Ozone Connections

Expert Networks in Global Environmental Governance

Penelope Canan, Nancy Reichman

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781874719403
• eBook ISBN: 9781351282307
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

It is difficult to think of a more significant example of international cooperation to address a problem that threatened the health and wellbeing of the entire planet than the 1987 Montreal Protocol for the Elimination of Ozone-Depleting Substances. This breakthrough in international environmental governance has proved to be an extraordinary success beyond rhetoric or promises. In a dozen years, this international agreement went from an understanding of the need to act in a precautionary manner for mutual benefit to a successful worldwide effort to eliminate chemical substances harmful to our protective ozone layer. The production and consumption of most ozone-depleting substances has now been phased out in developed countries, with developing countries not far behind.

What happened and why is of tremendous importance for those looking for guidance in the future, particularly those now involved in hugely complicated negotiations on climate change. The success of the Montreal Protocol has been linked to many factors such as political will, treaty flexibility and the recognition of equity issues raised by developing countries. While comprehensively analysing all of these success factors, Ozone Connections goes on to suggest that a social organization of global governance as typified by the protocol's Technical and Economic Assessment Panel (TEAP) was a unique – but replicable – decisive factor.

The book argues that we need to understand how the implementation of complex global environmental agreements depends on the construction and exploitation of social connections among experts who act collectively to define solutions to environmental problems.

This highly original and provoking thesis synthesises some of the more exciting social science concepts and methods, while refining our basic understanding of environmental social change and providing policy-makers with concrete success factors to replicate. This book will be essential reading for academics in the fields of sociology, political science, international relations, network studies, human communication, motivation, collaboration and leadership, as well as the burgeoning interdisciplinary field of environmental studies. Businesses will also find many applications for practical use. Finally, the many directly transferable lessons from ozone layer protection make this book a key addition to the growing literature on climate change.

1
Introduction

A treaty which is negotiated in 1987, which comes into force in 1988 or 9, whichever it was, which is revised in 1990, revised again in 1992, revised again in 1995.That is astonishingly practical. Astonishingly high speed! We wanted the Protocol to be able to do that. And the assessment panels are largely responsible for that.

Steve Lee-Bapty

The purpose of this book is to demonstrate that the implementation of complex global environmental agreements is the product of socially embedded actions and a particular combination of technical, interpersonal and political skills. It is the story of the social organisation of expertise at the global level. To this end, we focus on the remarkably swift and effective implementation of the Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer. Fifteen years ago this international agreement was a signed international understanding of the need to act in a precautionary manner for mutual benefit. Its passage in 1987 was the culmination of years of scientific debate, interest-based haggling and diplomatic arm-twisting. Today it is considered an exemplary case of innovative treaty language, a model of regulatory collaboration and an incredible success in implementation. The targets were chemical substances linked to prosperity, health and safety but harmful to the protective stratospheric¹ ozone² layer that makes life on Earth possible.

Safe, friendly and widely applicable, chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs)³ were first developed in 1931. They have been manufactured for an extremely wide variety of uses in addition to their original application in home refrigeration. Some of the applications include: flexible urethane foams (as in carpeting, furniture and car seats); rigid polyurethane foams (as insulation for buildings and mobile refrigeration units); blowing agents in nonurethane foams (polyurethane sheet products, foam trays, fast-food wrappers); refrigerant in automobile air-conditioners, industrial and commercial air-conditioners (known as chillers) and home refrigerators and freezers.

CFCs were an important solvent for the electronics and aerospace industries as a cleaning agent for printed circuit boards and scientific instruments. Halons,⁴ another set of halogenated hydrocarbons used as flame suppressants in fire-fighting, are also implicated. Other chlorine-containing solvents—including carbon tetrachloride,⁵ methylene chloride and the agricultural chemical methyl bromide,⁶ used as a soil fumigant and to protect stored agricultural products from pest-related deterioration—are implicated as well. As Parker and Gushee (1996: 7) note, ‘because of the wide variety of uses, the feasibility of substitution varies with the product’.

A bold experiment outlined on paper developed into a working regime, internally governed and externally governing the transformation of millions of industrial processes and sectoral practices around the world. In fact, the Montreal Protocol is without a doubt the most successful example of global environmental co-operation to date.⁷

The Montreal Protocol has worked, really worked, beyond rhetoric or promises (Grundmann 2000). As Charles Kolb, a leading atmospheric specialist and president of Aerodyne Inc., observed, ‘we’re all feeling very proud of the fact that we identified the problem and then the international community responded. We now see that the chlorine content [of the air] has peaked, and it seems to be declining’ (Cooke 2001).

Perhaps consensus regarding ozone-layer protection should have occurred earlier (Dotto and Schiff 1978; Linden 1993) and perhaps the early restrictions on ozone-deplet-ing chemicals should have been more severe (Nanda 1995). And it is true that ozone-layer protection is not a fait accompli; it will take time, and additional issues—from co-ordination with other international agreements to misguided efforts to contravene some of its provisions—will surface. Some of the bigger issues are illegal trade/smuggling (UNEP 2001), sanctions for non-compliance and the relationship between ozone-depletion potential and global-warming potential of substitute chemicals. Moreover, there is a lingering concern that the complication of global warming may undermine efforts at restoring the ozone layer (Cooke 2001). But by almost any yardstick—scientific, political, industrial, governmental, you name it—this is a treaty that has not merely been negotiated and ratified. It has, in fact, been implemented. And it has been implemented relatively smoothly and faster than originally agreed, under conditions of enormous complexity, differentiated responsibility and extraordinary collaboration.

What happened and why is tremendously important for those looking for guidance regarding climate change, global warming, biodiversity and other pressing global environmental problems. To the extent that each and every single factor that made for the ozone-layer regime’s unprecedented success was a fluke, we would have little to learn. But to the extent that there were patterns that we might consider emulating to address similarly complex issues of enormous societal importance, we need to take a close look. By examining the record as sociologists, we present here a case study of a global environmental experiment that worked.

The Protocol itself established assessment panels to advise the parties: the Science Panel, the Environmental Impacts Panel and the Technology and Economic Assessment Panel (TEAP).⁸ Our work covers the activities of one of these panels—the Technology and Economic Assessment Panel (TEAP)—in the dozen years after the signing of the Montreal Protocol of 1987, a time of tremendous behavioural and institutional change vis-à-vis the stratospheric ozone layer. The Montreal Protocol established the TEAP to accumulate the most current and credible knowledge on alternatives to the use of ozone-depleting substances (ODSs).⁹ The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) assembled scores of experts from different industries, nations, employers and disciplines to perform the task. The TEAP assessment process was organised into technical options committees (TOCs) that originally tracked the industrial sectors implicated in the phase-out of CFCs. Thus, early on, there was an Aerosols¹⁰ Technical Options Committee, a Foams Technical Options Committee, a Halons Technical Options Committee, a Solvents Technical Options Committee and a Refrigeration Technical Options Committee. Later, when the fumigant and pesticide methyl bromide was added to the list of banned chemicals, the Methyl Bromide Technical Options Committee (MBTOC) was created to give advice on phasing out this chemical as well.

Ozone-layer protection was a new concept for the world in the 1980s. How to do it, who would take responsibility for it and how it would be accomplished were enormous questions. In many ways, the history of the ozone-layer regime is the story of people who stepped up to the plate for a game that still needed to have the rules for playing created. It is also the story of the rules that the players created as they played. Initially, then, it was a situation of exploring what participating in this endeavour meant for actors already engaged in industrial, governmental and scientific roles. What quickly became obvious was the need for wide-ranging expertise and its co-ordination to pursue a common goal.

We bring our sociological imaginations to this case study of an international regime and its governance. C. Wright Mills taught us that to understand the social world one must examine the intersection of biography, personality and history. He writes that

We have come to know that … by the fact of his living [each person] contributes, however minutely, to the shaping of his society and to the course of history, even as he is made by society and by its historical push and shove (Mills 1956: 6).

The sociological imagination enables those who possess it to understand society through the lens of the individual, at the same time making sense of individuals by locating them within their social space. In other words, biography, history and personality merge in social life. It is this perspective that informs our work.

Our book tells the story of the mutual engagement of hundreds of technical experts in the accumulation and dissemination of knowledge to protect the ozone layer. We examine the people involved in implementing the Protocol as members of the TEAP and its TOCs. We consider the skills they brought to the process, the relationships that developed among them, and the social positions they held in their workplaces and their professional associations as key ingredients for the Protocol’s success. The accumulation and dissemination of technical knowledge about alternatives to ODSs depended on, indeed required, the investment and accumulation of social capital, stocks of relationships that individuals could draw on along with their technical knowledge to solve common problems.

We argue that the careful construction of connections, a shared sense of community and vision, among representatives to the TEAP and its committees created a field of ‘observables’ to encourage the production and implementation of alternatives to ODSs and to change the meaning of ‘best practices’ that are ‘ozone-friendly’. Not simply a convergence based on shared values, nor a negotiation of interests, the TEAP as a social organisation was consciously assembled through mutually constructed sets of individual preferences and possible solutions. The social organisation that was created fostered sturdy norms of generalised reciprocity, facilitated co-ordination and communication and created channels through which information about the trustworthiness of other individuals and groups could flow, be tested and verified. It embodied successes that could be built on over time. In short, the TEAP network became an enduring structure of global environmental governance.

In keeping with our focus on the social organisation of expertise, we begin with the story of a forward-thinking engineer whose first encounter with ozone-layer protection lays out many themes played out in the following ten years. In this story we will see that Jay Baker created new partnerships by breaking through traditional organisational thinking, designed new norms of industrial practice that are ‘friendly’ to the ozone layer and established connections that established innovative risk-sharing norms that promoted collaboration over competition. Finally, this story provides an example of how social connections, arranged in networks, became an effective form of self-governance for the solvent industry worldwide.

After Jay Baker’s story, we will introduce Suely Carvalho, a Brazilian physicist whose personal career exemplifies the institutional entrepreneurialism often found in the history of implementing the ozone-layer protection treaty. We will then introduce the TEAP and locate it and the Montreal Protocol in the larger scheme of regulatory behaviour. The final part of this chapter presents the book’s organisation.

The ‘early days’ of ozone-layer protection: Jay Baker’s story

For Jay Baker, a leader in electrical engineering and a keen observer of the relationship between people and technology, ozone-layer protection became an opportunity for his employer, Ford Motor Company. Baker chose to see the ozone-layer problem as a chance to collaborate with other industrial giants and with government agencies in the USA and around the world. It meant profits for his industry simultaneous with a corporate contribution to planetary survival.

In 1989 Baker assumed a new position at Ford Motor Company—the leadership of the unit that develops advanced technologies in and for manufacturing processes. Ford’s corporate office asked him to attend a meeting in Washington, DC, organised by Stephen Andersen of the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The subject was CFCs (ODSs)—something he ‘knew absolutely nothing about’. He was given no further instruction. ‘You’re on your own,’ they said, ‘just go and do the meeting and come back and tell us what you think’ (Baker 1997, interview).

In Washington, Baker found himself in the company of representatives from Chrysler, General Motors, IBM, AT&T, Motorola and DEC, among others. Baker soon learned that ‘a good percentage of the people were up to date on what the issues were … [but] a lot of the people were sceptical that there even was a problem’. Despite the palpable scepticism at the meeting, Baker remained open-minded. He was impressed by Steve Andersen’s sincerity, his ‘humanistic’ invitation to partner in the search for solutions and his orientation toward industry–government co-operation. He stated, ‘What I liked was that it wasn’t the autocratic “I’m-the-government-and-if you-guys-don’t-play-ball approach”. It wasn’t that kind of approach. It was very proactive’ (source: Baker 1997, interview).¹¹

When it was time to cast votes, Baker found that he was the only representative from an automobile company who was willing to join forces with representatives of the telecommunications and electronics giants to explore options for solving the CFC problem:

The GM man was on the fence, leaning toward declining, and the Chrysler man said Chrysler was not going to join. IBM was also sceptical about joining. AT&T was for it. DEC was for it. Motorola was for doing it. I did a quick survey at the meeting. It was about 50–50 (source: Baker 1997, interview).

When he returned to Dearborn, Michigan, Baker advised Ford to join the effort because he felt the timing was right both for his own career and the company’s future. He had a new research group and he had decided it was ‘a worthwhile cause’. After determining that his new team of engineers and scientists was interested, he initiated contacts with the companies who had spoken up as probable ‘joiners’. Using his position within Ford and his new contacts from the Washington meetings, he reached out independently to AT&T, Motorola and IBM, exploring current levels of technological understanding, predominantly in electronics, during a series of day-long meetings with each company’s engineers. As Baker told us, he pursued the concept of co-operation on an informal basis:

We had meetings to talk about potential technology solutions … Then I called IBM and said, ‘Even though you’re not going to join, can we have a technology exchange, where if you guys are working on similar issues we can share what we’re doing, you can share what you’re doing? What do you think about that?’ It helped that, at the time, IBM and Ford were forming a business relationship. Ford was single-sourcing them on computers and things like that, so they agreed to an exchange (source: Baker 1997, interview).

Subsequently US EPA’s Andersen set up another meeting in Washington for the people who had agreed to work together. Barriers to co-operation immediately appeared. Fuelled by declarations of mistrust of government, corporate attorneys began what turned into a six-month period of endless meetings haggling over corporate issues such as patent rights, intellectual property and vulnerability to claims of violating antitrust laws. Baker, who ‘went as an engineer’,¹² was the only person to arrive without an attorney. Although he ‘felt naked’, he didn’t think he needed a Ford attorney ‘just to see what’s going to go on’. Over the subsequent six months Baker attended meeting after meeting...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures and tables
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Introduction
• 2. The Montreal Protocol: a most remarkable treaty
• 3. Networks in the ozone-layer regime
• 4. Social capital in action
• 5. Committee connections
• 6. Socialisation in the ozone community
• 7. Institutional entrepreneurs
• 8. Lessons learned
• Bibliography
• Sources
• Appendix 1: Methodology
• Appendix 2: Interviewees
• Appendix 3: Survey questionnaire
• List of abbreviations
• Index