The Crisis of Global Environmental Governance

Towards a New Political Economy of Sustainability

Jacob Park, Ken Conca, Matthias Finger

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• Print ISBN: 9780415449199
• eBook ISBN: 9781134059812
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

More than twenty years after the Bruntland Commission report, Our Common Future, we have yet to secure the basis for a serious approach to global environmental governance. The failed 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development showed the need for a new approach to globalization and sustainability.

Taking a critical perspective, rooted in political economy, regulation theory, and post-sovereign international relations, this book explores questions concerning the governance of environmental sustainability in a globalizing economy. With contributions from leading international scholars, the book offers a comprehensive framework on globalization, governance, and sustainability, and examines institutional mechanisms and arrangements to achieve sustainable environmental governance. It:

• considers current failures in the framework of global environmental governance
• addresses the problematic relationship between sustainability and globalization
• explores controversies of development and environment that have led to new processes of institution building
• examines the marketization of environmental policy-making; stakeholder politics and environmental policy-making; socio-economic justice; the political origins of sustainable consumption; the role of transnational actors; and processes of multi-level global governance.

This book will be of interest to students and researchers of political science, international studies, political economy and environmental studies.

1 The death of Rio environmentalism

Jacob Park, Matthias Finger, and Ken Conca

What went wrong?

With the fading of post-Cold War optimism and the increasingly apparent inadequacy of responses to global environmental challenges, environmentalists around the world have begun to rethink the international strategies of the past few decades. Certainly, much has been accomplished to improve certain elements of international environmental governance. Multilateral agreements have proliferated; international institutions for trade and finance have begun to take more account of environmental considerations, either proactively or of necessity; many businesses around the world have begun to take the challenge of sustainability seriously. At the UN, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon recently appointed former Norwegian Prime Minister Gro Harlem Brundtland, former South Korean Foreign Minister Han Seung-soo, and former Chilean President Ricardo Lagos as special climate change envoys, to help build the “institutional framework within which a global solution to this global problem can be reached” (UN 2007). In Europe and Asia, many new ideas about institutionalizing sustainability have emerged and are being discussed (Ott 2005, IGES 2005, ADB 2005). In the United States, many cities and states have sought to assume policy leadership, as a way to counteract the Bush administration’s inaction and rollback on environmental matters.

Yet there is no denying that the scope and pace of change have been a source of major disappointment. The year 2007 marked the tenth anniversary of negotiations that produced the Kyoto Protocol on climate change. Progress toward global implementation of Kyoto, an agreement that falls woefully short of what is needed, can at best be described as uneven and sporadic. The same—or, in our view, much worse—could be said about progress in the case of faltered global initiatives on biodiversity, forests, the world’s oceans, and the environment-development targets embedded in the UN’s Millennium Development Goals. Ten years after the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, a serious environmental agenda was almost entirely missing when governments met in Johannesburg for what was labeled the World Summit on Sustainable Development.

In the United States, disappointment with the flagging of initiatives for global environmental protection stirred up into a major controversy when a widely publicized essay on “The Death of Environmentalism” argued that “modern environmentalism is no longer capable of dealing with the world’s most serious ecological crisis” of global warming (Shellenberger and Nordhaus 2004: 6; see also Shellenberger and Nordhaus 2007). The essay’s foreword suggested that “It’s time to ask: has the U.S. environmental community’s work over the past 30 years laid the groundwork for the economic, cultural and political shifts that we know will be necessary to deal with the crisis?” (Teague 2004: 4).

Many American environmentalists rejected the core claims of the essay (see “Don’t Fear the Reapers” 2005). Leaders of mainstream organizations such as the Sierra Club and the Natural Resources Defense Council offered rebuttals. Grassroots activists pointed to the failure of both the mainstream movement and those pronouncing its death to deal seriously with questions of race, class, and power in America. Several observers pointed to the fragmented character of American environmentalism, which makes it difficult to capture either success or failure through a single lens. Many noted that Shellenberger and Nordhaus, a pollster and a political strategist/public-relations expert, offered only incremental suggestions—that environmentalists work to recapture the Democratic Party, engage in values-based marketing initiatives, and promote alternative energy business development—raising questions about just how different their vision really was.

Few, however, disputed one of the central insights of the essay: that large, mainstream American environmental organizations were wedded to a set of strategies and tactics that increasingly misread the politics of the twenty-first century. As author Bill McKibben suggested, “The U.S. has wasted the 15 years since climate change emerged as a real problem. Its environmentalists have failed to make measurable progress on the greatest environmental challenge anyone’s ever faced. So we better come up with something new.” (McKibben 2005)

In the conversations that led us to produce this book, the editors and contributors have found themselves asking broadly similar questions about the state of global environmentalism. We use the phrase “global environmentalism” to refer not to a specific social movement or ideology, but rather to a broad historical trajectory of international initiatives that started with the 1972 UN Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm, were strengthened institutionally with the 1987WorldCommissiononEnvironment and Development (Brundtland Commission), peaked with the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, and, in our view, have been in decline ever since.

When governments converged on Rio de Janeiro for the 1992 UN Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED)—popularly dubbed the “Earth Summit”—the mood was one of cautious optimism about the challenge of sustainable development. Yet few can claim seriously that the period since the Rio meeting has been one of great accomplishment on global environmental governance, human development, or the chimerical notion of “sustainability.” Governments of the North have shown little interest in investing in Agenda 21, the laundry list of responses crafted for endorsement at the Earth Summit. Fifteen years after its release, Agenda 21 has become the environmental equivalent of the League of Nations’ resolutions against war—that is, high on political symbolism and low on policy impact. Governments of the South have shown little ability or inclination to stand in the way of the globalization of consumerism. International environmental diplomacy has stalled on issues ranging from climate change to the world’s forests to toxic hazards. In many parts of the world, activism and social mobilization on environment-development themes have grown in recent years—but most of this growth has taken place outside the framework of officially sanctioned “NGO” activity envisioned by the UNCED process, not within it.

The current situation looks vastly different from that euphoric summer of 1992. When the world’s governments came together at UNCED, they produced an official stance of cautious, pragmatically grounded optimism on the world’s environmental and development problems. UNCED conjured a world in which governments were starting to come together to hammer out a cooperative path toward long-term sustainability. In this highly stylized vision, governments of the North and South shared a basic interest in responding to a set of problems linking environment and development goals. Allocating the costs of responding would not be easy, and countries would continue to defend their sovereignty against undue encroachment. But change was expected to follow from creating the proper institutional frameworks to overcome these barriers to collective action, making it possible to realize the larger, shared global interest in sustainability.

Assets in this effort included humankind’s great capacity for technological and social innovation, the substantial gains in economic efficiency and quality of life to be had from doing things the sustainable way, and, above all, the growing recognition of the globally shared responsibility for the task. Enlisted in the campaign would also be a wide array of interested groups from civil society—everyone from farmers, youth groups, and civic associations to environmentalists, scientists, and transnational business elites. The premise was that these heterogeneous groups of actors, lumped under the general heading of “non-governmental organizations,” would feed useful information and perspectives into the joint agenda of governments and, in doing so, become much more likely to accept the conclusions reached by governments about the proper path forward from Rio.

Some critics have described UNCED as an unmet vision—a basically sound blueprint for sustainability that has failed only because governments have failed to fund and implement it. The question of how to finance sustainable development proved to be one of the most contentious issues at the 1992 Earth Summit. A particularly heated debate centered on whether the industrialized countries should pay for the costs of policy measures undertaken by developing countries to tackle global environmental problems. This notion of “additionality”—financial commitments to sustainability that would be provided in addition to existing development assistance—became a rallying cry for the developing countries in the negotiations on Agenda 21 prior to the Earth Summit, and has been raised many times since. The euphoria following Rio soon dissipated as decision-makers came to terms with the difficulties of meeting the $300 billion price tag to implement Agenda 21. With the possible exception of the Montreal Protocol and the phase-out of ozone-depleting substances, one can see similar difficulties with implementing virtually all global environmental conventions. Desire for a sustainable future is rarely followed up with adequate institutional support and economic resources.

Others have argued that UNCED was not so much a failed vision as an improperly focused one—a problem not simply of implementation and follow-through but, more fundamentally, of agenda-setting and priorities. High-profile Northern concerns about climate stabilization, biodiversity preservation, and tropical forests became the focus of high-stakes intergovernmental bargaining in an effort to craft multilateral treaties. The day-to-day struggles of the world’s poor for clean water, livable habitats, or healthy agro-ecosystems failed to muster political salience in the North, and as a result were consigned to the eco-political dumping ground of Agenda 21. They became problems for the next century, but not for the current political moment.

Still others have challenged the core premise of UNCED, rejecting its formulations of “sustainability” as a flawed, New Age, economistic vision. From this perspective, UNCED represented the institutionalization of incremental efficiency improvements or “ecological modernization,” in which the idea of “development” remains capital- and, more recently, knowledge-intensive industrialization, rather than questioning industrialization itself. Such an approach might promise marginal efficiency gains, but falls far short of the more fundamental social, political, and economic changes needed to achieve true sustainability. In this view, UNCED turned out to be little more than a vehicle to legitimize further industrial growth by transforming environmental problems into developmental issues, which then could be tackled by means of more money, more technology, and more management. A key element of controlling this process was to lump together civil-society actors and powerful business organizations under the general heading of “non-governmental organizations.”

Our purpose is not to formulate an institutional critique of global environmental governance or a deconstruction of the concept of sustainability. Indeed, such critical frameworks were available at the time of UNCED itself, for anyone willing to consider them. Perhaps the most compelling critique of UNCED is the spectacle that took place ten years after the Earth Summit, when the world’s leaders gathered in Johannesburg for the World Summit on Sustainable Development in August 2002. The Johannesburg Summit proved unable to offer a significant list of accomplishments since Rio, a coherent explanation of how to proceed, or even a clear description of the destination. Only ten years beyond Rio, the cracks in the official vision had grown into open fissures. As one director of a prominent environmental group active at the summit remarked, “Governments can’t even agree to reaffirm the principles of the Rio Summit ten years ago. This summit could easily be remembered as Rio minus ten rather than Rio plus ten” (London Times 2002). If it is remembered at all, the Johannesburg Summit is likely to stand as a perverse watershed in the history of global environmental governance: something that can only be described as the death of Rio environmentalism.

The inadequacy of current approaches to global environmental governance raises two important questions. First, how and why have serious approaches to global sustainability come to be so politically marginalized? How is it possible—15 years after UNCED, 20 years after the Brundtland Commission, and more than 30 years after the Stockholm UN Conference on the Human Environment—that the great global challenge of securing the ecological future of the planet and its peoples has reached a point of such political and social insignificance? Much of the problem lies, unsurprisingly, in opposition from powerful interests. But the problem has significantly been worsened by an inadequate grasp of the linked challenges of sustainability, globalization, and governance. The most damaging myths of Rio, in our judgment, were those that misrepresented, or simply ignored, this crucial triangular relationship. One central goal of this volume, therefore, is to begin to draw a clearer picture of this relationship and its implications.

Second, and ultimately more important, where do we go from here? If the path from Stockholm to Rio to Johannesburg cannot provide the basis for a serious approach, what are the alternatives? In particular, what institutional mechanisms and governing arrangements are consistent with a serious approach to sustainability in a globalizing world political economy? Here we are less interested in the narrower (albeit important) question of United Nations institutional reform, or the call for a “world environment organization.” Instead, we are interested in more basic questions: What are the core functions of environmental governance? Who are the agents best suited to perform them? At what levels of social aggregation—ranging from the most local to the genuinely global—are these functions most effectively performed?

How did we get here?

The clarion call for the can-do optimism of enlightened self-interest that pervaded what we will term the “Rio model” was Our Common Future, the 1987 report of the World Commission on Sustainable Development (WCED 1987). Chaired by Prime Minister Gro Harlem Brundtland of Norway, the WCED sketched a vision of sustainability as economic development; a world in which Southern governments implemented policy reforms with the help of Northern funding and technology transfer; and international cooperation around a shared global vision of the future which would break the logjam of perceived conflicts among national interests. Unfortunately, these premises can only be described today as wildly optimistic, particularly when it comes to the role of the state in promoting sustainable development.

In our assessment, the deep, underlying problems embedded in the Rio model, and the most fundamental failings of the path from Stockholm in 1972 to Johannesburg in 2002, have been threefold. First is a profound underestimation of the underlying dynamics of industrial development, technological change, and economic globalization, and the almost total failure to grapple with the questions of governing functions and governing agents in the world’s increasingly globalizing political economy. Second is an inadequate understanding of global environment-development problems, in which the main task is limited to managing transboundary environmental problems, while stabilizing national trajectories of growth-as-development. Third is an excessively state-centered vision of the political blueprint for change, in which deeply contested social conflicts over environmental protection and serious problems with both the authority and capability of states were largely denied or papered over. The net effect of these flawed ways of understanding the problem and its politics has been to steer us away from serious discussions of the links between sustainability, globalization, and governance.

In order to state our arguments clearly, it is important to examine each of these three flawed premises in more detail. The first incorrect premise of the UNCED/Rio process was to underestimate the dynamics of industrial society and miss the significance of globalization, particularly its economic dimensions. The Rio process underestimated—indeed, ignored—the dynamic trajectory of industrial civilization in the second half of the twentieth century and failed to account for the underlying, reinforcing dynamics of economic growth and technological diffusion that have come to define industrial development on an increasingly global scale. Chapter 2 by Ulrich Brand and Christoph Görg, “Sustainability and globalization: a theoretical perspective,” explores in more depth this problematic relationship between globalization and sustainability using a regulatory and critical-state theoretical framework. Matthias Finger’s chapter, “Which governance for sustainable development? An organizational and institutional perspective,” examines this decoupling by analyzing the dynamics of globalization and sustainability as governance dilemmas from an institutional and organizational perspective.

Centered in the comfortable traditions of interstate diplomacy, and strongly influenced by an underlying neo-liberal agenda of furthering economic growth, the Rio process offered no answers to core questions about the functions and agents of governance in a globalizing political economy. Deregulated, growth-liberating economies were expected to be able to solve many of the problems. Where they did not, the implicit belief was that the harmful side effects of progress could be contained by political will, with nation-states agreeing among themselves to limit these impacts voluntarily. Most of the emphasis was placed on economic incentives to do good things, rather than any notion of serious regulatory mechanisms at a global scale to prevent the doing of bad things. Matthew Paterson’s chapter, “Sustainable consumption? Legitimation, regulation, and environmental governance,” illustrates this problem in his examination of the contemporary discourse surrounding “sustainable consumption.” Paterson discusses the intellectual and political origins of sustainable consumption and shows how this concept acts as a general legitimizing strategy of economic globalization in relation to the environmental crisis. Henri Acselrad’s chapter, “Between market and justice: the socio-ecological challenge,” argues that sustainable development has been framed as a “technifying” of environmental discourse, in which the global environmental crisis is presented as manageable through the adoption of technical innovations and existing economic growth paradigms.

It is important to stress that the most important elements of this trajectory—the globalization of production systems, the rising power of transnational corporate interests, the diffusion of consumerist tastes and lifestyles, and the weakening of national regulatory systems—do not represent “post-UNCED” restructuring in the world system. Rather, they are longer-term trajectories that were in fact visible from the vantage point of the late 1970s, and that had clearly become apparent by the time of the 1987 Brundtland report. That they have spawned political controversies about “globalization” since the mid-1990s does not mean that they are new, but simply that they are getting increasingly difficult to ignore or obfuscate. In his chapter, “The marketization of global environmental governance: manifestations and implications,” Peter Newell discusses the important link between this global economic trajectory on the one hand and the increasing difficulty of devising an effective solution to ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• List of contributors
• 1 The death of Rio environmentalism
• 2 Sustainability and globalization: a theoretical perspective
• 3 Which governance for sustainable development? An organizational and institutional perspective
• 4 A global political economy of textiles: from the global to the local and back again
• 5 The marketization of global environmental governance: manifestations and implications
• 6 Between market and justice: the socio-ecological challenge
• 7 Sustainable consumption? legitimation, regulation, and environmental governance
• 8 Transnational transformations: from government-centric interstate regimes to cross-sectoral multi-level networks of global governance
• 9 “Stakeholders” and the politics of environmental policymaking
• 10 Rethinking authority, territory, and knowledge: transnational socio-ecological controversies and global environmental governance