Vol. 15 No.11 (November 2005), pp.984-988

GREENING NAFTA: THE NORTH AMERICAN COMMISSION FOR ENVIRONMENTAL COOPERATION, by David L. Markell and John H. Knox (eds).  Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003.  344pp.  Hardcover.  $45.00.  ISBN: 0-8047-4604-4.

Reviewed by Geoffrey Wandesforde-Smith, Emeritus Professor of Political Science, University of California, Davis.  Email: gawsmith [at] ucdavis.edu .

Not long ago, another reviewer faced with the prospect of writing about the literature on trade and the environment began by observing that the topic had been discussed ad nauseam.  Why, he wondered, would anyone want to read what he had to say on this subject, let alone read yet another book about it (Pauwelyn 2004)?  It was and remains a very good question.  Indeed, it would be difficult to overestimate the rate at which books, as well as other publications, on trade and the environment proliferate. 

Sometimes the object really is to try to say something new and profound about trade and the environment (Copeland and Taylor 2003).  But the subject now also appears with some regularity in the tables of contents of books with different, much more wide-ranging, and generally synoptic concerns.  Some of them are simply trying to keep track of what has already been written and said about one or another principal trade liberalization regime (Sampson and Whalley 2005).  Some seek to put trade and environment relationships in the context of economic globalization and its impacts; on national environmental policies, for example (Wijen, Zoeteman and Pieters 2005).  And still others strive to show how an appreciation for trade and environment is an integral and necessary part of the study of global environmental politics, where important theoretical and empirical interests in political science, international relations, and environmental studies ought to intersect (Dauvergne 2005). 

An argument might be made (Barkin 2003) that all this thinking and writing about trade and the environment has created a sense of movement and direction – a sense that over time we are learning some new and important things about the ways in which trade liberalization regimes affect environmental quality.  If that were true, of course, then the lessons might quickly be applied to good effect.  In fact, however, the number of careful and detailed studies of how trade regimes actually work turns out to be surprisingly, one might even say alarmingly, small.  Or, to put it another way, the ease and frequency with which pundits prognosticate about what may, or may not, be the next big turn in the trade and environment debate are probably good indicators of a general scholarly unwillingness to roll up the sleeves, pull down the eye shades, and do the hard and painstaking work that might advance trade and environment research.  

We owe an immense debt of gratitude, then, to David Markell and John Knox, who have pulled together in the present volume a series of original, empirical [*985] analyses of the workings of the North American Commission on Environmental Cooperation (CEC).  The CEC was created in 1993 by an international agreement completed to operate alongside of, and to leaven the imagined environmental impacts of, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).  The protracted and contentious negotiations on NAFTA itself were concluded the previous year. 

Markell and Knox approach their subject from a privileged position.  They are among the ten out of seventeen contributors to this book who either have or have had a direct relationship to one or another aspect of the CEC’s work.  Markell, now the Goldstein Professor of Law at Florida State University, was formerly the first director of a unit within the CEC Secretariat that receives citizen submissions on enforcement matters.  Knox was a participant from the State Department in the negotiations leading to the creation of the CEC, before he joined the Dickinson School of Law at Pennsylvania State University. 

Overall, the quality and standing of the contributors is unusually high.  The care and sensitivity they use in analyzing their own experience and other relevant data is superb.  The stories they tell are important and in most cases fascinating.

So, why does this book get such short shrift in the large and growing literature on trade and the environment I alluded to at the outset?   David Vogel, for example, one of the founders of trade and environment studies, gives the book one quick passing footnote reference out of forty-three in the very latest addition to what strikes me as an increasing over-supply of synoptic essays (Vogel 2006).  And, in the citations in the trade and environment chapters of the edited collections previously referenced, Markell and Knox and their contributors are conspicuous by their absence.

The all-too-easy explanation would be that Markell and Knox published their book with the Stanford University Press, which is known for astonishingly high academic standards but does not rank among the most well-publicized or widely read university presses in America.  But truth to tell, it is the picture painted by the Markell and Knox book that is the problem.  It is not an altogether hopeless picture.  But, if you are looking at the world through lenses honed to highlight exciting and readily achievable ways to identify and grapple with the environmental impacts of free trade regimes, the road ahead looks very, very daunting.  In the one set of international agreements most obviously structured to give voice, expression, and effect to the environmental implications of trade liberalization the outputs add up to a very thin gruel.

The book is divided like Roman Gaul into three parts.  After an introductory essay in which Knox and Markell review the history and structure of the environmental side agreement to NAFTA, and in which they stress the potential the CEC had to be “much more than window dressing” (p.12), the initial part of the volume is an attempt to evaluate the CEC as a regional environmental organization.  The first of the four constituent chapters explains how the CEC honed its broad mandates to tackle just about any environmental issue in North America into a more limited set of tasks that added up to a feasible cooperative work program.  In [*986] substantive terms, the CEC Council and Secretariat chose to work in four general areas, including biodiversity conservation and the relationships between pollutants and health.  Other chapters take up some of these subjects in more detail.

For evaluative purposes, however, Knox and Markell ask how well the cooperative work program met two goals.  One involves what is called, rather clumsily, the “upward harmonization of domestic environmental standards” (p.304).  The other seeks to improve the way the signatory states identify and coordinate their responses to transboundary or continental environmental issues.  The judgment on the first score is that the CEC has made a difference, and not just in Mexico.  Advocates of tougher standards who found their way blocked in Mexico, for example, realized they could make progress by participating in CEC processes.  And in Canada CEC’s work on pollution release and transfer registries led to their being better understood and more effectively used by NGO and governmental actors. 

So, the messages here are fairly clear.  The good news is that CEC as a regional environmental organization set in motion research, analysis, information sharing, and deliberative processes that enabled established actors to re-evaluate and realign the ways they dealt with each other, and with some positive effects.  The bad news is that CEC only had the resources to set things moving in a more positive direction in a tiny fraction of the myriad problems a cooperative CEC work program might have tried to address.

The second part of the book examines various aspects of the work the CEC has done to respond to environmental concerns with economic integration.  To what extent, for example, has CEC actually assessed the environmental effects of NAFTA?  Has the CEC succeeded as a trade and environment organization by injecting environmental considerations into the work of the institutions created by NAFTA?  And most importantly, perhaps, has CEC worked effectively to prevent pollution havens by improving the enforcement of domestic environmental laws? 

Looking across the five chapters that throw light on these questions, the good news, again, is that a small number of CEC initiatives have had some positive results.  Studies have been made, frameworks developed, symposia held, funds disbursed, and citizen complaints received.  This is all to the good.  But when you add it all up over nearly a decade of experience there is not very much of it.  And, set against the long list of things that should be done, might be done, and need to be done, the level of accomplishment is exceedingly modest.  

The most memorable chapter, I think, in this part of the book is the one by Kevin Gallagher (pp.117-132).  One might take some comfort from the fact that Mexico under NAFTA has not become a pollution haven by attracting foreign investment in polluting industries.  That is the finding of one of the other chapters in the book, and of other studies.  But where, Gallagher asks, is the joy in this result? 

Overall, levels of environmental quality are not improving in Mexico.  There is scant evidence of either willingness or [*987] capacity to deal with the factors that could yield improvements.  Indeed, “plant-level environmental inspections peaked in 1993, at the height of the NAFTA debate, and have been declining ever since, and . . . spending on environmental protection has dropped 45 per cent over the same period” (p.303).  “Mexico,” Gallagher writes, “was not equipped to steer the benefits of economic integration into increasing environmental protection” (p.125). 

Could a fully equipped environmental institution like the CEC help Mexico turn this situation around?  Gallagher has some good things to say about the CEC and especially about its ability to realign relationships among policy actors in ways that are also identified in the first part of the book.  In the last analysis, however, he doubts that an institution with a total budget of nine million dollars can have much of a positive impact, no matter how energetic, entrepreneurial, and politically savvy it is, on a set of problems that cost the Mexican government more than forty billion dollars a year.

The third part of the book looks at the role of the CEC as a forum for civil society.  Here, the formal mechanisms established by the environmental side agreement to give individuals the ability to participate in the work of the CEC are of special importance.  They include the processes by which American, Canadian, and Mexican citizens, and NGOs representing those citizens, can trigger investigative reports by the CEC Secretariat into allegations that a signatory of the side agreement is failing effectively to enforce its environmental laws.  They also include the work of the Joint Public Advisory Committee, which can give advice to the CEC Council on all aspects of the CEC’s work. 

There are five chapters in this part of the book.  In some ways they are the most fascinating, because the CEC has little ability to influence policy except by developing and expressing what the book calls an authoritative voice.  As we have seen, the CEC does not wield substantial resources, and it cannot shape policy outputs through adjudication.  The way the CEC interprets and uses its mandate to ensure public participation in its affairs is crucial, therefore, to its success.  That much having been said, however, the devil is in the details and, once again, the contributors to this book do a magnificent job of peeling away the layers of political and procedural complexity that lie beneath a seemingly simple proposition.  The treatments by Kal Raustiala (pp.256-273) and David Markell (pp.274-298) of the citizen submissions process are especially worth reading, in my view.

But at the end of the day, as the saying goes, you really have to be a legal and political process aficionado to persevere with this book and to find value in the conclusions it draws.  Knox and Markell mince no words.  There is more than a little irony, they observe, in the fact that their contributors sharply question the effectiveness as a trade and environment organization of an institution born out of the political ferment over NAFTA.  The CEC has not created an environmental voice in the NAFTA institutions.  The contributors to their book also agree that there are real limits to believing in the CEC as a model that might be emulated in other trade contexts, such as the proposed Free Trade Area of the [*988] Americas.  So, to resort again to the vernacular, where’s the beef? 

The CEC and the processes associated with it can help mobilize constituencies needed to strengthen environmental regulation in Mexico, and in Canada, and presumably in the United States, as well.  The CEC can, if it uses its scarce resources wisely and makes strategic choices, develop and publicize information that shifts the balance of power among competing interests.  The CEC can facilitate networking.  It can provide financial support for some (not many) groups and objectives.  It can make public participation in international law processes more meaningful and effective.  These are all process considerations, all process values, and all considerations that can carry weight even if they are divorced from the trade context. 

Knox and Markell see a role, then, for a “freestanding environmental agreement along the lines of the [environmental side agreement] . . . likely to provide the same kinds of benefits to other regions that the CEC has provided to North America” (p.311).  This is not the kind of clean, simple, and efficient device for making forward progress likely to appeal to synoptic students of trade and the environment narrowly understood.  But it has a complicated, messy, procedurally convoluted air of truth about it that seems to me well-matched with the realities of international law and policy, and I like it. 

REFERENCES:

Barkin, J. Samuel.  2003.  “Trade, Sustainable Development, and the Environment.”  3 GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL POLITICS 92-97.

Copeland, Brian R., and M. Scott Taylor.  2003.  TRADE AND THE ENVIRONMENT: THEORY AND EVIDENCE.  Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Dauvergne, Peter (ed). 2005.  HANDBOOK OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL POLITICS.  Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar Publishing.

Pauwelyn, Joost.  2004.  “Recent Books on Trade and Environment: GATT Phantoms Still Haunt the WTO.”  15 EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF INTERNATIONAL LAW 575-592.

Sampson, Gary, and John Whalley (eds).  2005.  THE WTO, TRADE AND THE ENVIRONMENT.  Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar Publishing.

Vogel, David.  2006.  “International Trade and Environmental Regulation.”  In Norman J. Vig and Michael E. Kraft (eds).  ENVIRONMENTAL POLICY: NEW DIRECTIONS FOR THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY, 354-373.  Washington D.C.: CQ Press.

Wijen, Frank, Kees Zoeteman, and Jan Pieters (eds).  2005.  A HANDBOOK OF GLOBALISATION AND ENVIRONMENTAL POLICY: NATIONAL GOVERNMENT INTERVENTIONS IN A GLOBAL ARENA.  Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar Publishing. 

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