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Lessons from Environmental Governance for Debt Forgiveness1
by
Peter M. Haas
Professor
Department of Political Science
Thompson Hall
University of Massachusetts
Amherst, MA 01003
Ph 413 545 6174
Fax 413 545 3349
Email haas@polsci.umass.edu
For inclusion in Vinod Aggarwal and Brigitte Granville eds. Sovereign Debt: Origins,
Management, and Restructuring London: Royal Institute of International Affairs
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1. Introduction
Economic globalization creates transboundary and global externalities. These
externalities arise both in the realm of environmental threats and in the realm of financial
threats. Regimes for the environment have developed since the 1970s, and major debt
regimes for developing countries emerged in the 1980s. Yet each area of regime creation
has developed in total isolation from one another. This chapter looks at collective
experiences from the development of environmental regimes over the last 30 years, and
considers the prospects for achieving recent reform efforts on behalf of the heavily
indebted countries within the debt regime.
In the environmental sphere over the last 30 years most states have added
environmental considerations to the traditional pursuit of economic growth, and
ecological integrity is now widely regarded as a common state goal in the international
realm. This compromise is called sustainable development.1 Environmental regime
creation occurred principally through a process of substantive and tactical linkages, by
which economic activities have been increasingly constrained subject to a shared
appreciation of their potential environmental consequences.
2.
Linkage Dynamics
A large literature exists on the dynamics by which linkages are drawn between
issues on the international agenda. 2 Two forms of linkages are most commonly
discussed, with distinctive political processes and outcomes associated with each.
Tactical linkages are temporary compromises that combine issues based on the ability of
actors or institutions to create linkages between issue areas through the application of
material capabilities; either threats or rewards. Tactical linkages are driven by an actor’s
ability to offer sufficient resources to induce others to accept something in which they
have no real interest. This is essentially a form of applying power, based on the
command of soft-power resources, rather than directly compelling others to act.
Substantive linkage is a process of drawing new connections between issues that
were not previously recognized or accepted. This may occur in two ways. Nesting
involves the application of universally accepted norms or beliefs about proper behavior to
issues that are believed to be subject to their sway. Understanding how key figures come
to deem issues as subordinate to others is only just being addressed, through the
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development of complex contingent models of social learning and the evolution of
norms. 3 A second substantive mechanism is by new consensual knowledge that justifies
the causal links between items, so that policy in one area is warranted because of its
causal impact on a valued goal in another issue area.
Linkages between the environment and economic development occurred primarily
through tactical and substantive linkages involving learning. It is too soon to ascertain the
extent to which widely shared normative values about environmental protection are
deeply held and applied systematically to economic management. Tactical linkages
between economics and the environment were possible because of the influence of
international organizations (formal international institutions). Substantive linkages were
due to the emergence of new consensual knowledge about the environment and the way
in which human welfare rests on the preservation of ecological integrity, and to the
increased ability of IOs to operate on behalf of such knowledge independently of the
interests of their dominant member states.
Environmental regime creation and progress occurred primarily through linkages
forged by the interaction of institutional and knowledge factors. Many environmental
commitments exceed those expected just by the tactical linkages established through
influence of institutional resources alone, and can only be understood in light of states
learning to pursue new goals subject to the application of consensual knowledge. 4 Based
on a comparative study of 14 environmental and resource regimes, Edward Miles
concludes that “we may, for all practical purposes consider a base of consensual
knowledge about the basic characteristics of the problem to be a necessary, though by no
means sufficient, condition for achieving effective solutions to truly malign problems.”5
Similarly, Arild Underdal writes “all cases where the predictions derived from
(assumptions) … based on rational anticipations of political difficulty…proved too
pessimistic are instances of institutional growth or improvement in the knowledge base.”
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In environmental regimes such as stratospheric ozone and European acid rain, national
commitments exceeded those expected by institutionalist analysis focusing only on the
influence of institutional variables.
Globalization facilitated such social learning by increasing the number of political
actors capable of exercising influence over states as well as by deepening states’
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uncertainty about the interactions with other states as well as about the nature of their
own interests and preferences in an increasingly uncertain and complex policy
environment. Environmental linkages were facilitated by several factors. The existence of
shared consensual knowledge about the behavior of valued ecosystems warranted
substantive linkages. Highly porous and independent international organizations engaged
in environmental governance were able to recognize and apply this new consensual
knowledge.
Debt forgiveness appears unlikely to be linked to the environment or to other
regimes because the political foundations for any of the types of linkage appear weak.
The disjoint nature of the formal institutions involved in the two regimes and the different
historical trajectories by which the regimes have developed inhibit linkages. In the debt
regime national debt obligations have been connected to the historical monetary regime
introduced at Bretton Woods. Thus, debt forgiveness is outside the pale of standard
operating procedures, and normative efforts on behalf of debt forgiveness, such as the
Jubilee 2000 campaign. The principal international institution involved with debt
management, the International Monetary Fund, is singularly unporous, and dominated by
neoclassically trained economists who are insensitive to substantive environmental
claims or to tactical political campaigns by debtors and their NGO allies.7
3. Environmental Regime Building
Environmental regimes have grown dramatically in number and substantive scope
over the last 30 years. 8 From a baseline of relative ignorance and neglect by policy
makers and most individuals of the environmental consequences of most human actions,
the preservation of ecosystem integrity has evolved as a new principled goal of the
international system, on a par with the pursuit of wealth and power. These changes
developed within a relatively self-contained political structure shaped by the experiences
of the 1970s, and the political involvement of international institutions and scientists.
Only recently, in the 1990s, have NGOs and international firms become important actors.
Now most activities are subject to some set of rules, and most countries are party
to at least one major environmental treaty governing the environmental consequences of
economic activities. Markets now exist for environmental technology that did not exist
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30 years ago. Andrew Hoffman finds that recent corporate interest in environmental
protection is a consequence of state regulation during earlier eras of multilateral
environmental regime formation, combined with broader shifts in public consciousness in
the 1990s. 9 The process of multilateral regime building for the environment created the
institutional and cognitive context in which states came to reformulate their
understanding of their interests, and changed foreign and domestic environmental
policies and practices to commit more political resources to environmental procession.
As a consequence, by the 1990s corporate interests were facing a new set of
institutionalized incentives for corporate behavior.
International concern with transboundary and global environmental threats
emerged in the late 1960s, following highly publicized environmental disasters. While
many environmental treaties and regimes were already in place, they were chiefly
addressed to species conservation and oil pollution at sea. The new alarms signaled a
new set of potential anthropegenic threats, involving human kind’s new potential to
systematically interfere with the natural ecosystems on which human (and other species’)
survival depends. A new pattern of global environmental governance has emerged over
the last 30 years, since the first concerted efforts at addressing modern environmental
threats at the 1972 UN Conference on the Human Environment (UNCHE).
Governance developed through a step-wise process. Governance during the
1970s and 1980s was a matter of institutionalized knowledge, as international institutions
adopted new missions and policy frameworks based on the improved understanding of
ecosystems. In turn this knowledge and institutional pressure led states to adopt more
vigorous environmental norms and to adopt common practices to address transboundary
and global environmental threats. By the 1990s globalization had accelerated, and
markets and civil society came to play a role in consolidating the environmental regimes
through increased political pressure on states and key actors to adhere to the regime
norms and rules, leading in turn to improvements in the effectiveness of environmental
regimes at curbing pollution. 10
The very nature of political governance has changed as a consequence of
institutionalized beliefs that were developed in individual environmental regimes during
this period, so that the current epoch of multilateral environmental governance is
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qualitatively different than was the state of affairs (or state of nature) in the early 1970s.
As a consequence, prospects for successful environmental protection have improved,
with the establishment of new environmental norms, formal rules and institutions, and
markets for environmental protection; all leading to the creation of new constituencies for
environmental protection that influence states and other groups to engage in more
environmentally sustainable practices.
Characteristics of International Environmental Politics
Many NeoRealist and Institutionalist analysts characterize international
environmental politics in terms of problems of collective choice. 11 Internationally, while
collective action may be desirable to address shared problems, the international system is
believed to be institutionally and administratively too weak to mobilize sufficient
political pressure on states to act, and thus effective management of shared problems is
weak or inadequate to protect the environment. Domestically, the costs of environmental
protection are often concentrated, while the benefits are diffuse, thus diffusing potential
domestic pressure for vigorous national action.
Constructivist theorists argue that these conventional views overstate the degree
to which states hold consistent and invariant preferences, and derive such preferences
from an appreciation of the game-theoretic nature of international politics. For
constructivists, states are not substantively or procedurally rational. Rather they make
decisions subject to bounded rationality, the easiest choices are taken at any one point it
time, and choices persist until new state action is galvanized by political crises. Choices
persist, and are not frequently returned to until political crises catalyze a response. In
practice, international environmental politics may also be seen as a setting in which states
are interacting under conditions of uncertainty. 12 States remain the legal authorities
responsible for making environmental decisions, although individual states vary
dramatically in terms of their functional ability to autonomously make and enforce
environmental policies. Due to the novelty of the issues, and the complexity of
environmental systems, state officials are often uncertain about state interests,
preferences, or the likely consequences of their actions. Consequently, state preferences
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and interests are not analytically given, and, in practice, may change as a consequence of
new information, institutional design, and participation in regimes from which state
officials obtain new information or incentives over time. That is, states may learn as a
consequence of engaging in international environmental regimes. Because regimes are
dynamic socializing institutions, the addition of a learning element (wrapped up in the
social dynamics that give rise to such unique outcomes) contributes to a longer-term
endogenous source of change in international governance.
Forces in International Environmental Politics
IR theorists concur that five factors are key in influencing state choices and in
shaping the creation of international environmental regimes - national leadership,
international institutions, transnational scientific networks, NGOs, and public concern –
although different schools of IR theory disagree about the importance of individual
factors (or variables) and the circumstances under which such forces are likely to be
important.
National Leadership
While Realists and NeoRealists stress the necessary guidance of strong state
leadership for all aspects of international relations, state leadership has not played a
strong role in international environmental politics. Consequently, few realists have
written much about international environmental politics other than to stress the possible
consequences for national security of resource scarcity and environmental degradation.13
No single country has exercised systematic leadership in international
environmental politics. In fact, much successful cooperation has occurred in the absence
of strong state leadership, and the United States – the presumptive international hegemon
– has not demonstrated any systematic pattern of behavior across environmental regimes
in which the US has been involved. 14 The US has a schizophrenic pattern of foreign
environmental policy: vigorously promoting strong environmental regimes for
stratospheric ozone protection, vigorously opposing strong environmental regimes for
biodiversity, and straddling the fence in climate change and in many regional seas
arrangements. At times the US has been a unilateral leader, such as with operational oil
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pollution and the passage of requirements for double hull tankers even in the absence of
harmonized policies by other states. The US has been highly selective in its attention to
UNEP activities, for which the US is the largest funder.
Thus, there has been little effort by key states to exercise national leadership on
behalf of linking environmental considerations to economic activities. Other than the US,
Germany has only occasionally exercised leadership, such as in the European Acid Rain
regime, when Germany stood to gain economically from the markets for pollution control
equipment that the regime would spawn. In general countries appear to exercise
leadership for three distinct reasons: principled beliefs, anticipated economic gain, and
fear of net environmental degradation. For instance, the US exercised leadership on
stratospheric ozone when the State Department and Environmental Protection Agency
were penetrated by an ecological epistemic community. Germany exercised leadership
when it anticipated economic gain from the regime. Sweden exercised leadership on acid
rain and marine pollution when the Swedish government anticipated that Sweden would
be a net victim of transboundary environmental threats. Decisions about environmental
leadership are made on issue-specific grounds, as the degree of knowledge, distribution
of environmental costs, and the make up of the policy community varies by
environmental issue.
NGOs and Civil Society
NGOs and civil society are often stressed as important participants in
international environmental politics.15 UNCED was a transformational international
conference at which NGOs exercised a strong presence. Analysts have stressed the
potential role played by NGOs in shaping public perceptions and values about the
environment, in pressing governments to adopt and comply with more vigorous
environmental positions.
While potentially contributing to effective regional governance, domestic pressure
and NGOs did not play a strong role in environmental governance until the late 1990s. In
Europe environmental concern was very modest until the late 1980s, and only took off in
the rest of the world in the early 1990s.16 A Gallup poll prepared for UNCED
demonstrated increased worldwide concern, but very little emphasis was placed on
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transboundary and global issues. Public opinion remained highly issue specific, like
siting individual factories rather than regional planning.
In general, NGOs, when involved in environmental regimes, have expressed
preferences for the pursuit of principled norms and press for strong commitments of
principle to which governments may be subsequently held accountable. Most NGOs
avoid recourse to precise formulations of regime rules, as the NGOs lack the resources to
carefully observe compliance, and NGOs own abilities to garner financial resources from
public contributions often rest on their ability to put forward principled positions, and to
embarrass governments and firms that are found in violation of the broad commitments.
Successful tactics have primarily involved shaming companies, shareholder movements,
and consumer boycotts. 17Occasionally, NGOs have become active in regime
enforcement. TRAFFIC, for instance, verifies compliance with the CITES regime on
trade in endangered species.
Most NGOs prefer regimes based on prohibitions of activities, rather than efforts
to shape the tolerable range of activities. For instance, Greenpeace has been active in the
whaling regime seeking to establish and enforce a moratorium on whaling – in the face of
more nuanced schedules of tolerable whaling harvests according to cetolgoists estimates
of the population dynamics and degree of threat to individual whale species – and the
creation of a marine sanctuary in the Southern Ocean. In the North Sea Greenpeace’s
Brent Spar campaign successfully induced Shell Oil to dispose of obsolete oil drilling
platforms on shore, rather than at sea, with higher economic costs but without clearly
higher environmental benefits. In CITES they push to bans on poaching, rather than
setting tolerable limits on takings.
There is no real common solidarity within the environmental NGO community,
because it is so vast. There are tens of thousands of environmental NGOs. Many
Northern NGOs are involved with local issues in the North, in global campaigns, and in
managing conservation and development projects in the South. NGOs in developing
countries only became politically salient after UNCED. Most are primarily concerned
with local issues, leaving transboundary and global issues up to campaigners are the
North.18
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NGO campaigns on the ground are much easier, politically, in the North, where
there is greater transparency of government decision making. In democracies NGO
campaigners operate with less individual risk, and campaigns involving public education
may directly percolate up to states as individual preference shifts are articulated through
elections. Keck and Sikkink argue that effective NGO involvement in the South rests on
strong north/south partnerships 19 Effective NGO pressure on developing country
governments rests on carefully planned campaigns with Northern and Southern NGOs, in
conjunction with pressure on potentially influential international institutions and
Northern governments, such as efforts to reverse Brazilian government policies that
contributed to Amazonian deforestation.
Keck and Sikkink’s “Boomerang effect” requires popular concern in influential
political venues. For instance, Brazilian rain forest policy changed when NGOs were
able to work with US domestic groups to pressure the US Congress to exercise its
leverage over the World Bank to apply pressure in turn on the Brazilian government.
Successful NGO environmental campaigns directed against the World Bank prevailed
because the Bank was ultimately subject to pressure from the US government, and
because the World Bank was itself accountable in part to NGOs and needed to include
them in its operations for delivering services.
NGOs systematic influence on international environmental politics and linkages
are limited to occasional bouts of tactical linkage. Their campaigns are ultimately
opportunistic, as they rest for their success on momentary windows of opportunity during
which options for political influence open up.
International Institutions
Formal international institutions, when permitted by their member states, can play
an important role in promoting environmental governance and sustainable development.
International institutions can help build more comprehensive regimes and encourage
compliance by providing a venue for international cooperation, by building national
capacity, and by building political will. In particular this means providing politically
tractable instruments to groups within countries who are interested in sustainable
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development and marine protection, and building stable political coalitions who are able
to press their governments within and among countries around such issues.
The properties of strong/thick institutions that are capable of inducting behavioral
change on the part of member countries are discussed in Table 1:
Table 1
Institutional Functions Influencing Environmental Regimes
Analytic Category
Activity Performed and formal institutional
properties
Contractual Environment
Forum for discussions
Small numbers are easier than large
Politically appropriate level of discussion to engage
domestic political opportunities for cooperation
Linkages facilitate agreement (overlapping
memberships or overlapping functional
responsibilities)
Frequency of interactions
Nesting
Monitoring
Verification
Voting rules
Building National Concern
Popularizing issues
Agenda setting
Generating new information
Public participation, involving new actors
(including NGOs)
National reporting
Monitoring
Verification
Public education
Training
Horizontal Linkages
Building National Capacity (administratively and
Monitoring
politically)
Verification
Training
Technology Transfer
Financial transfer
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Public education
Public participation
Horizontal Linkages
Yet not all states are equally sensitive to institutional pressures and incentives.
For instance, democratic societies are more likely than non-democratic ones to be
responsive to public education and information efforts, and to convert such information
into demands for environmental protection by the state. States and societies that are
already fairly strong in terms of science and technology resources are less likely to find
the limited offerings of international institutions significant in their calculations of
national policy. The following table 2 presents a schematic view of the types of states
likely to be influenced by different incentives offered by international institutions.
Table 2
Institutional Functions Capable of Influencing State Environmental Policy
Function
Democratic
Democratic
NonDemocratic Non
Society/strong
Society/weak
Society/strong
Democratic
state
state
state
Society/weak
state
Verification
X
X
X
X
Monitoring
X
X
X
X
Building
X
X
National
Concern
Capacity
X
x
Building
Non democratic developing countries then are unlikely to be affected by building
national concern. The principal form of leverage over LDCs by international institutions
is through capacity building, and the exercise of conditionality by sources of aid and
investment.
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Knowledge and Epistemic Communities
International relations has recently returned to focus on the role of ideas and
understanding in shaping choices by goal seeking states. 20 As international politics
becomes increasingly complex and uncertain, it becomes far fetched to assume that states
are capable of clearly anticipating how national welfare will be affected by policy choice
at home and in conjunction with others. Constructivists assume that states are incapable
of searching for new information each time a decision is demanded, and that they
satisfice and rely on prior cognitive frames to understand how national interests are likely
to be affected by any particular decision. Thus decisions to comply are not based on
rational calculations of interest. Rather, compliance is a matter of applying socially
generated convictions and understandings about how national interests are likely to be
achieved in any particular policy domain.
The most important sources of influence for social constructivists are the shared
causal understandings, or consensual knowledge, which help guide decision makers in
making choices in complex and unfamiliar domains. Such domains are increasingly
common throughout recent international politics, particularly in the areas of economic
and environmental policy. Obligations in these issue areas are largely grounded as well
on causal and instrumental warrants rather than normative ones. Following appreciation
of new causal factors in the policy environment which affect state interests, states may be
said to learn to comply as they learn to recognize undesirable international conditions
which will detrimentally affect their national interest, while also learning of new
practices by which to alleviate or ameliorate such conditions.
The principal mechanism by which such ideas are developed and disseminated is
by transnational networks of policy professionals who share common values and causal
understandings called epistemic communities. Members of epistemic communities will
seek to introduce national measures consistent with their beliefs, and utilize the
enforcement mechanisms of the bureaucratic units in which they operate. Patterns of
regime support and compliance are thus based on the extent to which epistemic
community members are able to acquire influential positions in national administrations
and in international institutions.
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The epistemic community pattern may well have differential impacts on advanced
industrialized and developing countries. Advanced industrial countries, with greater
familiarity and ability to evaluate external advice will be more likely to defer to
transnational scientific advice. Epistemic communities are most likely to gain prompt
entree in democratic countries with states which have a high degree of technical
competency in the substantive area in question. Conversely, many developing countries
are highly suspicious of technical advice and information from abroad, and will only
defer to scientific advice that is provided through domestic channels. The development
of indigenous scientific capability reinforces the authority of those scientists providing
advice to decision-makers.
When they become involved in national policy making they inform national
preferences and policy agendas with their own preferred visions. Epistemic community
members have typically served as consultants to national governments engaged in
environmental negotiations, have served as officials of international institutions engaged
in international environmental politics (most notably UNEP, UNECE, and the World
Bank, but including others as well).
International negotiations may then directly effect state notions of self-interest as
well as the prospects for compliance by including new groups in the process of
negotiation, and by alerting states to new ideas, and recruiting and institutionalizing
groups associated with those ideas. Negotiations may thus contribute to transforming the
beliefs and interests of the parties engaged in the negotiations, and thus influencing their
subsequent choices regarding compliance.
The negotiated regime would then reflect the causal and principled beliefs of the
epistemic community. National positions would vary according to the extent of
penetration by epistemic communities or the sensitivity of policies in that country to
policies in a country or international institution already influenced by the epistemic
community. In most cases this would make epistemic environmental regimes more
stringent and comprehensive than other forms of environmental regimes due to the more
sophisticated vision of ecological problems which ecological epistemic communities
hold. Regimes will persist until the epistemic community's shared body of knowledge
collapses or the epistemic community institutionalization declines. Both leaders and
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laggards might modify their policies in light of the new regime as a bandwagoning
process develops, leading to gradual, progressively increasing changes in national
policies to accommodate evolving scientific understanding about how ecosystems work.
As with other patterns, anticipation of material rewards from the regime (i.e. capacity
building provisions) would also encourage states to comply with the regime.
Members of the epistemic community which has dominated discussions in environmental
regimes have subscribed to holistic ecological beliefs about the need for policy
coordination subject to ecosystemic laws. Thus, they promote international
environmental regimes which are grounded on policies which offer coherent plans for the
management of entire ecosystems, sensitive to interactions between environmental media
(such as air and water), sources of pollution, and contending uses of the common
property resource, rather than being limited to more traditional policies for managing
discrete activities or physical resources spaces within fairly short term time horizons. For
instance, Mediterranean governments came to embrace comprehensive nuanced and
differentially applied marine pollution controls following influence of a regional
ecological epistemic community, operating concurrently through national governments
and through the United Nations Environment Program.
Consensus seems to be crystallizing internationally around the linkages between
environment and development activities, as policy elites in national governments and
international institutions as well as NGO activists increasingly recognize that efforts to
promote economic growth are contingent on assuring some degree of environmental
protection; although some analysts have stressed the obverse of this connection, that
environmental protection may require some minimal economic growth as well.
Appreciation of such new linkages would lead states to comply in the newly highlighted
policy domains, out of an appreciation of the complementary causal influences between
the domains.
Evolution of Environmental Governance
Over 140 multilateral environmental treaties have been concluded since the
1920s, with over 50% developed since UNCHE. A growing range of activities has
become subject to environmental regulations. Before UNCHE most treaties addressed
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species conservation or oil pollution of the open seas. Since then attention has moved to
politically and economically more contentious topics of air and water, indicating a
significant mobilization of political resources since UNCHE to address these issues. At
present most states are party to many binding pieces of environmental regimes, extending
to most areas of economic activity.
Environmental regimes have assumed 4 ideal types, presented in Table 3.. The
primary distinctions are between the legal form of the treaties within the regime
(essentially whether the commitments are comprehensive, based on experts' consensus
with differentiated national obligations; or uniform obligations chosen somewhat
arbitrarily), the overarching political dynamics of regime development, the
responsiveness of the regime to subsequent alarms about environmental threats, and the
likely resilience of the regime past shifts in the initial configuration of variables giving
rise to the regime. Each regime type is characterized by a distinctive set of political
patterns, described schematically below. Some legal forms are shared, such as a reliance
on verification and monitoring in the regimes.
The combination of strong institutions and transnational scientific involvement
has led to robust and comprehensive arrangements that take an effects-based approach to
environmental protection and have led to demonstrable reductions in many sources of
pollution. When strong institutions are able to embed knowledge into standard national
practices – through socializing governments, establishing norms, and rewarding
compliance – then distinctive patterns of environmental governance occur via social
learning, as states come to change their notions of the value of environmental protection,
and the means by which to achieve it. Institutionalized science leads to regimes which
are more comprehensive, judicious, and slower than regimes that are negotiated through
institutions in which science is not allowed to play a significant role. Such regimes have
goals that reflect scientific consensus about the ability of ecosystems to sustain stress, and
apply differentiated national obligations. Such regimes are likely to be robust, as they
will persist over time because states’ own interests changed as a consequence of their
participation in negotiations, and now find the regime to their own advantage.
Strong institutions alone have also contributed to effective regimes, although the
collective goals have been reached through political compromise and thus are less likely
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to generate technical results at an optimal economic cost than arrangements worked out
in conjunction with regional experts. Environmental regimes developed through
institutional bargaining contain legal efforts that are uniform, and commitments that tend
to entail across the board emission cuts, or numerical limits in species taking.
In the absence of any of these factors collective efforts are likely to be very weak
and only generate modest and bland commitments that are acceptable to the least
interested party (“lowest common denominator” responses). With the presence solely of
epistemic communities in the absence of strong institutions state practices will vary
according to domestic factors. negotiated arrangements will be weak and modest, but
“over-compliance” may occur in countries with strong epistemic communities or
vigorous NGOs.
Table 3
Patterns of environmental governance
Epicom involvement
Institutionally strong (dense/thick)
Institutionally weak (thin)
Social Learning
Parallel Play?
Comprehensive regulatory treaties with differentiated
Disjoint national policy, with no formal joint
national obligations, and substantive commitments,
action or merely hortatory expressions of
based on expert consensus on causes and environmental
commitment. Possibility that national
effects. Pollution control treaties will apply
performance (in countries with domestic
emission/ambient standards that reflect scientific
epistemic community involvement) will
consensus. They may be prohibitionary or regulatory,
exceed collective standards.
depending on expert consensus about environmental
carrying capacity. Conservation treaties will focus on
preserving habitats.
Agenda will be quite responsive to scientific alerts and
new discoveries. New environmental threats will only
be converted to policy when they have been confirmed
by scientific panels.
Ozone
LRTAP
Mediterranean
Persian Gulf
South pacific
SE Pacific
Antarctica
Migratory Species
Polar Bears
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Wetlands
No Epicom
Institutional Bargaining
LCD
Involvement
Disjointed treaties with uniform national regulatory
Weak disjointed treaties with limited uniform
obligations chosen for their political and emotive
national obligations.
appeal. Pollution control treaties may include hortatory
and regulatory elements. Substantive commitments will
Agenda setting is entirely political, set by the
include emission standards, or stipulate technological
wishes of the most vocal opponent.
procedures (BEP or BAT, i.e. tankers). Conservation
Caribbean
treaties will set tolerable takings.
West Africa
Agenda will be driven by political opportunities, and
East Africa
new environmental observations will be converted to
North Sea (1972-1987)
policy only if there is a strong constituency behind
Fisheries management
them.
Red Sea
Black Sea
Baltic
North Sea (1987-)
LDC/marine dumping
MARPOL/operational oil
Persian Gulf
Whaling
Source of coding information: Yearbook of International Co-Operation on Environment
and Development various years, and UNEP Registry of Treaties.
An increasing proportion of regimes has acquired comprehensive treaty elements,
as patterns of social learning have become more common, with the growing influence of
ecological epistemic communities and the growing confidence and influence of strong
international institutions informed with their ecological episteme. In 1973 3 of 11
international environmental regimes had comprehensive elements. In 1985 7 of 22 were
comprehensives. In 1995 10 of 25 were comprehensive. From a policy analytic
perspective, though, comprehensive regimes are likely to be superior in their ability to
protect the environment in a cost-effective and politically acceptable manner.
This pattern runs counter to the expectations of most NeoRealist and
Institutionalists, not to mention radical and critical approaches to international politics.
The scope of voluntary national commitments exceeds that expected by Neoliberal
Institutionalists, particularly those occurring in the social learning (upper left) cell, in
which commitments are not uniform, and reflect a scientific standard of what is necessary
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to achieve desirable levels of environmental protection, rather than the expeditious
compromise uniform target that generally results from institutional bargaining and interstate compromises when national preferences are set largely by relative costs or by
degrees of domestic environmental concern.
There is a striking absence of regimes organized around market and economic
principles. States seldom rely on insurance and informational mechanisms in
governance, and they don’t rely on market mechanisms such as taxes, tradable permits,
and the like. Even for climate change, where the discourse is different – the Kyoto targets
may anticipate a permit trading system, benchmark national entitlements, and credits for
reductions achieved by investments in other countries - governments remain reluctant to
apply these instruments. Regimes that rely entirely on clear cut market based institutional
arrangements are quite infrequent (such as operational oil pollution. It is notable about
most environmental regime discussions that they operated outside the nesting influence
of liberal economic doctrines. These concepts were not widely deployed, and no
institution in which those concepts were embedded exercised binding authority. In part,
the reason for the absence of market based mechanisms in environmental regimes has to
do with the widespread absence of neoclassical economists and economic IOs in the
development of these regimes.
Explaining Patterns of Environmental Regime Formation
Environmental governance has been driven principally by the interaction of
knowledge and international institutions. Static analysis of regime patterns is due to the
configuration of these 2 variables. Comprehensive regimes with bargaining dynamics
characterized by learning, and agendas by scientifically warranted environmental threats,
occur with the presence of an ecological epistemic community and thick institutions.
Thick institutions alone yield cooperation organized around political compromises, with
little correspondence to an understanding of acceptable environmental targets. Finally,
with only thin institutional contexts and no epistemic communities Least Common
denominator patterns obtain.
Regime dynamics over time are driven as well by the spread of consensual
knowledge about the environment more generally and thus has led to an increase in the
20
number of epistemic communities across issue areas, and the observed increase in
regimes that are based on institutionalized consensual ecological knowledge. As UNEP
grew more confident in the political mobilization and deployment of epistemic
communities and more networks of scientists developed with the popularity of ecological
management training in universities worldwide, the carriers of consensual knowledge
grew more confident and widespread in their potential influence. Comprehensive
ecological practices have become institutionalized in the sense that that such injunctions
have acquired legitimacy and been converted to firm and enduring practices by states.
Thus, the growth in frequency of social learning and the attendant comprehensive
regimes is due to the growing influence of ecological epistemic communities, and the
increasing reliance by states on strong international environmental institutions to help
guide regime creation and administration. In part the cascade of institutionalized
knowledge is a conscious political choice by states to consign issues to groups and
institutions that have an ecological bent. In part the persistence and lock-in is attributable
to unintended social dynamics, as national environmental agencies develop and apply
more ecological environmental practices (both in domestic and foreign environmental
policy) as a consequence of internalizing the regime rules and principles into
organizational routines, standard operating procedures, and organizational culture. More
broadly, these new ecological principles assume taken for granted expectations by states
about others’ behavior. In addition, new domestic and transnational constituencies form
around the new environmental laws and norms, with the emergence of environmental
markets and the prospects for legal remedies from regime non-compliance once the
regime rules are fully converted into domestic environmental legal and administrative
procedures.
Most importantly, in terms of long term lock in effects (although we are not
talking about large-scale technological systems yet such as energy generation), is the
creation of new pollution control markets that simply did not exist in the 1970s. The
world market for clean up technology (consulting services and hardware) is now roughly
600 billion dollars; a market which simply did not exist in 1972. The creation of this
market is causally related to the development of these regimes The resilience of these
governance commitments hinge on ongoing public support for environmental protection
21
(likely to be strong worldwide) and reinforcing material incentives, that are also
increasing with the spread of environmental markets.
Aggregate Effects
Regimes have contributed to aggregate substantive changes in environmental
governance. The focus of environmental discussions has shifted from concern about
resource scarcity and depletion to efforts to understand and protect ecosystem integrity,
as scientific consensus has crystallized around comprehensive forms of ecological
management doctrines. For example by the mid 1990s 150 integrated coastal zone
management efforts were in place in 65 countries
New norms of behavior have been established for international environmental
behavior. But, more importantly, these norms are based on shifting patterns of state
practice. Policies, laws, and programmatic activities by environmental agencies are
increasingly in synch with the regime injunctions described above.
Through this institutionalized process of social learning based on participation
and education, new environmental norms of environmental protection have been diffused,
and participating states have been encouraged to endorse them and to apply them
nationally. These causal claims can be appraised by deductive theorizing about the
political processes likely to lead to distinctive outcomes, process tracing in individual
regimes, combined with hypothesis testing of alternative explanations of outcomes. As a
counterfactual exercise, it is extremely unlikely that the current frequency of
comprehensive environmental treaties, and their attendant behavioral consequences,
could have existed in the absence of consensual knowledge or the active involvement of
vigorous international institutions involved in its dissemination and application to policy.
But, the regime dynamics of increasing commitment to comprehensive regimes is
due to the increasing institutionalization of ideas, and a growing willingness of states to
defer to key institutions that are to some extent out of the immediate control of major
states. States were increasingly willing to rely on thick institutions to conduct
environmental negotiations during the 1980s. This is due to a variety of factors:
increasing reliance by the international community on UNEP, and consequently imparted
a greater range of potential action for UNEP and its style. In part due to the influence of
22
such strong international institutions as UNEP, UNECE, and the World Bank, and in part
due to the operation of the regimes themselves, states have learned to apply a new
framework or pattern of reasoning to addressing environmental threats, and thus the
increase in comprehensive treaties and regimes over the last 30 years. Strong institutions
– such as UNEP, UNECE and IBRD - contributed to the identification, mobilization and
political involvement of ecological epistemic communities, in environmental regimes and
in national governments. Over time, subject to this increase in pressures on state
recognition of interest, policies and identities have changed.
Effectiveness
Some regimes have been highly effective at protecting the quality of the
environment. The ozone regime is credited with virtually eliminating CFCs as threats to
the stratospheric ozone layer. The rate of environmental decline from selected organic
and inorganic contaminants has been slowed in the Mediterranean, North Sea, and Baltic.
The quality of the marine environment may have stabilized in the South Pacific and
Southeast Pacific regions, although the data are much scantier for those areas. Airborne
emissions of sulfur in Europe declined by 35% from 1980 to1991, and a slight reduction
in nitrogen emission from 1987 to 1991 has been recorded. These achievements are all
the consequence of regime influences over state actions.
More general assessments are limited by data availability. Seldom is high quality
time series environmental data available to determine real changes in the quality of the
environment (or ascertain relative rates of change relative to the growth of the activities
giving rise to environmental stresses.) Analysts are often forced to make proxy
judgements by looking at state activities galvanized by international action that are likely
to have a discernible effect on environmental policy; either in terms of doctrinal choices
by states, or political or administrative reforms likely to assure a better mix of expression
of views in the domestic environmental policy making process.
In addition, while there is no available direct measure of environmental change,
the political prospects for effective state action has improved as a consequence of the
development of stronger sources of potential influence on states to pursue
environmentally more sustainable economic practices within their countries.
Effectiveness, in the sense of strong commitments of state resources towards complying
23
with the enunciated environmental goals of the regime, seems to be largely due to the
institutional resources of the regime. Yet, knowledge and embedded beliefs can make
some governments (such as in ozone, European Acid Rain and the Mediterranean) more
willing to commit resources out of a sense that national welfare is at stake, rather than in
terms of the cost-benefit calculations associated with the influence of institutional factors
that are associated with weaker patterns of compliance. 21
Limits to learning
National administrative design often inhibits learning and the diffusion of
environmental lessons. Most learning remains highly localized: lessons are limited to
changes in national policy with regard to one particular environmental medium for
instance air pollution or marine pollution. This limitation is due to administrative design
in most countries. Epistemic community members’ expertise is highly specialized, so
their influence and involvement in agency choices are limited to a specific regime and
environmental issue area. Moreover, environmental responsibilities within governments
vary by environmental issue, as different agencies are responsible for coordination
national activities in different areas. Thus the influence eof epistemic community
members in the short term is highly concentrated. Few governments have the domestic
potential for these lessons spreading within the governments, because the functional
agencies have little influence over other agencies.
The prospects for improving national sensitivity to epistemic community
influence rest on recruitment and retention patterns within national administrations.
Environmental agencies often lack the ability to spread their influence within government
administrations, since most environmental are so specialized and the staff remains in
position for limited periods so there is limited potential for individuals educating each
other.
4.
Implications for Debt Forgiveness
The emergence over the last 30 years of new principles and strong institutions for
environmental governance helps to identify interesting new patterns in international
relations that highlight the role of ideas and transnational non-state actors in their
24
articulation and dissemination. As international relations becomes more complex with
globalization, the patterns of learning and transnational politics is likely to grow further
in significance.
Many in the NGO and development community have hoped to find some way to
link debt forgiveness with sustainable development in preparation for the Rio Plus 10
Conference in Johannesburg South Africa in fall 2002. Yet the prospects for linking debt
relations to the environmental regime seem modest.
Tactical linkages are unlikely, due to the dearth of interested parties. Such
linkages depends on ability of NGO campaigns to leverage key institutional points in
international society, such as to press the US to exercise pressure on the IMF. Such
efforts appear unlikely, even though such a campaign was successful in forging links
between World Bank development policy and environmental protection, leading
procedural and policy reforms in World Bank lending practices, because public concern
in the US about third world debt remains weak, and the IMF is not as porous and subject
to external influence as is the World Bank. The policy community of central bankers and
aid officers is much tighter than the world of development policy officials and NGOs,
and consequently less open to pressure or to new ideas. 22
Substantive linkages are unlikely as well. Two substantive arguments have been
advanced to justify linking sustainable development and debt forgiveness. One argument
is that debt forgiveness would free economic resources which, with some degree of
conditionality could be directed towards improving environmental conditions in the HIPC
countries. But there many competing demands for scarce financial resources in the HIPC
countries, and few of the HIPC government’s rank environmental protection as a high
priority. Most of the HIPC countries have some of the world’s weakest environmental
agencies, so would be unlikely to be able to effectively convert such new resources
towards environmental ends without extensive additional commitments of training and
other forms of building national institutional capacities.
A second substantive justification for linkage is the global benefits accruing from
environmental protection in the HIPC countries, such as the preservation of biodiversity
through improved resource management practices. This argument further resonates with
nested global norms of environmental preservation. Yet few transboundary global
25
environmental threats are actually generated by HIPC countries, so there is no reason to
apply such nested beliefs. The only global environmental threats emanating from the
HIPC countries are threats to biodiversity in West Africa, Kenya, Tanzania, Madagascar,
and Burma/Myanmar.
23
Such substantive and normative arguments are likely to fall on deaf ears because
the IMF is strongly insulated from changes in development doctrine. While
environmental norms are now shared by environmental agencies and even development
officials, they do not extend to finance agencies, and strong institutional and political
divisions remain between the different policy communities in most donor and borrower
countries.
5.
Conclusion
Sustainable development and debt forgiveness are two orthogonal regimes that are
difficult to reconcile. There are few overlapping political resources by which
environmental considerations can be integrated into development and financial planning
in the HIPC countries. There are few points of engagement between key decision makers
responsible for making choices in each regime. Sustainable development and the
management of environmental externalities from economic growth emerged over the last
30 years through linkage dynamics mediated by strong international institutions and
advances in consensual ecological understanding or knowledge, but debt forgiveness
does not seem to be easily subject to the same set of political dynamics.
1
This paper was originally prepared for presentation at the Conference on Globalization,
Governance and the Environment at the University of California, Berkeley 14-15 April
2000. A revised form was prepared but not presented at the IPSA World Congress,
August 2000. A version was published in John Ikenberry and Vittorio Parsi eds.2001
Manuale di Relazioni Internazionale Rome: Gius, Laterza & Figlie.
1
Stephen Bernstein 2001 The Compromise of Liberal Environmentalism New York:
Columbia University Press
2
Some of the key works include: E. Haas 1980 “Why Collaborate” World Politics
Kenneth Oye 1979 “The Domain of Choice” in Kenneth Oye, Donald Rothchild, and
26
Robert J. Lieber eds. 1979 The Eagle Engangled New York: Longman; James K.
Sebenius 1983 “Negotiation Arithmetic” International Organization Vol 37 pp 281-316.,
Vinod Aggarwal 1985 Liberal Protectionism University of California Press; Vinod K.
Aggarwal ed.,1998 Institutional Designs for a Complex World Ithaca: Cornell University
Press; Terry Winograd and Fernando Flores1986 Understanding Computers and
Cognition Reading, MA: Addison Wesley Publishing
3
Thomas Risse, Stephen C. Ropp, and Kathryn Sikkink eds 1999 The Power of Human
Rights Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, Kathryn Sikkink and Martha Finnemore
1998 IO.
4
Edward L. Miles et al 2001 Environmental Regime Effectiveness Cambridge: MIT
Press, Steiner Andresen et al 2000 Science and Politics in International Environmental
Regimes Manchester: Manchester University Press.
5
Edward L. Miles 2001 “ “ in Miles et al 2001 p 470.
6
Arild Underdal 2001in Miles et al 2001 p 440.
7
Kahler in Haggard & Kauffman.
8
For a prehistory see Peter H. Sand 2001 “A Century of Green Lessons: The
Contribution of Nature Conservation Regimes to Global Governance” International
Environmental Agreements: Politics, Law, and Economics, Vol. 1 pp. 33-72; and Lynton
Caldwell 1996 International Environmental Policy 3rd Edition Durham, NC: Duke
University Press chapter 2. For an analysis since 1972 see Peter M. Haas “Pollution” in
P.J. Simmons and Chantal de Jonge Oondraat eds. 2001 Managing a Globalizing World
Washington, DC: The Carnegie Foundation for International Peace; Peter M. Haas 1999
“Social Constructivism and the Evolution of Multilateral Environmental Governance” in
Aseem Prakash and Jeffry A. Hart eds. 1999 Globalization and Governance London:
Routledge.
9
Andrew J. Hoffman 2001 From Heresy to Dogma Stanford University Press.
10
Miles et al p 435.
11
Elinor Ostrom and Robert O. Keohane eds.1995 Local Commons and Global
Interdependence Hollywood, CA: Sage Publications; Oran R. Young 2000 Governance
in World Affairs Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
27
12
Peter M. Haas 1999 “Social Constructivism and the Evolution of Multilateral
Environmental Governance” in Aseem Prakash and Jeffrey A. Hart eds. Globalization
and Governance Routledge; The Social Learning Group 2001 Social Learning and the
Management of Global Environmental Risks 2 Volumes Cambridge: MIT Press.
13
Paul Kennedy “Preparing for the 21st Century” The New York Review of Books 11
February 1993, “The American Prospect” The New York Review of Books 4 March 1993,
Thomas Homer-Dixon “Environmental Scarcities and Violent Conflict” International
Security Vol 19 No 1 (fall, 1994).
14
Stephen Hopgood American Foreign Environmental Policy and the Power of the State
1998 Oxford, Robert Paarlberg “Lagged Leadership” in Norman Vig & Regina Axelrod
eds. The Global Environment Washington, DC: CQ Press.. Strong environmental
leadership need not lead to positive environmental outcomes. For instance, the US
exercised its leadership in opposing the biodiversity treaty, and in seeking to water down
a climate change treaty. From the perspective of climate change skeptics conducting
policy analysis, the US is exercising hegemonic leadership to promote social welfare by
opposing a set of unwarranted commitments and thus preventing policy based on a
diagnosis of a false positive.
15
Paul Wapner 1996 Environmental Activism and World Civic Politics Albany: State
University of New York Press; Sheila Jasanoff 1998 “NGOS and the Environment” in
Thomas Weiss ed. 1998 Beyond UN Subcontracting New York: St Martin’s, Margaret
Keck and Kathryn Sikkink 2000 Activists Beyond Borders Ithaca: Cornell University
Press; Ann M. Florini ed. 2000 The Third Force Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment
for International Peace; Jonathan A. Fox and L. David Brown 1998 eds. The Struggle for
Accountability Cambridge: MIT Press; Michael Edwards and John Gaventa eds. 2001
Global Citizen Action London: Earthscan.
16
Riley E. Dunlap, George H. Gallup Jr., Alec M. Gallup 1992 Health of the Planet
Princeton: Gallup International Institute; Russell J. Dalton 1994 The Green Rainbow
New Haven: Yale University Press.
28
17
Marina Ottaway 2001 “Reluctant Missionaries” Foreign Policy July/August pp 44-54;
Gary Gereffi, Ronie Garcia-Johnson, and Erika Sasser 2001 “The NGO-Industrial
Complex” Foreign Policy July/August p 56-65.
18
Thomas G. Weiss and Leon Gordenker 1996 NGOs, the UN, and Global Governance
Boulder: Lynn Rienner.
19
Margaret Keck and Kathryn Sikkink 2000 Activists Beyond Borders Ithaca: Cornell
University Press; see also Ann M. Florini ed. 2000 The Third Force Washington, DC:
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace; Jonathan A. Fox and L. David Brown 1998
eds. The Struggle for Accountability Cambridge: MIT Press; Michael Edwards and John
Gaventa eds. 2001 Global Citizen Action London: Earthscan; Bruce Rich 1994
Mortgaging the Earth Boston: Beacon Press.
20
Peter M. Haas 1990 Saving the Mediterranean Columbia University Press, Peter M.
Haas 1997 “Introduction: Epistemic Communities and International Policy Coordination”
in Peter M. Haas ed. Knowledge, Power and International Policy Coordination 1997
University of South Carolina Press, John Gerard Ruggie 1998 “ “ IO
21
Miles et al 2001, Edith Brown Weiss and Harold Jacobson eds. 1998 Engaging
Countries Cambridge: MIT Press.
22
Feinberg IO, see also Kahler in Haggard & Kaufman.
23
These locations are drawn from Norman Myers, Russell A. Mittermeir, Cristina G.
Mittermeir, Gustatvo A.B. da Fonseca & Jennifer Kent 2000 “Biodiversity Hotspots of
Conservation Priorities” Nature Vol. 403 24 February pp. 853-858.