Location
Ceremonial Mootcourt Room
Start Date
2-7-2012 11:20 AM
End Date
2-7-2012 12:40 PM
Description
The apex of formal international law development to address environmental issues may have occurred in the 1990s, as evidenced by the difficulty in negotiating a successor to the Kyoto Protocol, but the increasing globalization of environmental law creates opportunities for regulatory innovation at the international level that may prove more successful than “traditional” state-to-state international law. A key characteristic of globalization in any field is increasing linkage, which includes linkage of national and international law and greater understanding of the linkages between nations that require coordinated management of common issues. For this reason, among others, globalization of environmental law appears poised to facilitate a reconsideration of the regulatory fragmentation that has heretofore characterized environmental law, particularly at the international level.
The first wave of environmental laws that emerged in the 1970s, at both the national and international levels, arose from recognition of the limited ability of environmental systems to withstand the onslaught of human activities corresponding with technological advance and population growth. Subsequent developments through the 1990s (epitomized by the Rio Earth Summit) represented a maturing of the field through development of legal arrangements to directly address the profound complexity of massive environmental threats, such as climate change and biodiversity loss, at a global level. With few exceptions, however, these efforts have not succeeded in significantly reducing the threats they sought to address. A cause of this failure, running through virtually all national and international efforts, is the underlying assumption that closely intertwined environmental issues can be addressed within the confines of highly fragmented governance systems. This fragmentation includes a vertical (scale of governance) and horizontal (scope of governance authority at a given level) dimension, which encompass both institutional and issue competence elements.
Building upon the trends of globalization in environmental law to more successfully address global environmental threats will require the effective development of linkages among the fragmented pieces of the environmental governance puzzle. Thus, questions of fragmentation and linkage form an under-recognized but essential element of the crossroads at which global environmental law now stands. Improving global environmental governance must involve a more effective approach to overcoming the artificial divides created by the fragmentation that was imbued in environmental law from its earliest origins and which continue to limit its ability to achieve desired results in the context of international politics.
The proposed presentation (and possible paper) will explore the limitations of fragmented governance and identify potential pathways to building more effective global environmental law that responds to the reality of environmental issues linked across geography and topical scope. The presentation builds upon my 2010 IUCN Academy Colloquium presentation by analyzing the relationship of linkage and global environmental law, then drawing upon the global environmental law paradigm (or framing) to construct policy-relevant and forward-looking strategies for more successful environmental governance in the current context of global financial stress. The presentation will thus include both theoretical and practical analysis of the potential for globalization to reinvigorate environmental governance throughout the world.
Presentation
Included in
Linkage in 21st Century Global Environmental Governance
Ceremonial Mootcourt Room
The apex of formal international law development to address environmental issues may have occurred in the 1990s, as evidenced by the difficulty in negotiating a successor to the Kyoto Protocol, but the increasing globalization of environmental law creates opportunities for regulatory innovation at the international level that may prove more successful than “traditional” state-to-state international law. A key characteristic of globalization in any field is increasing linkage, which includes linkage of national and international law and greater understanding of the linkages between nations that require coordinated management of common issues. For this reason, among others, globalization of environmental law appears poised to facilitate a reconsideration of the regulatory fragmentation that has heretofore characterized environmental law, particularly at the international level.
The first wave of environmental laws that emerged in the 1970s, at both the national and international levels, arose from recognition of the limited ability of environmental systems to withstand the onslaught of human activities corresponding with technological advance and population growth. Subsequent developments through the 1990s (epitomized by the Rio Earth Summit) represented a maturing of the field through development of legal arrangements to directly address the profound complexity of massive environmental threats, such as climate change and biodiversity loss, at a global level. With few exceptions, however, these efforts have not succeeded in significantly reducing the threats they sought to address. A cause of this failure, running through virtually all national and international efforts, is the underlying assumption that closely intertwined environmental issues can be addressed within the confines of highly fragmented governance systems. This fragmentation includes a vertical (scale of governance) and horizontal (scope of governance authority at a given level) dimension, which encompass both institutional and issue competence elements.
Building upon the trends of globalization in environmental law to more successfully address global environmental threats will require the effective development of linkages among the fragmented pieces of the environmental governance puzzle. Thus, questions of fragmentation and linkage form an under-recognized but essential element of the crossroads at which global environmental law now stands. Improving global environmental governance must involve a more effective approach to overcoming the artificial divides created by the fragmentation that was imbued in environmental law from its earliest origins and which continue to limit its ability to achieve desired results in the context of international politics.
The proposed presentation (and possible paper) will explore the limitations of fragmented governance and identify potential pathways to building more effective global environmental law that responds to the reality of environmental issues linked across geography and topical scope. The presentation builds upon my 2010 IUCN Academy Colloquium presentation by analyzing the relationship of linkage and global environmental law, then drawing upon the global environmental law paradigm (or framing) to construct policy-relevant and forward-looking strategies for more successful environmental governance in the current context of global financial stress. The presentation will thus include both theoretical and practical analysis of the potential for globalization to reinvigorate environmental governance throughout the world.