contents

History

Since World War II, environmental policies have shifted focus from local or discrete issues like loss of biodiversity or pollution to global environmental topics. The post-war economic expansion also created environmental damage, which in turn led to modern environmentalism and the first Earth Day in 1970. [3] The 1972 United Nations Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm marked "the emergence of what has become a large and complex set of environmental regimes", [3] and "the beginning of international environmental law and policy." [4] Major conferences regarding climate change occurred in the 1970s and 1980s, with the first World Climate Conference in 1979, and the World Conference on the Changing Atmosphere in 1988; the latter resulted in the world's first ambitious targets and timetables for the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. [5]

As of 2018, more than 1,800 multilateral environmental agreements are in effect. Of these, more than 190 address climate change, consisting of 12,000 sub-state and non-state actors. [3]

Actors

International organizations

International organizations are organizations established by treaties, which are governed by international law and have their own legal personalities. They both create international law and are subject to it. [6] Examples of international organizations with a focus in environmental policy include the International Union for Conservation of Nature [3] and the United Nations Environment Programme. [7]

Non-governmental organizations (NGOs)

Transnational environmental NGOs (TENGOs) are environmental NGOs with a broad geographic scope. Examples of TENGOs include World Wide Fund for Nature, Natural Resources Defense Council, Conservation International, The Nature Conservancy, and the World Resources Institute. [8] One way TENGOs create environmental change is through market-based certification programs, which have been enacted in sectors including ecotourism, forestry, fishing, and fair trade. One of the most successful and visible of these programs is the Forest Stewardship Council, which has served as a model for other certification programs. [9] Other popular certification programs include the dolphin safe label [3] and Marine Stewardship Council. [9]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">United Nations Environment Programme</span> Agency of the United Nations focused on solving environmental issues

The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) is responsible for coordinating responses to environmental issues within the United Nations system. It was established by Maurice Strong, its first director, after the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm in June 1972. Its mandate is to provide leadership, deliver science and develop solutions on a wide range of issues, including climate change, the management of marine and terrestrial ecosystems, and green economic development. The organization also develops international environmental agreements; publishes and promotes environmental science and helps national governments achieve environmental targets.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Forest Stewardship Council</span> Global forest certification system

The Forest Stewardship Council GmbH (FSC) is an international non-profit, multistakeholder organization established in 1993 that promotes responsible management of the world's forests via timber certification. This organization uses a market-based approach to transnational environmental policy.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ecolabel</span> Labeling systems for food and consumer products

Ecolabels and Green Stickers are labeling systems for food and consumer products. The use of ecolabels is voluntary, whereas green stickers are mandated by law; for example, in North America major appliances and automobiles use Energy Star. They are a form of sustainability measurement directed at consumers, intended to make it easy to take environmental concerns into account when shopping. Some labels quantify pollution or energy consumption by way of index scores or units of measurement, while others assert compliance with a set of practices or minimum requirements for sustainability or reduction of harm to the environment. Many ecolabels are focused on minimising the negative ecological impacts of primary production or resource extraction in a given sector or commodity through a set of good practices that are captured in a sustainability standard. Through a verification process, usually referred to as "certification", a farm, forest, fishery, or mine can show that it complies with a standard and earn the right to sell its products as certified through the supply chain, often resulting in a consumer-facing ecolabel.

Global governance refers to institutions that coordinate the behavior of transnational actors, facilitate cooperation, resolve disputes, and alleviate collective action problems. Global governance broadly entails making, monitoring, and enforcing rules. Within global governance, a variety of types of actors – not just states – exercise power. Governance is thus broader than government.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">International environmental agreement</span> Treaties and protocols protecting the environment

An international environmental agreement or sometimes environmental protocol, is a type of treaty binding in international law, allowing them to reach an environmental goal. In other words, it is "an intergovernmental document intended as legally binding with a primary stated purpose of preventing or managing human impacts on natural resources."

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Steve Charnovitz</span> American legal scholar, writer, and teacher

Steve Charnovitz is a scholar of public international law, living in the United States. He teaches at the George Washington University Law School in Washington, D.C., and is best known for his writings on the linkages between trade and environment and trade and labor rights. He is also known for his scholarship on the historical role of nongovernmental organizations in international governance.

Network governance is "interfirm coordination that is characterized by organic or informal social system, in contrast to bureaucratic structures within firms and formal relationships between them. The concepts of privatization, public private partnership, and contracting are defined in this context." Network governance constitutes a "distinct form of coordinating economic activity" which contrasts and competes with markets and hierarchies.

Aseem Prakash is a professor of Political Science, the Walker Family Professor of the College of music and Sciences and the Founding Director of the UW Center for Environmental Politics. He serves as the General Editor of the Cambridge University Press Series on Business and Public Policy and the Associate Editor of Business & Society. In addition to serving on editorial boards of several additional journals, he has been elected as the Vice-President of the International Studies Association (2015-2016). Professor Prakash is a member of National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine's Board on Environmental Change and Society and International Research Fellow at the Center for Corporate Reputation, University of Oxford. He was elected to the position of the Vice President of the International Studies Association for the period, 2015-2016. He is the recipient of International Studies Association, International Political Economy Section's 2019 Distinguished Scholar Award that recognizes "outstanding senior scholars whose influence and path-breaking intellectual work will continue to impact the field for years to come as well as the Associations' 2018 James N. Rosenau Award for "scholar who has made the most important contributions to globalization studies". The European Consortium for Political Research Standing Group on Regulatory Governance awarded him the 2018 Regulatory Studies Development Award that recognizes a senior scholar who has made notable "contributions to the field of regulatory governance."

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Earth System Governance Project</span> Social science research programme

The Earth System Governance Project is a research network that builds on the work from about a dozen research centers and hundreds of researchers studying earth system governance. It is a long-term, interdisciplinary social science research alliance. Its origins are an international program called the International Human Dimensions Programme on Global Environmental Change. The ESG Project started in January 2009. Over time, it has evolved into a broader research alliance that builds on an international network of research centers, lead faculty and research fellows. It is now the largest social science research network in the area of governance and global environmental change.

Environmental governance (EG) consists of a system of laws, norms, rules, policies and practices that dictate how the board members of an environment related regulatory body should manage and oversee the affairs of any environment related regulatory body which is responsible for ensuring sustainability (sustainable development) and manage all human activities—political, social and economic. Environmental governance includes government, business and civil society, and emphasizes whole system management. To capture this diverse range of elements, environmental governance often employs alternative systems of governance, for example watershed-based management. Obviously, in fact the EG arrangements are very diversed and not at all as inclusive as we could wish them to be.

In political ecology and environmental policy, climate governance is the diplomacy, mechanisms and response measures "aimed at steering social systems towards preventing, mitigating or adapting to the risks posed by climate change". A definitive interpretation is complicated by the wide range of political and social science traditions that are engaged in conceiving and analysing climate governance at different levels and across different arenas. In academia, climate governance has become the concern of geographers, anthropologists, economists and business studies scholars.

Sustainability standards and certifications are voluntary guidelines used by producers, manufacturers, traders, retailers, and service providers to demonstrate their commitment to good environmental, social, ethical, and food safety practices. There are over 400 such standards across the world.

The Cities for Climate Protection program (CCP) is one of three major global transnational municipal networks aimed at reducing urban greenhouse gas emissions. Established in 1990 by the International Union of Local Authorities and the United Nations Environment Programme, one of the largest global transnational networks, the International Council for Local Environment Initiatives (ICLEI), presented a framework to represent local government environmental concerns internationally. The ICLEI strives to ‘establish an active and committed municipal membership… that promotes environmental and sustainable development initiatives within…[a] framework of decentralised cooperation’. In 1993, subsequent to an ICLEI successful pilot scheme, the Urban CO2 Reduction Project, the CCP program was established during the post-Rio Earth Summit era. The CCP program illustrates itself within local climate policy, as a Transnational governance network.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Earth system governance</span> Field of scholarly inquiry in the social sciences

Earth system governance is a broad area of scholarly inquiry that builds on earlier notions of environmental policy and nature conservation, but puts these into the broader context of human-induced transformations of the entire earth system. The integrative paradigm of earth system governance has evolved into an active research area that brings together a variety of disciplines including political science, sociology, economics, ecology, policy studies, geography, sustainability science, and law.

Ocean governance is the conduct of the policy, actions and affairs regarding the world's oceans. Within governance, it incorporates the influence of non-state actors, i.e. stakeholders, NGOs and so forth, therefore the state is not the only acting power in policy making. However, ocean governance is complex because much of the ocean is a commons that is not ‘owned’ by any single person or nation/state. There is a belief more strongly in the US than other countries that the “invisible hand” is the best method to determine ocean governance factors. These include factors such as what resources we consume, what price we should pay for them, and how we should use them. The underlying reasoning behind this is the market has to have the desire in order to promote environmental protection, however this is rarely the case. This term is referred to as a market failure. Market failures and government failures are the leading causes of ocean governance complications. As a result, humankind has tended to overexploit marine resources, by treating them as shared resources while not taking equal and collective responsibilities in caring for them.

Soil governance refers to the policies, strategies, and the processes of decision-making employed by nation states and local governments regarding the use of soil. Globally, governance of the soil has been limited to an agricultural perspective due to increased food insecurity from the most populated regions on earth. The Global Soil Partnership, GSP, was initiated by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and its members with the hope to improve governance of the limited soil resources of the planet in order to guarantee healthy and productive soils for a food-secure world, as well as support other essential ecosystem services.

The Earth Negotiations Bulletin (ENB) is a reporting service providing daily coverage on a variety of global environmental and sustainable development negotiations.

Multistakeholder governance is a practice of governance that employs bringing multiple stakeholders together to participate in dialogue, decision making, and implementation of responses to jointly perceived problems. The principle behind such a structure is that if enough input is provided by multiple types of actors involved in a question, the eventual consensual decision gains more legitimacy, and can be more effectively implemented than a traditional state-based response. While the evolution of multistakeholder governance is occurring principally at the international level, public-private partnerships (PPPs) are domestic analogues.

Stacy D. VanDeveer is an American academic and international relations scholar. He is Professor, Department of Conflict Resolution, Human Security, and Global Governance at the McCormack Graduate School at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. He was Chair of the Department of Political Science and Professor of Political Science at the University of New Hampshire. He has also taught courses with Harvard Extension School and Harvard Summer School, and been a fellow at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government, Brown University's Transatlantic Academy, UMASS, and UNH London Program. VanDeveer has authored and co-authored over 90 articles, book chapters, reports and six co-edited books on his specialties. His research interests include international relations, comparative politics, LGBT rights, EU and transatlantic politics, humanitarian degradation and connections between environmental and security issues.

Michele Betsill is an American political scientist. She is a professor of political science at Colorado State University, where she has also been the chair of the department. She studies climate change and sustainability policies, with a particular focus on how non-governmental actors and sub-national governments respond to climate change. She is a co-founder of the Earth System Governance Project.

References

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  3. 1 2 3 4 5 6 Hale, Thomas (2020). "Transnational Actors and Transnational Governance in Global Environmental Politics". Annual Review of Political Science. 23 (1): 203–220. doi: 10.1146/annurev-polisci-050718-032644 .
  4. Mickelson, Karin (2015). "The Stockholm Conference and the Creation of the South–North Divide in International Environmental Law and Policy". In Alam, Shawkat; Atapattu, Sumudu; Gonzalez, Carmen G; Razzaque, Jona (eds.). International Environmental Law and the Global South. Cambridge University Press. pp. 109–129. doi:10.1017/CBO9781107295414.006. ISBN   9781107295414.
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  6. "International Organizations: Introduction". Peace Palace Library. Retrieved 31 August 2020.
  7. "About the UN". United Nations. Retrieved 31 August 2020.
  8. Reese, S. D. (2015). "Globalization of mediated spaces: The case of transnational environmentalism in China". International Journal of Communication. 9 (19).
  9. 1 2 Gulbrandsen, Lars H. (2010). Transnational Environmental Governance: The Emergence and Effects of the Certification of Forest and Fisheries. Edward Elgar Publishing. pp. 2–4. ISBN   9781849806756.