Vol. 9 No. 6 (June 1999) pp. 263-268.

THE GLOBAL ENVIRONMENT: INSTITUTIONS, LAW, AND POLICY, Norman J. Vig and Regina S. Axelrod (Editors). Washington, DC: Congressional Quarterly, 1999. 352 pp.

Reviewed by Caitilin R. Rabbitt, Doctoral Candidate, Department of Sociology, New York University.

In this book, editors Norman J. Vig and Regina S. Axelrod have compiled a series of sixteen scholarly and often quite insightful articles on an important topic. The book opens with an introduction by Vig to the book’s fundamental theme: while the proliferation of international environmental policy organizations since the 1970s paralleled increases in international environmental agreements, weak international governance over the economic policies and ecological protections of individual nations may explain the limited gains in international environmental protections achieved during recent decades.

As Vig explains, because individual states exercise sovereign authority over internal political and economic matters, international policies must rely on states’ voluntary consent. Consequently, international policies are prone to scientific and political conflict as environmental protections are often diplomatically non-institutionalized. This leaves their precise legal content and organizational venue free to evolve over time in response to the political configurations emergent from state, scientific, industry, and other private-sector actors. International policies are frequently analyzed in terms of "international regimes," or the "principles, norms, rules and decision-making procedures around which actor expectations converge in a given issue-area" (Krasner, 1983, cited by Vig on pg. 4 in the text). International policy on economic development, the primary focus of the book, is characteristically organized around the principle of "sustainable development." Widely adopted following a 1987 UN "Brundtland Commission" interpretation, "Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs" (p. 7). The Brundtland Commission attempted to bridge potential barriers to environmental protections by arguing, first, that the needs of the poor must be recognized by wealthy countries (because countries unable to provide for the survival or well-being of their citizenry will always subordinate ecological concerns to economic ones), and second, that the real constraints to provision for social needs arise not from environmental limitations, but from technological and organizational ones (pp. 6-7). Sustainable development, then, has provided a policy framework emphasizing the collective benefits of national economic cooperation, and the potential for scientific and technological progress to transcend conflicts between individual countries.

Vig also introduces readers to prevalent explanatory frameworks for international regimes: a theory of transnational "epistemic communities" emergent from expert (scientific or policy) discourses, and conceptions of global "governance" or global "civil society" privileging networks of state and non-state organizational actors joined by exchanges of information and influence (Haas, 1990; Young, et al, 1996; Lipschutz and Mayer, 1996, cited by Vig on pp. 4-5). Like "globalization," these concepts appear sufficiently abstract to conflate substantively and analytically important distinctions across national contexts, policy issues, and organizational actors. The litmus test for this reader, thus, was the degree to which contributors either ground their discussions in concrete social actors and causal relations, or left them floating within the somewhat nebulous realm of "global" community and normative consensus. Overall, despite the sheer scope of a remarkably vast and complex topic, contributors succeeded admirably in providing analyses certain to be of interest to academic and non-academic readers alike.

Subsequent chapters are organized into four sections, the first three on international institutions and regimes, international environmental law, and international environmental policies and implementation; the last section of the book presents four national case studies of environmental policy implementation.

In the first section, Marvin S. Soroos explains the environmental functions of intergovernmental organizations (IGOs - the book, incidentally, serves as a thesaurus of key acronyms within the field of international policy-making), and John McCormick summarizes the activities of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and international NGOs (INGOs) ranging from Greenpeace, known for environmental activism utilizing civil disobedience, to the Swiss-based World Conservation Union (IUCN) bridging governmental and non-governmental organizations. As both authors make clear, state and non-state actors must negotiate their way through some very deep chasms in pursuit of the national coalitions required to protect global atmospheric, aquatic, or natural resource "commons."

North/South conflicts are among the most recurrent: while the industrialized northern countries seek curbs on economic development within the generally less regulated countries in South America or Africa, developing countries often perceive these demands as inequitable relative to the energy and resource toll taken by affluent Northern lifestyles. Petitions by developing countries for the technology transfers and other subsidies needed to comply with international policies, meanwhile, are often resisted by industrialized countries protective of their own economic growth. Finally, the IGOs key to international development programs, such as the International Monetary Fund, World Trade Organization, or World Bank, have often been resistant to pressure for environmental-sensitivity: IMF loans, for example, often require favorable balance of trades achievable only through economic drastic changes and intense exploitation of environmental resources such as range land, forests, or ore reserves (pg. 34).

As McCormick observes, NGOs play a consequential roles within environmental policy: gathering information, monitoring compliance and whistle-blowing, lobbying state and IGO officials and mobilizing pubic support for environmental causes, and even supplementing IGO activities through the development of model environmental policies and programs (pp. 68-70). However, full participation of NGOs and INGOs within international environmental regimes is hindered by a lack of participatory mechanisms comparable to provisions for public review and comment of regulatory agency rule-making, or citizen standing to litigate enforcement actions, created within U.S. environmental policies by statutory and case-law.

The causes and consequences of weakly institutionalized international environmental policy are explored in depth in the section of the book on International Environmental Law. According to Edith Brown Weiss, while international policies have become increasingly restricted to nonbinding or "soft" law (analogous to voluntary codes instituted by private industry associations) in proportion to the intensification of international regulation of previously domestic matters, less specific programmatic guidelines may often enable higher levels of state support and even compliance than would more rigid and punitively sanctioned policies. The operation of "soft" law is, however, complicated by two other trends within the structure of international law: blurred boundaries between public law and private law (arising from international regulation of private business) and the integration of international and national law (resulting from legal relationships crossing national boundaries, such as a 1982 Agreement on Acid Precipitation by New York and Quebec). While logical legal outcomes of interactions among international actors, these developments within the structure of international law raise new questions about the management of, and accountability for, legal policies and actions. Weiss here alludes to what others have termed "the decentering of the state" in relation to current U.S. regulatory trends (Coglianese, 1999; Freeman, 1999). State actors delegate regulatory decision-making to non-state actors in response to criticism of command-and-control regulation and to a lack of governmental consensus needed to explicitly address politically controversial matters such as environmental, workplace, or consumer protections unpopular with powerful industries. As a result, problems of political accountability for policy design and implementation may be displaced rather than ameliorated. As Weiss notes, while there are some formal provisions for NGO participation within international environmental regimes (the UN Economic and Social Council, for example, certifies NGOs for participation within meetings between governmental actors), neither NGOs nor industry groups are, in fact, necessarily more accountable to the public than is the state (pg. 112):

Precisely because private interests participating within international regimes may not naturally aggregate into "the public interest," explicit consideration of the structure and norms of NGO participation within international environmental policy regimes is required to assure that these regimes are organized around universalistic goals and democratic processes. Public accountability within international environmental law is further complicated by segmentation captured in Robert Putnam’s theory that domestic and international actors within the policy formulation path operate within a "two-level game" (p. 109) of potentially quite contradictory processes. Several authors explain, for example, that U.S. domestic business interests resulted in a Senate resolution requiring concessions in greenhouse gas emission from developing countries and precluding any treaty obligations deemed injurious to the U.S. economy in Kyoto negotiations over global warming (pp. 225, 243). This policy framework was jettisoned by U.S. negotiators attempting to obtain the critical mass of international support required for international policies on greenhouse gases to have a practical impact on global warming. Consequentially, negotiators approved a policy framework already known to be unacceptable to the legislators whose ratification would be required for the Kyoto Protocol to become binding on the U.S.

Michael Faure and Jurgen Lefevere explore the distinctions between environmental policy implementation, compliance, enforcement, and effectiveness (pp. 138-139). This facilitates identification of what institutional sociologists term "decoupling" between formal and practical organizational norms (Meyer and Rowan, 1977) in response to variations across issue, national, and organizational contexts, and thus, hopefully, the development of corrective mechanisms. Rather than leaving international environmental policies vague, in the interests of achieving state support, or relying on formal sanctions to achieve compliance, the authors advocate a "managerial approach" (p. 141) based on mechanisms, such as formally differentiated policy standards, tailored to existing state capacities. Faure and Lefevere also point out that the transparency of environmental programs, a key factor within their enforcement, is quite likely to depend on the existence of democratic provisions for civil and political rights, as these are preconditions for NGOs influence within public opinion and the political arena.

Among the articles about environmental policy implementation, Gary C. Bryner’s analysis of the 1992 UN Conference on the Environment and Development (UNCED, or "Rio Earth Summit," after its host city) provides a particularly informative discussion of the impact of international policy goals. Bryner focuses on implementation of the UNCED’s "Agenda 21," participants’ game-plan for implementation of the principle of "sustainable development." He emphasizes interactions between social and economic phenomena which help substantiate the more idealistic dimensions of this principle, noting, for example, that the culturally-appropriate, labor-intensive, and environmentally-sensitive technologies can better mediate between imperatives for environmental protection and economic development than capital-intensive, "high-tech" development projects more likely to have significant environmental and social impacts (pp. 178-179). Bryner integrates statistical data providing a perspective into international economic development programs within developing countries with sufficient contextual details to provide perspective into the experience and concerns of the citizens of developing countries.

The final case studies examine environmental policy with an industrialized country (the Netherlands), a nation in "transition" from the Soviet Bloc to a democratic government (the Czech Republic), and two developing nations not generally associated with extensive civil liberties (China and Indonesia). Within the Netherlands, state regulatory capacities have allowed the development of a program of "ecological modernization" utilizing a systems analysis of natural resource flows through the Dutch economy. According to author Duncan Liefferink, formulation and implementation of the 1989 National Environmental Policy Plan (NEPP) relied on cooperation from affected industry groups in exchange for consideration of business concerns, in combination with more formalized provisions such as state licensing (264). Interestingly, Liefferink contends in an argument reminiscent of James Q. Wilson’s thesis that the "politics of regulation" are a function of the social distribution of perceived costs and benefits (Wilson, 1980), that as Dutch environmental policy has become more institutionalized, citizen and environmental groups appear to have abdicated the operation of the nation’s environmental policy to interest groups with the most immediate interests in it (pp. 270-272).

The picture of national compliance with international environmental policy goals that emerges from the other articles in this section of the book is less optimistic. Within the Czech Republic, environmentalists were recently targeted, along with skinhead and anarchist organizations, by national security agents as enemies of the Czech state. This is particularly troubling because the governmental role within planning and construction of an internationally-funded nuclear facility appears to have been plagued with corruption and little concern for public safety on the part of responsible state officials, who developed norms of communicating decisions orally to avoid any liability for them. State control over information about the Czech nuclear program ensured that the public had little basis for independent evaluation of state nuclear policies, and despite some liberalization within the Czech government, Axelrod concludes that ideals of "sustainable development" will be realized within the Czech Republic only if there is enough public participation to create incentives for state recognition of social and environmental "externalities" incurred through economic development (pp. 293-297).

Tensions between state elite plans for economic development projects and a country’s citizenry also emerge in plans for the Three Gorges Dam in China, which will involve relocation of between 1.3 and 1.9 million residents of the proposed dam site (pg. 303). Consistent with Bryner’s observations about the reconciliation of economic and environmental goals through the use of appropriate technology, author Lawrence R. Sullivan notes that critics of the dam seek to avoid the Dam’s anticipated social and environmental damage replacing it with multiple smaller-scale dams. Chinese officials, however, favor the technologically-complex Three Gorges plan, more conducive to centralized control over the nation’s energy production, and counter the efforts of local groups to protest the Dam through political repression and use of the state-controlled media to equate the project with the national interest (pp. 309-311).

Ultimately, the divergent patterns of interest-group participation illustrated in the national case studies are not adequately addressed by this book’s often static and "state-centered" orientation (Skocpol, 1985). Despite multiple references to a "global civil society" and emphasis on differences between democratic and more authoritarian societies, none of the book’s contributors really theorize processes of public mobilization around different environmental issues, and there is no analysis of the dynamics of NGO participation within international regimes comparable to consideration of public mobilization within the research, for example, on the role of social movements within public policy.

Overall, however, this book covers a tremendous amount of ground, historically and theoretically, as well as geographically. Its chapters provide solidly researched, well-organized, and often extremely interesting analyses of the policy and practical implications of the principle of "sustainable development," identify barriers to its implementation within many national contexts, and, in the process, also suggest potential avenues for future international environmental policy gains.

References

Coglianese, Cary, (1999) Presentation at the Annual Meeting of the Law and Society Association, Chicago, IL, May 27-30, 1999

Freeman, Jody, (1999) Presentation at the Annual Meeting of the Law and Society Association, Chicago, IL, May 27-30, 1999

Meyer, John and Brian Rowan (1977), "Institutionalized Organizations: Formal Structure as Myth and Ceremony," AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY, 83: 344-63

Skocpol, Theda, (1985), "Bring the State Back In: Strategies of Analysis in Current Research," pp. 3-37 in BRINGING THE STATE BACK IN, Peter Evans, et al, (eds.) New York, NY: Cambridge University Press

Vig, Norman J. and Regina S. Axelrod, (eds.) (1999). THE GLOBAL ENVIRONMENT: INSTITUTIONS, LAW, AND POLICY. Washington, DC: Congressional Quarterly

Wilson, James Q. (1980) "The Politics of Regulation," pp. 357-394 in THE POLITICS OF REGULATION, James W. Wilson, (ed.), New York: Basic Books

Copyright 1995