Confronting environmental treaty implementation challenges in the Pacific Islands

For more about the East-West Center, see http://www.eastwestcenter.org/Popular literature and the entertainment industry commonly portray the Pacific Islands as a homogeneous, tropical, and timeless Eden where life is leisurely and free from care and the problems of the twenty-first century. The region's tourist industry itself does its utmost to promote that very image and first-time visitors to Hawaii today are often unprepared to discover that Honolulu, for example, is a modern metropolis with high-rise buildings and freeways. Located in the world's largest ocean, Pacific nations and territories are among the smallest on earth. The region is also one of the most linguistically and culturally diverse places in the world, as well as one of the most fragile and vulnerable--with Island countries often separated by hundreds of miles of open sea. In this paper, Pamela S. Chasek describes how, as a result of such circumstances, regional cooperation is necessary, albeit difficult. Environmental issues, particularly global warming with attendant sea-level rise, are a major concern, Chasek explains. At the same time, participation in multilateral environmental agreements is particularly demanding and often beyond the capacity of the small-island entities. Not infrequently, Chasek asserts, environmental ministries within local governments are small and lack the trained personnel and sufficient economic resources to effectively accomplish their mission

The Convention to Combat Desertification and the Role of Innovative Policy-Making Discourses: The Case of Burkina Faso

The UN Convention to Combat Desertification is a mix of traditional regime elements with a set of innovations. These innovative elements can be interpreted as emanations of policy discourses that have been gaining in importance since the introduction and the fairly broad acceptance of sustainable development and Agenda 21 as guiding conceptual frameworks. In this article I first elaborate on three of those discourses: the participatory, the decentralization and the local knowledge discourses. In a second part, I will look at Burkina Faso as an example of UNCCD policy implementation at the national and the local level (Yatenga region). It will become clear that although changes are visible in policy-making dynamics, major difficulties and obstacles remain. The CCD undeniably has an impact at the national level of policy-making. It has provided support for decentralization, for more participatory processes of policy-making and for the inclusion of local knowledge in the policy process. At the more decentralized level the impact is less clear and more difficult to distinguish. Copyright (c) 2004 Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Global Environmental Politics: Dilemmas in World Politics, 7th Edition

For more than twenty years, Global Environmental Politics has provided an up-to-date, accurate, and unbiased introduction to the world\u27s most pressing environmental issues. This new edition continues this tradition while covering critical new developments in the field. Through case studies on key issues such as climate change, toxic chemicals, and biodiversity loss, the authors detail the development of major environmental regimes. With new material on the adoption of global Sustainable Development Goals and the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development; the December 2015 Paris Climate Change conference; and recent meetings of major conventions on desertification, biological diversity, and more; the authors present a comprehensive overview of contemporary international environmental politics. Global Environmental Politics is vital reading for any student wishing to understand the current state of the field and to make informed decisions about which policies might best safeguard our environment for the future.https://digitalcommons.fairfield.edu/politics-books/1033/thumbnail.jp

U.S. policy in the UN environmental arena: powerful laggard or constructive leader?

Environment, Sustainable development, United Nations, United States,

The UN Commission on Sustainable Development: Which Mechanisms Explain Its Accomplishments?

The UN Commission on Sustainable Development (CSD) has been criticized for lack of effectiveness since its establishment in 1993. The main objective of this article is to describe and explain the mechanisms that affect the work of the CSD, in order to understand how it would be possible to enhance the potential for effectiveness. The study aims to apply the perspectives of "distribution of capabilities" and "institutional design" to evaluate the CSD's accomplishments during its fırst ten-year period. I conclude that the CSD has achieved some results in monitoring and reviewing the process on the implementation of Agenda 21 and promoting dialogue and building partnerships for sustainable development, due to the role of the secretariat and nongovernmental organizations. However, the member states' positions and interests have contributed to the CSD's low goal attainment, especially in the area of policy guidance. (c) 2007 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Does Bureaucracy Really Matter? The Authority of Intergovernmental Treaty Secretariats in Global Environmental Politics

Although a number of scholars acknowledge the relevance of intergovernmental bureaucracies in world politics, International Relations research still lacks theoretical distinction and empirical scrutiny in understanding their influence in the international arena. In this article I explore the role of intergovernmental treaty secretariats as authoritative bureaucratic actors in global environmental politics. I employ organizational theories and sociological institutionalism for comparative qualitative case study research that traces variances at the outcome level of two environmental treaty secretariats, the secretariats to the Vienna Convention and the Montreal Protocol ("Ozone Secretariat") and the UN Convention to Combat Desertification ("Desertification Secretariat"). While the organizational design of both secretariats is similar, their institutional histories and outcomes differ markedly. Looking for possible explanations for these differences I focus on the activities of both secretariats and how they relate to the authority they enjoy vis-à-vis the parties they serve. Copyright (c) 2006 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Global environmental agreement-making: upping the methodological and ethical stakes of studying negotiations

This perspective identifies how recent advances contribute to re-evaluating and re-constructing global environmental negotiations as a research object by calling into question who constitutes an actor and what constitutes a site of agreement formation. Building on this scholarship, we offer the term agreement-making to facilitate further methodological and ethical reflection. The term agreement-making broadens the conceptualisation of the actors, sites and processes constitutive of global environmental agreements and brings to the fore how these are shaped by, reflect and have the potential to re-make or transform the intertwined global order of social, political and economic relations. Agreement-making situates research within these processes, and we suggest that enhancing the methodological diversity and practical utility is a potential avenue for challenging the reproduction of academic dominance. We highlight how COVID-19 requires further adapting research practices and offers an opportunity to question whether we need to be physically present to provide critical insight, analysis and support