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The expansion of the fishing industry in the last century has raised concerns over the long-term viability of many fish species. International fisheries have failed to prevent the overfishing of many stocks but have succeeded in curtailing harvests for some key fisheries. This book develops a theoretical approach, the vulnerability response framework, which can increase the understanding of the countries’ positions on the management of international fisheries based on linkages between domestic vulnerabilities and national policy positions. Vulnerability, mainly economic in this context, acts as an indicator for domestic susceptibility to the increasing competition associated with open access and related stock declines. Because of this relationship, it can also be used to trace the trajectory of the countries’ positions on fishery management as they seek political alternatives to economic problems. The author tests this framework by using it to predict national positions for eight cases drawn from the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (ICCAT). These studies reveal that there is considerable variance in the management measures which ICCAT has adopted—both among different species and in dealing with the same species over time—much of which can be traced to vulnerability response behavior. Little attention has been paid to the ways in which international regimes change over time. The book’s approach illuminates the pressures for change that are generated by economic competition and overexploitation in Atlantic fisheries, and also identifies patterns of adaptive governance, as national responses to such pressures culminate in patterns of change in international management.

Common wisdom holds that the earth’s dwindling natural resources and increasing environmental degradation will inevitably lead to interstate conflict, and possibly even set off “resource wars.” Many scholars and policymakers have considered the environmental roots of violent conflict and instability, but little attention has been paid to the idea that scarcity and degradation may actually play a role in fostering interstate cooperation. This book offers a different perspective on the links between environmental problems and interstate conflict. Although the contributors do not deny that resource scarcity and environmental degradation may become sources of contention, they argue that these conditions also provide the impetus for cooperation, coordination, and negotiation among states. The book examines aspects of environmental conflict and cooperation in detail across a number of natural resources and issues including oil, water, climate change, ocean pollution, and biodiversity conservation. The contributors argue that increasing scarcity and degradation generally induce cooperation across states, but that when conditions worsen (and a problem becomes too costly or a resource becomes too scarce), cooperation becomes more difficult. Similarly, low levels of scarcity may discourage cooperation because problems seem less urgent. With contributions from scholars in international relations, economics, and political science, the book offers an investigation of the links among scarcity, environmental degradation, cooperation, and conflict.

North American policy responses to global climate change are complex and sometimes contradictory, and reach across multiple levels of government. For example, the U.S. federal government rejected the Kyoto Protocol and mandatory greenhouse gas (GHG) restrictions, but California developed some of the world's most comprehensive climate change law and regulation; Canada's federal government ratified the Kyoto Protocol, but Canadian GHG emissions increased even faster than those of the United States; and Mexico's state-owned oil company addressed climate change issues in the 1990s, in stark contrast to leading U.S. and Canadian energy firms. This book examines and compares political action for climate change across North America, at levels ranging from continental to municipal, in locations ranging from Mexico to Toronto to Portland, Maine. It investigates new or emerging institutions, policies, and practices in North American climate governance; the roles played by public, private, and civil society actors; the diffusion of policy across different jurisdictions; and the effectiveness of multilevel North American climate change governance. The book finds that although national climate policies vary widely, the complexities and divergences are even greater at the subnational level. Policy initiatives are developed separately in states, provinces, cities, large corporations, NAFTA bodies, universities, non-governmental organizations, and private firms, and this lack of coordination limits the effectiveness of multilevel climate change governance. In North America, unlike much of Europe, climate change governance has been largely bottom-up rather than top-down.

This book investigates the process of information disclosure as a policy strategy for environmental protection. The process, which is a new approach to environmental protection, sometimes leads government and industry to focus on meeting only minimal standards. The authors examine the effectiveness of information disclosure in achieving improvements in corporate environmental performance by analyzing data from the federal government’s Toxics Release Inventory, or TRI, and drawing on an original set of survey data from corporations and federal, state, and local officials, among other sources. The authors find that TRI, a prime example of information disclosure, has had a substantial effect over time on the environmental performance of industry. When examining case studies from all over the United States, the conclusion is that improvement is not uniform: some facilities perform much better than others. The authors argue that information disclosure plays an important role in environmental policy—but only as part of an integrated set of policy tools that includes conventional regulation.

Our morning cups of coffee connect us to a global industry and, also, to an export crisis in the tropics that is destroying livelihoods, undermining the cohesion of families and communities, and threatening ecosystems. This book explores the crisis facing small-scale coffee farmers of Mexico and Central America, the political economy of the global coffee industry, the coffee producers’ response to this crisis, and the initiatives that claim to promote more sustainable rural development among coffee-producing communities. The contributors review the historical, political, economic, and agroecological processes involved in today’s coffee industry and analyze the severely depressed export market that small-scale growers in Mexico and Central America encounters. The book presents a series of interdisciplinary case studies showing how small-scale farmers manage ecosystems and organize collectively as they seek useful collaboration with international NGOs and coffee companies to create opportunities for themselves in the coffee market. The findings demonstrate the interconnections between the livelihoods of farmers, biodiversity, conservation, and changing coffee markets. Additional chapters examine alternative trade practices, certification, and eco-labeling, and discuss the politics and market growth of organic, shade-grown, and Fair Trade coffees.

In today’s globally integrated food system, events in one part of the world can have multiple and wide-ranging effects, as has been shown by the recent and rapid global rise in food prices. Transnational corporations (TNCs) have been central to the development of this global food system, dominating production, international trade, processing, distribution, and retail sectors. Moreover, these global corporations play a key role in the establishment of rules and regulations by which they themselves are governed. This book examines how TNCs exercise power over global food and agriculture governance, and what the consequences are for the sustainability of the global food system. It defines three aspects of this corporate power: instrumental power, or direct influence; structural power, or the broader influence corporations have over setting agendas and rules; and discursive, or communicative and persuasive, power. The book begins by examining the nature of corporate power in cases ranging from “green” food certification in Southeast Asia and corporate influence on US food aid policy to governance in the seed industry and international food safety standards. Chapters examine such issues as the promotion of corporate-defined “environmental sustainability” and “food security,” biotechnology firms and intellectual property rights, and consumer resistance to genetically modified organisms and other cases of contestation in agrobiology. In the final chapter, the editors raise the question of how to achieve participation, transparency and accountability in food governance.

Not so long ago, people North and South had little reason to believe that wealth from oil, gas, and coal brought anything but great prosperity. But the presumption of net benefits from fossil fuels is eroding as widening circles of people rich and poor experience the downside. A positive transition to a post-fossil fuel era cannot wait for global agreement, a swap-in of renewables, a miracle technology, a carbon market, or lifestyle change. This book shows that it is now possible to take the first step toward the post-fossil fuel era, by resisting the slow violence of extreme extraction and combustion, exiting the industry, and imagining a good life after fossil fuels. It shows how an environmental politics of transition might occur, arguing for going to the source rather than managing byproducts, for delegitimizing fossil fuels rather than accommodating them, for engaging a politics of deliberately choosing a post-fossil fuel world. The book includes several chapters of analyses of the fossil fuel problem from the biophysical, cultural, ethical and political perspectives along with case studies that reveal how individuals, groups, communities, and an entire country have taken first steps out of the fossil fuel era, with experiments that range from leaving oil under the Amazon to ending mountaintop removal in Appalachia.

The legacy of environmental catastrophe in the states of the former Soviet Union includes desertification, pollution, and the toxic aftermath of industrial accidents, the most notorious of which was the Chernobyl disaster of 1986. This book examines the development of environmental activism in Russia and the former Soviet republics in response to these problems, and its effect on policy and planning. It also shows that because of increasing economic, ethnic, and social inequality in the former Soviet states, debates over environmental justice are beginning to come to the fore. The book explores the varying environmental, social, political, and economic circumstances of these countries—which range from the Western-style democracies of the Baltic states to the totalitarian regimes of Central Asia—and how they affect the ecological and environmental situation and public health. Among the topics covered are environmentalism in Russia (including the progressive nature of its laws on environmental protection, which are undermined by overburdened and underpaid law enforcement); the effect of oil wealth on Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan; the role of nationalism in Latvian environmentalism; the struggle of Russia’s indigenous peoples for environmental justice; public participation in Estonia’s environmental movement; and lack of access to natural capital in Tajikistan. The book makes clear that although fragile transition economies, varying degrees of democratization, and a focus on national security can stymie progress toward “just sustainability,” the diverse states of the former Soviet Union are making some progress toward “green” and environmental justice issues separately.

Environmental justice concerns form an important part of popular environmental movements in many countries. Activists, scholars, and policymakers in the developing world, for example, increasingly use the tools of environmental justice to link concerns over social justice and environmental well-being. This book investigates the emergence of a distinctively Latin American environmental justice movement, offering analyses and case studies that examine both the promise and the limits of environmental justice in Latin America and the Caribbean—both as a rallying point for popular mobilization and as a set of principles for analysis and policymaking. After considering such conceptual issues as the connection between environmental conditions and race, trade, and social justice, it presents a series of case studies. These studies focus first on industrial development, examining such topics as social tension over “megadevelopment” projects in Argentina and the concentrated industrial waste hazards of the export assembly plants at the U.S.–Mexico border, and then on the power and politics involved in land and resource use. Other chapters explore ecotourism; inequitable land distribution in Brazil; the ongoing struggle for justice and accountability over the former U.S. Navy bombing range in Vieques, Puerto Rico; and water policy in Chile, Bolivia, and Mexico. Taken together, the analyses and case studies suggest that environmental justice—which highlights both broader issues of global injustice and local concerns—holds promise as a way to understand and address environmental inequities in Latin America and elsewhere.

The idea of sacrifice is the unspoken issue of environmental politics. Politicians, the media, and many environmentalists assume that well-off populations won’t make sacrifices now for future environmental benefits and won’t change their patterns and perceptions of consumption to make ecological room for the world’s three billion or so poor who are eager to improve their standard of living. This book challenges these assumptions, arguing that they limit our policy options, weaken our ability to imagine bold action for change, and blind us to the ways sacrifice already figures in everyday life. The concept of sacrifice has been unexamined in both activist and academic conversations about environmental politics, but this book confronts it directly. The chapters bring a variety of disciplinary perspectives to the topic. Contributors offer alternatives to the conventional wisdom on sacrifice, identifying connections between sacrifice and human fulfilment in everyday life, and finding such concrete examples as parents’ sacrifices in raising children, religious practice, artists’ pursuit of their art, and soldiers and policemen who risk their lives to do their jobs. They examine particular policies and practices that shape our understanding of environmental problems, including the carbon tax, cycling incentives, and the perils of green consumption. This book puts “sacrifice” into the conversation about effective environmental politics and policies, insisting that activists and scholars do more than change the subject when the idea is introduced.

The EU has, for a long time, portrayed itself as an international leader on climate change. Previous studies have tended to focus on the characteristics of EU leadership, but have failed to examine the extent to which EU leadership generates “followership”. This book analyzes EU climate policies towards China and India in order to provide a holistic assessment of EU climate leadership, and makes three key arguments. First, EU engagement was driven by a desire to build the international role of the EU, but also from 2000 onwards in particular by growing normative concern and material interest within the EU regarding combating climate change. The development of engagement was also conditioned by the broader development of EU relations with China and India. Second, EU engagement took the form of institutionalized dialogue and capacity-building projects. These were generally more extensive in the EU-China case; the EU-India relationship was significantly more limited. Third, the Chinese Government responded through limited normative emulation and limited but growing lesson-drawing through bilateral cooperation in specific sectors. While the Indian Government also responded through limited normative emulation, the principal Indian response was resistance. Moreover, both the Chinese and Indian Governments resisted the EU approach to the international climate change negotiations. The book concludes that the EU has been a highly restricted leader in its relations with China and India on climate change.

Agriculture in the United States today increasingly operates in two separate spheres: Large, corporate-connected commodity production and distribution systems; and small-scale farms that market directly to consumers. As a result, midsize family-operated farms find it increasingly difficult to find and reach markets for their products. They are too big to use the direct marketing techniques of small farms but too small to take advantage of corporate marketing and distribution systems. This crisis of the midsize farm results in a rural America with weakened municipal tax bases, job losses, and population flight. This book discusses strategies for reviving an “agriculture of the middle” and creating a food system that works for midsize farms and ranches. Activists, practitioners, and scholars from a variety of disciplines, including sociology, political science, and economics, consider ways in which midsize farms can regain vitality by scaling up aspects of small farms’ operations to connect with consumers, organizing together to develop markets for their products, developing food supply chains that preserve farmer identity and are based on fair business agreements, and promoting public policies (at international, federal, state, and community levels) which address agriculture-of-the-middle issues. The book makes it clear that the demise of midsize farms and ranches is not a foregone conclusion and that the renewal of an agriculture of the middle will benefit all participants in the food system, from growers to consumers.

Climate change represents a “tragedy of the commons” on a global scale, requiring the cooperation of nations that do not necessarily put the Earth’s well-being above their own national interests. And yet, international efforts to address global warming have met with some success; the Kyoto Protocol, in which industrialized countries committed to reducing their collective emissions, took effect in 2005 (although without the participation of the United States). This book explains international action on climate change from the perspective of countries’ domestic politics. In an effort to understand both what progress has been made and why it has been so limited, experts in comparative politics look at the experience of seven jurisdictions in deciding whether to ratify the Kyoto Protocol and to pursue national climate change mitigation policies. By analyzing the domestic politics and international positions of the United States, Australia, Russia, China, the European Union, Japan, and Canada, the authors demonstrate that decisions about global policies are often made locally, in the context of electoral and political incentives, the normative commitments of policymakers, and domestic political institutions. Using a common analytical framework throughout, the book offers a comparison of the domestic political forces within each nation that affect climate change policy and explains why some countries have been able to adopt innovative and aggressive positions on climate change both domestically and internationally.

This book looks at the regulation of air pollution not as a static procedure of enactment and agreement but as a dynamic process that reflects the shifting interrelationships of science, policy, and citizens. Taking transboundary air pollution in Europe as its empirical focus, it assesses the particular regulation strategies that have evolved to govern European air and offers theoretical insights into dynamics of social order, political negotiation, and scientific practices. These dynamics are of pivotal concern today, in light of emerging international governance problems related to climate change. The contributors, all social scientists specializing in international environmental governance, review earlier findings, analyze the current situation, and discuss future directions for both empirical and theoretical work. The chapters discuss the institutional dimensions of international efforts to combat air pollution, examining the effectiveness of the Convention for Long-Range Transboundary Air Pollution (CLRTAP) and the political complexity of the European Union; offer an overview and case studies of the roles of science, expertise, and learning; and examine the “missing link” in air pollution policies: citizen involvement. Changing political conditions, evolving scientific knowledge, and the need for citizen engagement offer significant challenges for air pollution policy-making. By focusing on process rather than product, learning rather than knowledge, and strategies rather than interests, the book gives a nuanced view of how air pollution is made governable.

More than ever, Americans rely on independent special districts to provide public services. The special district — which can be as small as a low-budget mosquito abatement district or as vast as the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey — has become the most common form of local governance in the United States. This book examines the consequences of specialization and the fragmentation of policymaking authority through local drinking-water policies. Directly comparing specific conservation, land use, and contracting policies enacted by different forms of local government, the author investigates the capacity of special districts to engage in responsive and collaborative decision-making that promotes sustainable use of water resources. She concludes that the effect of specialization is conditional on the structure of institutions and the severity of the policy problem, with specialization offering the most benefit on policy issues that are the least severe. The book presents a political theory of specialized governance relevant to a variety of functions that special districts perform. The book is a study of how the decentralized politics of water is forming in American communities.

In September 2015, the UN General Assembly adopted the Sustainable Development Goals as an integral part of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. The Sustainable Development Goals mark the most ambitious effort yet to place goal setting at the center of global governance and policy. This book is the first book addressing global governance through goals, asking three sets of questions. First, the book studies in detail the core characteristics of goal setting in global governance, asking when it is an appropriate strategy in global governance and what makes global governance through goals different from other approaches such as rule making or norm promotion. Second, the book analyze under what conditions a goal-oriented approach can ensure progress toward desired ends; what can be learned from other, earlier experiences of global goal setting, especially the Millennium Development Goals; and what governance arrangements are likely to facilitate progress in implementing the new Sustainable Development Goals. Third, the book studies the practical and operational challenges involved in global governance through goals in promoting sustainability and the prospects for achieving such a demanding new agenda. The book revealed that the approach of “global governance through goals”—and the Sustainable Development Goals as a prime example—is marked by a number of key characteristics, but none of those is specific to this type of governance. Yet all these characteristics together, in our view, amount to a unique and novel way of steering and distinct type of institutional arrangement in global governance.

This book describes Mexico’s efforts over the past one hundred years to manage its forests through forestry science and biodiversity conservation. The author shows that transparent knowledge was produced not by official declarations or scientists’ expertise but by encounters between the relatively weak forestry bureaucracy and the indigenous people who manage and own the pine forests. The author records the performances, collusions, complicities, and evasions that characterize the forestry bureaucracy. He shows that the authority of forestry officials is undermined by the tension between local realities and national policy; officials must juggle sweeping knowledge claims and mundane concealments, ambitious regulations, and routine rule-breaking. Moving from government offices in Mexico City to forests in the state of Oaxaca, the book describes how the science of forestry and bureaucratic practices came to Oaxaca in the 1930s and how environmental and political contexts set the stage for local resistance. The author describes how the indigenous Zapotec people learned the theory and practice of industrial forestry as employees and then put those skills to use when they became the owners and managers of the area’s pine forests, eventually incorporating forestry into their successful claims for autonomy from the state. Despite the apparently small scale and local contexts of this balancing act between the power of forestry regulations and the resistance of indigenous communities, the author shows that it has implications for how we understand the modern state, scientific knowledge, and power and for the global carbon markets for which Mexican forests might become valuable.

Studies have shown that institutions play a crucial role both in causing and in addressing problems arising from human–environment interactions. But the nature of this role is complex and not easily described. This book presents an overview of the findings of long, painstaking scientific research on how institutions matter in efforts to tackle such intractable environmental problems as the loss of biological diversity and the degradation of forests, and the overarching issue of climate change. Using the tools of the “new institutionalism” in the social sciences, it treats institutions as sets of rights, rules, and decision-making procedures. The individual chapters present research findings and examine policy implications regarding questions of the causality, performance, and design of institutions, as well as the themes of institutional fit (or misfit), interplay, and scale. The book is the product of a decade-long international research project on the Institutional Dimensions of Global Environmental Change (IDGEC) carried out under the auspices of the International Human Dimensions Programme (IHDP) on Global Environmental Change. It demonstrates that research on institutions can provide the basis for practical advice on effective ways to deal with the most pressing environmental problems of our times.

Global warming is the most significant environmental issue of our time, yet public response in Western nations has been meager. Why have so few taken any action? This book explores answers to this question, drawing on interviews and ethnographic data from the author’s study of “Bygdaby,” the fictional name of an actual rural community in western Norway, during the unusually warm winter of 2000–2001. From 2000–2001, the first snowfall came to Bygdaby two months later than usual; ice fishing was impossible and the ski industry had to invest substantially in artificial snow-making. Stories in local and national newspapers linked the warm winter explicitly to global warming. Yet residents did not write letters to the editor, pressure politicians, or cut down on their use of fossil fuels. The book attributes this lack of response to the phenomenon of socially organized denial, by which information about climate science is known in the abstract but disconnected from political, social, and private life, and presents this as emblematic of how citizens of industrialized nations are responding to global warming. The author finds that, for the highly educated and politically savvy residents of Bygdaby, global warming was both common knowledge and unimaginable. This denial is traced through multiple levels, from emotions to cultural norms to political economy. The author’s report from Bygdaby, supplemented by comparisons throughout the book to the United States, tells a larger story behind our paralysis in the face of today’s predictions from climate scientists.

The internationalization of economies and other changes that accompany globalization have brought about a paradoxical reemergence of the local. A significant but largely unstudied aspect of new local-global relationships is the growth of “localist movements,” efforts to reclaim economic and political sovereignty for metropolitan and other subnational regions. This book offers an overview of localism in the United States and assesses its potential to address pressing global problems of social justice and environmental sustainability. Since the 1990s, more than 100 local business organizations have formed in the United States, and there are growing efforts to build local ownership in the retail, food, energy, transportation, and media industries. This social science study of localism adopts an interdisciplinary approach that combines theoretical reflection, empirical research, and policy analysis. The book's perspective is not that from an uncritical localist advocate; it draws on new empirical research to assess the extent to which localist policies can address sustainability and justice issues. After a theoretical discussion of sustainability, the global corporate economy, and economic development, it looks at four specific forms of localism: “buy local” campaigns; urban agriculture; local ownership of electricity and transportation; and alternative and community media. The book examines “global localism”—transnational local-to-local supply chains—and other economic policies and financial instruments that would create an alternative economic structure. Localism is not a panacea for globalization, it concludes, but a crucial ingredient in projects to build more democratic, just, and sustainable politics.