Regional Environmental Politics in Northeast Asia

Conflict and Cooperation

Jeongwon Bourdais Park

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781138302372
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351400336
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Asian History
• Index: Social Sciences

The share of global CO2 emissions from the core Northeast Asian (NEA) countries in 2015 was estimated to be as high as 33.63 percent. Representing 28.21, 3.67, and 1.75 percent of total global emissions, China, Japan, and South Korea were ranked the first, fifth, and seventh largest contributors, respectively. Some parts of China, the Republic of Mongolia, the Russian Far East, and Southeast Asia have long been on serious alert due to accelerated deforestation. With their rapid population growth and economic development, the core countries of Northeast Asia are responsible both directly and indirectly for numerous environmental problems. Urgent individual and collective action is required from the region's governments.

Against the backdrop of debate on how to understand Northeast Asia as a "region," Park focuses on the major regional economies of China, Japan, and South Korea, along with Russia, North Korea, and the Republic of Mongolia, due to both their geopolitical proximity and their significance to the region. The author attempts to answer the questions: "How far has regional environmental cooperation progressed in Northeast Asia?"; and "Why are Northeast Asian countries reluctant to cooperate further on urgent transboundary and regional environmental issues?"

1 Setting the scene

Use your property so as not to injure that of another.

(Roman law BC 449, the origin of modern tort law)

Raising research questions

The ecosystem does not share the same construct model as human beings, which incorporates the nation-state, class, society, ideology, bureaucracy, social hierarchy, political systems, and so on.¹ Although human communities and the natural world coexist, human-created regional borders and national boundaries may have little meaning to non-human populations and communities. Environmental goods and harms are fundamentally non-excludable and non-rivalry by nature. While humans extract and require more and more services from the ecosystem (food, timber, water, fresh air, recreation, spiritual comfort, minerals, energy, etc.), countries’ efforts to delay anthropogenic ecosystem disruption caused by human activities have not yet been effective despite prevalent beliefs and evidence of technological optimism. Although the world shares more or less common environmental problems today, regions – as a cluster of countries – have more reasons to deal with many problems “collectively” due to their geographical proximity and ecological connectivity. Northeast Asia (NEA afterwards), as a fast industrialized or industrializing zone, suffers enormously from severe environmental degradation and is facing a variety of existing, emerging, and unknown environmental problems and associated risks. Many problems become regional rather than remaining as domestic problems or being loosely connected with global issues. Accordingly, a regional level approach would be essential as a unit of analysis in dealing with shared environmental harm that in turn may affect wider regions across the globe. Although unsatisfactory in terms of outcome effectiveness, there is a considerable amount of ongoing environmental cooperation.

Such cooperation requires a great deal of exchanges in technology, information, data, experts, financial aid, and administrative support among the countries involved. Geographically and historically, the six countries in the NEA under this study (namely, China, Japan, the two Koreas, Mongolia, and the Russian Far East (RFE)) are closely interconnected, with four of them having a border with China, and the adjacent Koreas being technically at war. Although it is, a priori, arbitrary or insignificant to study the countries in the NEA as a cluster when considering the great disparities between them from various aspects, environmental problems paradoxically continue to bind these countries together to cooperate. Reflecting this, various forms of environmental cooperation in the region is increasing.

This project on environmental politics of the NEA region, as a subfield of political science, international relations, and environmental studies, focuses on “regional” environmental affairs, inter-state competition and conflicts over exhaustible resources, and the patterns and motivations for institutionalized cooperation over environmental issues. The recent decades have witnessed a large and thriving body of literature on the environment in all of the social sciences disciplines. Thus, regarding the question of “determining what to observe” in this growing interdisciplinary area of study, various research topics and angles have generated a plethora of combinations of conceptual and analytical contributions to this field. Employing an interdisciplinary approach, to date, much research has been conducted (depending on the trends of world politics and environmental issues) by expanding the existing scope of key political science concepts or by mainstreaming (internalizing/addressing) ecological constraints into existing political science subjects. As a result, such interfaces concern “security and the environment” (Maddock 1995); “governance and the environment”; “trade and the environment (international political economy of environment)” (e.g., Ekins 2003); “the philosophy of ecologism”; “green parties and green movements” (e.g., Almeida and Stearns 1998; Burchell 2002; Folke 2014; Frankland et al. 2008; Kalland and Persoon 1998; Tranter and Western 2009). A great deal of in-depth sociopolitical studies have been conducted focusing on environmentalism and post-material movements in Asia (e.g., Lam 1999; Lee and So 1999; Mason 1999; Pierce et al. 1987; Wilkening 1999). In addition, more interfaces include “governance and social institutions for the environment” (e.g., Young, 1994; VanDeveer and Steinberg 2015), “public environmental policy and regulations”; “diplomacy and the environment including green aid” (Sagar and VanDeveer 2005); “theories and cases of political systems and the environment (e.g., green state)” (Dryzek et al. 2003; Schreurs 2002); “modernity and rise environmentalism” (Beck 1995); “ecology and sociopolitical ideologies” (e.g., eco-nationalism, green imperialism); and so on. If the question is confined to “regional” politics (in other words, what “regional” politics may contribute to environmental studies and environmental improvements), the core and crucial subjects intersecting between environmental affairs and regional politics would be security, development and region-wide environmentalism (both as ideology and action).² Relating closely to environmental affairs, security has been dealt within an extended framework of “state/political security and human/communities security”; development concerns in the context of the conflict between growthism in quantity and sustainability accompanying equity; and environmentalism embracing multi-layered consistency beyond nationalized NINBY-ism (Not-In-My-Backyard). It is quite clear that today’s regional politics, as part of international affairs, consist of diverse actors’ continuous and simultaneous actions of competition, conflict and cooperation. An additional inquiry can be made on how, why and under what circumstances in a specific regional context on a certain subject, states and/or other major actors interact while forming a tangible regional-level cooperative entity beyond national boundaries. Such a question might become more intriguing (and more meaningful) when the region under question demonstrates a high level of tension in terms of security, is equipped with a high potential in economic development, and yet faces a variety of challenges due to historically irreconcilable conflicting collective identities. The NEA, as a loosely-defined “region,” well meets those initial grounds to stand as an intriguing and significant field of inquiry.

Main disciplinary approaches

As an academic field, political studies of a region can be positioned in between political science and international relations. There has been a rise and fall of regional studies in the academic trends of international relations reflecting the dynamism of international affairs (Groom and Taylor 1990). Within the discipline of international relations, a number of studies have been produced dealing with environmental “cooperation” across countries by scholars who take a liberalist position. These studies focus on the functions of institutions and organizations, the role of non-governmental actors, the rise of and interplay of governances at various levels, the effectiveness of cooperation, and international laws, norms and principles. The environmental field seemingly provided a perfect example for testing these theories, implying an optimistic vision on “cooperation beyond national or regional boundaries” with the view of resolving common problems. Constructivism also contributed to mainstreaming environmental issues into politics and political science through research on risk construction, securitization of non-conventional social risks, and the link between modernity and risks. Realism and its derivatives provide insights on states’ fierce zero-sum competition over scarce natural resources, perceiving these as part of essential elements to secure political and economic power at the expense of other players’ nationalized interests, rather than public environmental goods that need protection.

Against this background, one purpose of this book is to suggest, in terms of methodology, a way that political science can contribute to existing interdisciplinary studies on the environment, by providing a broader context of regional cooperation, but at the same time shedding light upon less visible conflicting relationships across nations in regional environmental affairs. National security and state sovereignty are used as conventional shields and legitimacy for member countries’ selective participation within a loose and flexible regional identity of the NEA.

Main questions and the scope of the project

It is clear that over the past two decades or so, the region (the NEA and the wider East Asia) has witnessed the expansion of multilateralism with an increasing number of regional organizations, institutions, fora, inter-regional cooperation and other forms of communication at all levels. The major three NEA players (China, Japan, and South Korea) took a strong leadership (or hegemonic) position in almost all such regional processes. Environment-related themes became one of the core areas of the regionalism and regionalization process. Yet, puzzling questions remain: first of all, these cooperative processes do not necessarily mitigate fundamental region-wide tensions and conflicts as much as neo-functionalism would expect; second, in spite of issue-focused regional cooperation in the field of the environment, the overall environmental degradation has not been controlled by regional cooperative regimes as much as liberal regime theorists might expect; third, in spite of widespread realist skepticism on regionalism and institutional cooperation, regional processes and multilateralism continue to grow in the NEA, particularly faster in the environment-related field. The rest of this book intends to disentangle these puzzles by exploring the evolution of regional environmental cooperation, interlinking the process with growing regional security tensions. In doing so, it intends to suggest a way to enhance the quality of cooperation (policy-wise) and contribute to environmental studies (methodological and theoretical). In this regard, questions arise regarding how far, for what motivations, and under what circumstances major players in the NEA would choose to participate in cooperation process, particularly in the environmental field.

To reiterate, this book explores primarily the following question: “How far, for what motivations, and under what circumstances do major players in the NEA choose to cooperate and how are other aspects of regional affairs, competition and conflict linked with those cooperation efforts?” While investigating this main question throughout the remaining chapters, it also explores the related questions: “To what extent has regionalized cooperation successfully evolved and been strengthened in view of, first, resolving region-wide environmental issues (in what specific areas and under what conditions), and further to contribute to global environmental governance?” “If regional environmental cooperation is necessary and beneficial in certain areas, how do conflicts over security issues in the related fields interact with such cooperative efforts, to what degree, on what level, and under what conditions?” Finally “Whether there has been negative or positive symbiosis between the above-explained three pillars of environment-related regional affairs (the rise of environmentalism, the broader sense of securitization, and development) that is generated by the regionalization process?”

In doing so, this book provides both sector-specific (across the three environmental fields) and region-specific analyses to suggest “to what extent a regionalized approach reinforces environmentalism” and “how regional security dynamics can have both constraints and opportunities,” generating a synergetic effect across related regional issues. The fundamental purpose of this research is to examine and suggest possibilities of enhancing environmental conditions both on anthropogenic and ecological grounds, and at the same time reconsidering the concept of “environmental security” in the wider context of contributing to ongoing academic efforts of mainstreaming environmentalism into political science and international relations. Environmental studies require an interdisciplinary approach, and there still remains much room for political scientists and scholars of international affairs to contribute.

Although all social science disciplines have been engaged in environmental studies with a range of contributions, there is still a dearth of research providing a wider picture of environmental affairs looking into the nature of the participating countries’ cooperation and conflicts in the regional context. Accordingly, environmental politics closely linked to conventional security have not been adequately scrutinized. This is partly because conventional state-centered realism-dominated analyses on regional politics of the NEA heavily concentrate on (and firmly legitimize) state security with a reluctance to accept the environment as a significant subfield of politics, while trivializing its problems as being socially and culturally based, thus being categorized as soft issues in international relations, and therefore taking a lower priority as a welfare issue in domestic politics. This is particularly true in most countries in East Asia.

This analysis is focused on the major regional economies due to both their geopolitical proximity and their significance in the region. As mentioned, it investigates the approaches to environmental cooperation of the major NEA economies, namely China, Japan, and the ROK (Republic of Korea) as core players and the DPRK (Democratic People’s Republic of Korea), the Republic of Mongolia, and Russia as additional actors. Strictly speaking, cooperation refers to that among the four (China, Japan, South Korea, and the RFE), whereas the framework of environmental aid (as part of development aid) is more relevant to describe the cooperative activities of the four vis-à-vis Mongolia and the DPRK. The environmental relationship between Russia and the NEA has often been neglected in previous studies, and global warming in the RFE³ has rarely been regarded as a security threat to the region (BBC News, August 2, 2016).⁴ “The impact of transnational and trans-border factors on the ecology of the Russian Far East is considerable,” as the region shares borders or proximity with China (see Zabelina and Klevaki 2012), the ROK, the DRPK, and Japan. Meanwhile, the DPRK “poses a potenti...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Preface
• 1 Setting the scene
• 2 Environmental politics and regional cooperation
• 3 Regional reaction to trans-boundary air pollution and climate change in Northeast Asia
• 4 Northeast Asia’s responses to biodiversity loss and the formation of regional biodiversity governance
• 5 Regional political dynamics and the marine environment in Northeast Asia
• 6 Greening regional politics
• Annex 1
• Annex 2
• Annex 3
• Index