Environment and Citizenship

Integrating Justice, Responsibility and Civic Engagement

Mark J. Smith, Doctor Piya Pangsapa

• Publisher: Zed Books
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9781842779033
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781848136618
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Corruption & Misconduct
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Citizenship and the environment are hotly debated, as climate change places more responsibility on individuals and institutions in shaping policy. Using new evidence and cases from across the globe, Environment and Citizenship explores the new vocabulary of ecological citizenship and examines how successful environmental policy-making depends on the responsible actions of citizens and civil society organizations as much as on governments and international treaties. This accessible and thought-provoking book:

- provides a comprehensive and timely guide to the debates on environmental and ecological citizenship, expertly combining examples of practice with theory;
- examines how environmental movements have become increasingly involved in governance processes at the local, national, regional and intergovernmental levels;
- explores the increasing importance of corporations and transnational networks through examples of stakeholding processes and participatory research in environmental decision-making;
- calls on researchers, policy-makers and activists to face a new challenge: how to effectively link environmental justice with social justice.

Breaking new ground, Smith and Pangsapa address how environmental responsibility operates through politics, ethics, culture and the everyday experiences of ctivists, as well as how awareness of environmental and social injustice only leads to responsible actions and strategic change through civic engagement.

PART TWO

Practice informed by theory

4 | Environmental governance, social movements and citizenship in a global context

Introduction: from regulation to obligation at a global level

The hollowing out of the state combined with the transformation of the global economy has led to a shift from a concern with ‘government’ policy to an interest in ‘governance’ networks across different levels and between different sectors, issues and policy communities. This chapter considers the emergence of environmental governance at intergovernmental, regional (in particular the EU), national and sub-national arenas. Sometimes, governance is described as ‘government without statehood’ (Weale et al. 2000: 6), although this misses the point that national policy is still part of the complex relations through which environmental policy emerges. This chapter brings together case studies of international regime formation on global environmental commons (such as forestry and climate change) with a specific focus on the interaction between NGOs and national governments. It is difficult to identify exact benchmarks for the growing importance of environmental policy in this context – although those often highlighted range from the Stockholm Conference 1972 through to the Earth Summit twenty years later, in Rio de Janeiro.

What we can state is that, in the 1970s, environmental policy was concerned more with environmental protection (conservation, air pollution and water quality measures), but by the 1990s had shifted more towards standard-setting and assessing performance. In addition, since ‘globalization is first and foremost a creation of business, devising a policy will necessarily require the contribution and support of those actors who generated it and remain its primary movers’ (Tesner 2000: 145). The structural changes in the global economy mean that nation-states are less capable of regulating the behaviour of corporations and the effects of capital mobility. This means that other ways of influencing the activities of international capital are seen as more effective, hence the rise of NGOs and transnational networks concerned with sweatshops, human rights abuses, labour standards violations and unsustainable environmental impacts.

Environmental concerns over pollution or resource depletion can potentially lead to serious conflicts. Even when environmental problems are located within national boundaries (as with the nuclear accidents in Japan – at Tokaimura 1997, 1999; Kashiwazaki-Kariwa 2007) or affect a limited number of countries (such as the nuclear fallout from the Chernobyl meltdown or acid rain deposits in European countries in the 1980s), the response to such hazards is often conducted in what has been come to be called the world community. Acid rain problems are not limited to Europe but are well documented in Korea, Japan, South Africa and Brazil. The same can be said of the slash-and-burn activities of Indonesian farmers, which have created significant air pollution problems for other South-East Asian countries such as Malaysia and Singapore. This region, along with China, is also displaying the early signs of significant acid rain problems. In particular, the rapid industrialization of areas of India has produced what has been dubbed the ‘Asian Brown Cloud’. In addition, concern about regional atmospheric pollution is closely related to international negotiations on deforestation.

Box 4.1 Potential conflicts over environmental resources in the Arctic region

With the rise of oil prices to over US$130 a barrel in 2008, attention has been redirected to potential fossil fuel resources in the polar regions. The knock-on effects include new designs for icebreaking supertankers and funding for military vessels in nations with a territorial interest in the Arctic, even including Canada. Russia has even planted its national flag on the seabed at the North Pole. Ownership of fossil fuels and other resources in the Arctic will result in conflict ‘fought in temperatures below 40°c, amid bone-chilling blizzards and unrelieved winter darkness. The political powers of the northern hemisphere are suddenly facing tense negotiations over who gets what in an oil- and gas-rich polar territory twice the size of France’ (Mills 2007).

In some cases, the rush to the North Pole is as much an expression of national pride as driven by necessity in terms of environmental security. According to Mills, ‘Artur Chilingarov, a Russian explorer and politician, dropped a rustproof titanium flag from the hold of a mini-submarine to prove that while Moscow lost the space race, it is determined to win the ice race … access to what geologists believe are a quarter of the globe’s oil and gas reserves – in short, the solution to the crippling energy shortages that will begin throttling Western economies within the next two decades’.

The rush to the pole is also precipitated by the effects of global warming and the Arctic melt, making regions of the globe more accessible to exploration as well as to potential shipping routes that were previously ice-bound. The putative North-West and Bering Strait passages linking the Atlantic to the Pacific also offer new routes for trade in fuel that would link available resources in the Arctic to the rapidly developing Asian economies, while the high fossil fuel prices make the high costs of polar oil and gas exploration in the Arctic more economically feasible, that is, profitable, in business terms.

On the resource depletion side, resolving conflicts of interest presents difficulties when they concern scarce resources such as oil and water as well as minerals. Commodity prices for these resources have appreciated considerably since the start of the twenty-first century as a result of the rapid industrialization of China and India. In addition, it is expected that oil and gas production will peak some time in the second decade of this century (see Box 4.1). These examples highlight the critical importance of environmental negotiations and the development of coordinated responses to environmental problems that go beyond the local and the national arenas, highlighting the relations between state actors and transnational NGOs. It is to these we now turn in the next section.

Global commons and international environmental regimes

One of the most influential studies of the politics of the international environmental issue, John Vogler’s The Global Commons (2000), provides a useful framework for understanding international environmental regimes. Regime analysis emerged in the study of international relations during the 1970s and 1980s during a period that witnessed the relative decline of the dominance of the USA in international relations, the development of transnational cooperation on formal legal instruments, and the proliferation of informal networks through which agreements can become effective. Vogler argues that the shift in relationships between states and the growth of institutional relations below, alongside and above national governments demanded a very different approach in order to make sense of the complex evidence involved. Vogler highlights Krasner’s definition as a baseline for understanding regimes:

Sets of implicit and explicit principles, norms, rules and decision making procedures around which actors’ expectations converge in a given area of international relations. Principles are beliefs of fact, causation and rectitude. Norms are standards of behaviour defined in terms of rights and obligations. Rules are specific prescriptions or proscriptions for action. Decision making procedures are prevailing practices for making and implementing collective choice. (Krasner 1983: 2, cited in Vogler 2000: 20)

The concern here is as much with the flexible and constantly renegotiated informal rules of conduct as with the formal legal rules regulating actors in international relations. While the research literature tends to focus on legally binding instruments as tangible objects of analysis (Porter and Brown 1991), this neglects the role of tacit knowledge and the effect of shared experiences through which trust has been established (and sometimes damaged) in past practices. Inevitably, legal documents at this level are often broad in scope, making the achievement of specific outcomes difficult without a shared commitment and common understanding of what objectives are desirable, especially when success requires wider support from a range of non-governmental actors such as private corporations and NGOs. This may also involve the need to reconcile the objectives of state and non-state participants before any specific agreement, once drafted and accepted, can prove workable. It is these issues which make the careful analysis of environmental regime formation and implementation so pressing. When considering issue areas, always central to defining the scope of a regime, we are concerned with how an increase in average atmospheric temperatures or the preservation of the Antarctic wilderness can become objects for common negotiation. These examples are also useful for highlighting how issue areas overlap; for example, how climate change or ozone depletion is intimately connected to the polar regions or how deforestation and marine acidification are relevant to understanding global warming. Hence adequate analysis has to take account of how changes in bio-physical processes (often as a result of anthropogenic impacts on environments) in one issue can generate causes that have consequences in other issue areas. Vogler presents two useful illustrations with reference to space and marine environments as global commons:

•separate regimes exist for the safety of astronauts, information flows, military uses and the geostationary orbit (GSO) frequency essential for communication links;

•the hunting of whales is subject to the International Convention on the Regulation of Whaling (1946) but since whales migrate back and forth across the Antarctic convergence (roughly 60 degrees south), they are also regulated by the Antarctic Treaty System as well as regimes specific to the high seas.

Environmental negotiations can also be partitioned off from the regulation of other aspects of international relations, such as trade relations. For example, restrictions on the importation of particular goods for health and environmental reasons, such as beef involving the use of hormones, have been ruled to be a barrier to free trade by the World Trade Organization (WTO). Similarly, when the WTO met in Seattle in 1999 to consider the uses of biotechnology (specifically, restrictive practices primarily by the EU on the trade of products containing genetically modified organisms, GMOs), it set in process a claim by the national governments of the USA, Canada and Argentina. This resulted in a WTO ruling on this dispute in 2006, to the effect that the six-year moratorium on approving GMO food products by a number of countries in the EU was in breach of trade rules (it applied a de facto moratorium), which marked a significant shift, but the European Commission claimed that this did not affect the existing procedures in place. As a result, since the WTO found that the EU was creating undue delays in approval of GMO products, discussion has focused on speeding up the process for approval. Environmental NGOs in Europe were particularly unsatisfied that the European Commission did not appeal, asserting that sovereign territories should have a clear right to reject food products that posed potential risks.

When it comes to actors and their interests, as the GMO case highlights, states are still important in environmental negotiations. States have difficulties in representing the diverse views and interests of their citizens, however, and they cannot guarantee the compliance of actors responsible for environmental degradation. Meanwhile, non-state actors (whether they are for-profit or not-for-profit) are also increasingly significant in environmental negotiations in terms of both the formation and implementation of agreements. In the global marketplace, as a result of increased capital mobility, private corporations are able to secure considerable concessions from governments, in the form of weak regulation as well as tax breaks and subsidies within their territorial boundaries. Besides states in the conventional sense, these actors can be divided into organizations or coalitions of states, UN bodies, private corporations and NGOs. For example, the interests of developing societies have been represented by the coalition Group of 77 (most often designated as G77).

Coalitions of states may act in a way that contradicts the stated objectives of member states or international bodies in which states play a part. By way of an example, the EU (or its predecessors before 1993) is a unique actor in that it is the sole example of a Regional Economic Integration Organization and is often cited as an important agency for developing international environmental agreements. Nevertheless, developing a common environmental policy within the EU is never easy. While in formal terms the EU negotiates as a bloc, internal negotiations can lead to problems in effectiveness. During the final session of the UN’s Intergovernmental Forum on Forests held in February 2000, when considering the possibility of an International Convention on Forests, representatives of the EU member states could not agree internally and so became ineffectual in the discussions. Spain and Finland aligned themselves with the opinions of representatives of countries favouring a convention. Meanwhile other states, including the UK, were against. The result was that the EU played an increasingly peripheral role as the negotiations unfolded. This kind of immobilism means that when a policy proposal arises, majority support among members is not evident, and when a majority begins to emerge, the disagreements on substantive aspects of policy get in the way of united action, which could be a recurrent pattern if the global system becomes divided by regional blocs.

While the UN is formally and primarily a negotiating arena, the programmes and organizations that have been established also operate as actors in the processes of environmental negotiations. The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and strategically located individuals in other UN institutions have coordinated state and non-state actors to achieve specific outcomes – for example, in dealing with ozone-depleting chemicals such as CFCs. In addition, private corporations and environmental NGOs have sometimes had a place in national delegations by virtue of the specialist expertise and technical competence they can provide. Such involvements also create opportunities for civil society organizations to act as transmission belts for disseminating information within nations, as well as transnationally through organizations such as the Environmental Liaison Centre International, itself a key member of the broader Sustainable Development Issues Network, which seeks to use knowledge-sharing for NGO capacity-building.

While the focus on rules in the operation of international regimes is crucial, the changing circumstances, shifting perceptions and emergence of new scientific evidence regarding environmental problems mean that it is just as important to consider the principles and norms that underpin the rules. Vogler suggests that regimes operate according to certain foundational assumptions as to the physical character of the issue area, the kind of environmental problem that should be subject to regulation, the scientific theory and evidence through which the ‘problem’ is constructed, and the identification of specific measures for producing better outcomes. For example, regarding climate change, these assumptions include the problem of global warming, the aggregate level of CO₂ and other emissions, the scientific consensus established through the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and the targets for limiting emissions, alongside mechanisms such as carbon trading. As a result, he defines principles as beliefs of fact, causation and rectitude, while describing norms as standards of behaviour. Regarding norms, Vogler does not distinguish between abstract and concrete norms (see Chapter 3), generalizing that norms are defined in terms of rights and obligations. Principles provide the broad framework for working through the relationship between property rights and the responsibilities of actors to others, such as taking care with common sinks by maintaining air quality, not polluting the oceans, and ensuring a stable climate.

In addition, there are what Vogler defines as allocative principles, market-based or centralized resource planning, which provide ground rules for rights to extract resources and rights to discharge waste. If in an open-access commons, when initial exploiters discover a new location of a resource or develop technologies for extraction that were implausible before, then ‘first come, first served’ works as the allocative principle. Norms involve the application of principles to specific global commons, ensuring that rights to use the commons are moderated by duties (although it is often the case that rights exist here alongside obligations, i.e. an informal sense of commitment at best, and very narrowly defined duties). For example, members of particular nations can enjoy rights within territorial waters to fish stocks, crustaceans and sea mammals. Overfishing has resulted, however, in declining fish stocks in many cases, leading to the collapse of particular species in certain areas when stocks fall to unsustainable levels. State and EU regulations have restricted harvesting in this context with fishing quotas, hence translating obligations into duties. In 2006, the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea (ICES) recommended a total ban on cod fishing in the North Sea and other waters surrounding the British Isles so that stocks can rise to the minimum desired level of 70,000 tonnes, though this falls short of the agreed target of 150,000 tonnes made between the EU and Norway a year earlier.

Using these terms poses difficulties. Norms can be prescriptive and proscriptive (indicating what can and cannot be done) or they can be used in straightforwardly normative ways to signify good and bad outcomes, the right and wrong course of action, or the virtuous and unvirtuous forms of behaviour. In addition, many statements on sustainable development simultaneously imply principles and norms. To add confusion, international agreements often describe norms as principles. For instance, in the Earth Summit declaration (1992):

Principle 15 – that the absence of scientific certainty should not postpone action to prevent environmental degradation (the precautionary principle);

Principle 17 – that environmental impact assessment (EIA) should be introduced on all projects where environmental impacts follow.

Decision-making procedures and the organizations that make decisions attempt to provide a mechanism for transforming collectively agreed choices and commitments into effective actions in parti...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Figures, tables and boxes
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: environment, obligation and citizenship
• One | Theory informed by practice
• Two | Practice informed by theory
• Bibliography
• Index