Governing at the global scale
It is not enough to confine our environmental governance to the local or national level only. The global biosphere behaves as a single system, where the environmental impacts of each nation ultimately affect the whole. That makes a coordinated response from the community of nations a necessity for reversing today’s global environmental decline. But the challenges of international governance are substantial. Finding consensus among nations about what sustainable development means, how to finance it, and what international laws and institutions are required to facilitate it is an urgent, but unfinished task.
The interconnectedness of the global environment is beyond dispute. Few would disagree that coordinated international action is essential to protecting Earth’s climate, preserving its biodiversity, and managing its marine and other common resources. In short, the need for a coherent system of international environmental governance is clear. But constructing such a system, and maintaining its effectiveness in the face of the many competing interests of nations, has proven exceedingly difficult.
The difficulty of pursuing environmental governance at the global scale is made greater by the obvious fact that there is no global government—no central institution with authority sufficient to craft strong environmental protections at the international level and to insist on compliance. In its absence, a looser system of global environmental governance has emerged. The current system reflects the strengths and dysfunctions of global politics, and shows the difficulty of inspiring effective cooperation among the fractious community of nations—even on environmental matters that all agree require common action.
The current system of international environmental governance consists of three basic elements. One component is a collection of intergovernmental organizations, such as the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), and other specialized UN agencies and commissions that are responsible for coordinating policy on the environment at the international level. These organizations, controlled by UN member nations, are charged with formulating an international agenda that will protect the environment and promote sustainable development. A variety of other international organizations, such as the World Bank and the World Trade Organization (WTO), also play important roles in global environmental decision-making.
A second element of the international environmental governance system is the framework of international environmental law that has evolved over the last century or so. This takes the form of a web of environmental treaties, such as the Framework Convention on Climate Change or the recently negotiated Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants. These are legally binding agreements among countries to take joint action on different environmental problems, with each nation responsible for action within its own territory.
A third element is financing mechanisms—to build capacity to carry out treaty commitments, to supplement national efforts toward sustainable development in poorer countries, and to support the UN agencies and treaty secretariats that coordinate and carry out environmental efforts. Some of these mechanisms are more general, such as the system of dues and voluntary contributions that funds UN agencies, or the financing that the World Bank and other multilateral development banks provide for development activities with environmental components. Other financing mechanisms, such as the Global Environment Facility, are more specifically targeted to environmental activities.
Together, the three components of international environmental governance are supposed to set priorities and facilitate steps to protect the environment and further sustainable development. Most of these steps must be implemented by individual nations themselves. From legislation to regulation to enforcement, it is the actions taken by nations at the domestic level that ultimately count most for success at the global level. But international organizations like UNDP, UNEP, and the World Bank also play major roles in implementation. Bilateral aid agencies and civil society groups also participate in important ways, as does the private sector.
Supplementing these elements is a continuing series of international environmental “summits,” such as the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg and the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. These large gatherings are intended to provide highly visible forums that advance global resolve on the environment (see Box 7.1 The World Summit on Sustainable Development: Pursuing a global agenda).
The record of governance this loose global regime has compiled is decidedly mixed. On the positive side, the international community has clearly accepted the environment as a key topic in global affairs, crafting hundreds of environmental agreements that promise cooperation on topics as specific as protecting certain species of sea turtles and as broad as preventing harm to the global climate. Supporting this growing will toward sustainability has been a gradual expansion of the capacity to assess global environmental threats through monitoring and analysis that the international community accepts as scientifically valid, and therefore a neutral basis for understanding and negotiation. Although far from perfect, this analysis has begun to bring the principle of access to environmental information to life at the international level—an essential enabling condition for action.
However, the international environmental governance regime has fallen short in many respects. Even internal UN assessments have concluded that the system is fragmented, with a host of policy-making organizations, treaties, financing mechanisms, and implementation projects whose efforts are often poorly coordinated and sometimes overlapping. There is a strong sense that “current approaches to global environmental management and sustainability are…ineffective” (UNEP 2001a:19). In many instances, international negotiations produce agreements with ambitious goals, but without realistic means of implementing or financing them. At a more fundamental level, international governance institutions are weakened by divisions among countries and regions, often manifesting themselves as North-South divides in terms of environmental priorities and perceived responsibilities. These weaknesses and divisions limit the capacity of the international community to respond to even the most pressing environmental problems—and may be an important reason why the combined efforts of dozens of organizations, hundreds of treaties, thousands of international meetings, and billions of dollars have failed, in most instances, to reduce environmental decline.
The relative ineffectiveness of international environmental governance is most apparent when compared to the evolving system for international governance of trade and investment. Not only does the World Trade Organization wield more concentrated authority over trade than any single environmental organization, but international trade agreements have strong enforcement and dispute resolution mechanisms. Moreover, international trade and finance policies have significant impact on the environment and real potential to trump international environmental policies when they come into conflict.
To be fair, the international environmental governance system is still a work in progress. Nearly all of it has come into being in the three decades since the environment began to be a common concern, and it continues to evolve, with new efforts to strengthen key elements agreed to at the Johannesburg summit. Civil society and the private sector have taken more active roles as the growth of “multi-stakeholder processes” has created a political space for the input of environmental, human rights, scientific, business, and other organizations in international decision-making processes. New partnerships that link civil society groups, businesses, and governments have also begun to make their influence felt at the international level, shifting some of the burden of implementing global solutions to groups that can tackle issues quickly and with special focus. These new coalitions have become a more dynamic force as the formal machinery of statecraft has shown its limitations.
Setting environmental policy: A symphony of organizations
The formal system of international environmental governance starts with the United Nations. The UN family of organizations includes the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), which has been given the principal environmental mandate but comparatively modest resources. It also includes the Commission on Sustainable Development (CSD), set up to monitor progress on Agenda 21—the blueprint for sustainable development adopted at the Rio Earth Summit. The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) plays a major role in sustainable development and in implementing the Millennium Development Goals, one of which focuses on reducing environmental degradation. The formal system also includes a host of specialized agencies. Among others, it includes the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), which deals with atmosphere and climate; the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), whose purview includes agriculture, forests, and fisheries; the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), which has responsibilities in science and environmental education; and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which monitors nuclear safety and radioactive wastes. (See Table 7.1 Selected intergovenmental organizations that influence environmental governance.)
It is not just UN agencies that play roles in environmental policy-making at the international level. The World Bank has significant impact, both indirectly through the implications of its development activities for the environment and directly through its own environmental strategy. The Global Environment Facility (GEF), with its own governing council, sets priorities and processes for funding many environmental projects. In addition, a number of other intergovernmental and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) routinely influence conservation and sustainable development policy. an important example is the World Conservation Union (IUCN), an international network of NGOs and governments that operates in 140 countries and has a mandate to help nations conserve nature and use it sustainably.
Regional organizations such as the European Union (EU) or the Organization of American States (OAS) contribute to international governance both through their own programs or legislation and through participation in global accords. At a national level, most countries now have ministries or other agencies responsible for environmental matters. A recent UN review provides a more detailed description of the many actors and mandates that comprise the international environmental governance system (See: UNEP 2001a:9–14).
In one sense, the complexity of this system reflects the complexity and diversity of environmental issues themselves. Environmental concerns span a huge range, touching almost every aspect of human existence: The clean drinking water that is essential to health; the soils, fisheries, and other natural resources critical to much economic activity; the continued viability of ecosystems and the stability of Earth’s climate that affect all living things. Not surprisingly, a large number of entities, governmental and nongovernmental, have a stake in how international environmental issues are resolved. But the proliferation of international bodies that deal with one aspect or another of the environmental agenda also reflects the rapid evolution of that agenda over the past three decades and the proliferation of new entities and structures to deal with it. Regardless of the cause, the complexity poses a real challenge: setting coherent and achievable policies and coordinating actions. How well has the symphony played together?
Some strengths and achievements
Over the past 40 years, one clear achievement has been increased public concern and government attention to environmental issues at all levels. The diversity of agencies and agendas has meant programs and policy voices at an international level that respond to many concerns and touch many economic sectors. Diversity can be a strength and a source of resilience, in political and biological ecosystems alike.
Moreover, the international system has demonstrated that it can mobilize scientific and legal talent to expand understanding of environmental issues and build an impressive body of international environmental law. For example, many scientists around the world, coordinated by WMO and UNEP, contributed to the work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, whose efforts in analyzing climate processes and projecting future trends under a variety of circumstances played a major role in building the consensus that brought nations to the negotiating table for the Kyoto Protocol.
UNEP has made major contributions to international environmental law, playing an important role in developing such legal regimes as the Montreal Protocol, the Convention on Biological Diversity, and the Convention to Combat Desertification. At the national level, it has helped more than 100 nations develop environmental legislation and institutions (Nagai 2003). IUCN also has an impressive track record in drafting and promoting national and international environmental legislation (Holdgate 1999:244). IUCN has helped over 75 countries prepare and implement national conservation strategies (UNEP 2002a:9–10) and participated in the drafting of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, the Convention on Biological Diversity, and other major treaties.
Another strength has been in monitoring and analyzing environmental trends and assembling the data and information on which policy-making relies. UNEP has played a key role in these activities, publishing a long list of technical reports, atlases, and other specialized compendia, and its Global Environment Outlook report offers a broad overview of environmental conditions and trends. FAO has been a primary source of data and analysis on agriculture, fisheries, and forest trends. IUCN regularly publishes the Red Data Books—authoritative lists of threatened plant and animal species that inform much conservation policy at the national and international levels.
