More than 20 years ago, the Brundtland Commission outlined an approach for achieving global environmental sustainability through multilateral diplomacy to reconcile environmental and economic objectives and resource transfers from North to South. This model was subsequently institutionalized in multilateral environmental agreements, such as the Kyoto Protocol and Convention on Biological Diversity, and intergovernmental organizations, such as the United Nations Commission on Sustainable Development. The sad reality, however, is that the international community has failed to realize the promise of environmental health and prosperity laid out in Our Common Future. In The Crisis of Global Environmental Governance, Jacob Park, Ken Conca, and Matthias Finger have assembled some of the leading critical political economists to reflect on society's failure to confront the global environmental challenge.
Collectively, the essays in this volume present a consistent and sophisticated argument that the dominant “Rio model” has failed to deliver on its promise of providing effective global environmental governance for three reasons. First, the Rio model does not account for the effects of globalization as a driver of environmental change, as well as a constraint on the range of policy options available for responding to such change. Second, the Rio model underestimates the scope of the problem. Global environmental problems involve a “complex interplay of power, equity, environmental, social, and economic issues that weave together to form the reality of sustainability challenges” (p. 8) and are, thus, not amenable to technical fixes. Finally, the Rio model places too much faith in the authority of national states to confront global environmental challenges.
These arguments are clearly outlined by the editors in the introductory chapter, and each of the subsequent chapters addresses one or more of these weaknesses from a variety of theoretical and empirical vantage points. Ulrich Brand and Christoph Görg draw on regulation theory to demonstrate how capitalism has altered the human understanding of nature and its implications for biodiversity politics. Finger uses organization theory and new institutional economics to highlight the limitations of state-centric forms of international governance. Gabriela Kütting analyzes the global textile industry using a commodity-chain approach to reveal the complex global–local linkages related to environment-development challenges. Peter Newell argues that a “potent combination of material, institutional, and discursive forces” (p. 91) have led to a “marketization” of environmental policymaking, which emphasizes a narrow range of responses to environmental degradation and fails to interrogate the role of global economic trends in causing degradation in the first place. Henri Acseland and Matthew Paterson both contend that this pattern is reinforced through the globalization of discourses on sustainable development (Acseland) and sustainable consumption (Paterson) that further legitimizes global capitalism. By the end of the volume, the contributors have made a strong case that future efforts to achieve global environmental sustainability must address the links between economic globalization and environmental degradation, as well as the complex relationship between global and local social, economic, and ecological processes. This will require engaging new forms of authority and agency beyond that of national governments.
Admirably, the editors seek to go beyond critique. The introductory chapter also identifies two key elements of an alternative model for achieving environmental sustainability. First, governance arrangements must allow for “more serious forms of civil society engagement, political participation, and articulation of what people really want and need” (p. 10). Second, new institutional arrangements must cross multiple levels of social and political organization as well as issue areas. In chapter 8, Sanjeev Khagram and Saleem H. Ali support these claims through a comparative analysis of four global governance networks (the World Commission on Dams; the Minerals, Mining and Sustainable Development Initiative; the Global Reporting Initiative; and the Global Compact). They conclude that such networks offer a promising model for more meaningful stakeholder engagement and multilevel/cross-sectoral governance. Darrell Whitman analyzes the idea of “stakeholder” from a legal perspective and cautions that stakeholder processes often are used to advance corporate interests in environmental policymaking, rather than to provide opportunities for democratic deliberation. Conca concludes the volume by tracing the rise and fall of the Rio model in the realm of global water governance, as well as the emergence of more transnationalized forms of governance.
Unfortunately, these themes are not as well developed as they might have been. These three chapters could have been set apart to clearly signal a shift in focus, and the authors could have made more explicit links to the themes of participation and multilevel governance. Moreover, since these chapters also address some of the earlier themes critiquing the Rio model, their contributions on alternative models for global environmental governance get lost in the shuffle. The insights are there but the reader is left to make the connections.
Overall, The Crisis in Global Environmental Governance makes a significant contribution to key debates in the fields of global environmental politics and global governance more broadly. The impressive group of contributors offer important insights on how we theorize about governance in the context of a globalized economy, as well as how we might apply these insights to achieve the goal of global environmental sustainability.
