In his book, Henrik Selin introduces readers to the complex and fragmented international regime governing the management of hazardous chemicals. He presents a compelling account of the environmental and human health threats posed by international trade and the transboundary movement of hazardous chemicals and waste, building a strong case for this problem as an appropriate target for international cooperation and governance. He then analyzes the development and contents of the chemicals regime, with particular emphasis on the way that linkages among issues and actors contribute to the design of chemicals management policy.
The chemicals regime consists of four independent multilateral agreements addressing different, but overlapping, parts of the life cycle of hazardous chemicals: the 1989 Basel Convention on the Control of Transboundary Movements of Hazardous Wastes and Their Disposal; the 1998 Rotterdam Convention on the Prior Informed Consent Procedure for Certain Hazardous Chemicals and Pesticides in International Trade; the Convention on Long-Range Transboundary Air Pollution's (CLRTAP) 1998 Protocol on Persistent Organic Pollutants (POPs); and the 2001 Stockholm Convention on POPs. Although issues of control, trade, and disposal of hazardous chemicals are clearly interrelated, the chemicals regime is unlike many other international regimes in that these conventions and protocols are formally independent, without any framework convention that coordinates policy efforts. As a consequence, the various stakeholders attempting to influence international policy toward hazardous chemicals—states, intergovernmental and nongovernmental organizations (IGOs and NGOs), and chemicals producers and users—interact with one another repeatedly across different venues in an attempt to build coalitions and advance their goals.
These interactions among actors, and the ways that the interactions evolve as policy activity transfers from one issue and institutional venue to another, are the focus of Selin's analysis. Global Governance of Hazardous Chemicals examines how institutional linkages across multilateral forums affect three different outcomes: coalition building in support of policy expansion; the diffusion of regime components, such as reliance on prior informed consent (PIC) as a guiding principle or the design of bodies tasked with implementation; and the design and effectiveness of multilevel governance efforts.
Following an introduction, the second chapter positions the study in the literature on institutions and multilevel governance. Chapter 3 provides a history of chemicals use and management. After that, Selin dedicates a chapter to each of the four main international chemicals treaties. With great detail, he documents the development of the treaties, tracking coalitions of interest on the key issues of conflict and providing extensive discussion of implementation challenges and outstanding unresolved issues. The research that went into producing these case histories is truly impressive—this book is essential reading for scholars and practitioners working in the area of hazardous chemicals management. For those with more general interest in issues of global environmental governance, however, these histories err on the side of too much detail. Especially in the first two case study chapters, it is difficult to untangle the larger lessons about institutional effects on policy from the specific features of the policy processes under study. The concluding chapter is helpful in summarizing results and highlighting some of the broader themes, but on the whole, I found the empirical detail to overwhelm the book's analytic arguments.
Even so, the book has much to contribute to our understanding about how institutional complexity affects strategic interplay among policy stakeholders. International governance of hazardous chemicals is both fragmented along horizontal lines and multilevel, characterized by policy action at national and regional levels, as well as on a global scale. With respect to the vertical features of multilevel governance, the study is particularly strong in its careful attention to countries' financial, technical, and administrative capacity to implement treaty provisions. Issues of capacity helped define treaty obligations; for example, the diffusion of PIC as a guiding principle was not as protective as some stakeholders preferred, but it carried great potential to spread information from countries with more regulatory capacity to those with less. Capacity remains an ongoing challenge in regime implementation, and low rates of compliance with PIC procedures are in part attributable to insufficient domestic capacity.
Although the subtitle suggests that the book's focus is on vertically shared responsibility, the bulk of the insights relate to horizontal fragmentation among the four treaties. The treaties are freestanding, but they address related issues and involve many of the same state, IGO, NGO, and corporate actors. In this dense institutional environment, linkages among actors, issues, and administrative procedures do much to shape relationships and policy choices. Selin discusses these linkage opportunities at length, identifying different types and forms. Not only do the linkages provide analytic leverage in helping to explain developments in the chemicals regime, but they are also important substantively, because part of the purpose of multilateral cooperation in chemicals management is to diffuse knowledge about, and capacity for, the handling and disposal of hazardous chemicals. As stakeholders build coalitions to support their formal positions on chemicals governance, they also develop relationships that might help achieve the shared goal of promoting education about chemicals management.
Given the importance of the linkages on both analytic and substantive grounds, I was disappointed not to see more systematic treatment of their causes and effects. Selin convincingly portrays the linkages as a critical factor in shaping the design of the chemicals regime, but he does not take the next step to theorize about the determinants of linkage formation or the conditions that might increase the influence of linkages on outcomes. This broader emphasis is needed in order to export findings from this research to other areas of international governance. On the basis of findings in the literature on institutional fragmentation in metropolitan areas, I would expect the dense institutional environment in the chemicals regime to create high transaction costs for forming linkages, but these costs should be lower where trust relationships emerge. Do transaction costs have a similar effect in this case? For example, do we see more linkages between venues that have more common membership? Selin notes that differences in membership between the CLRTAP POPs Protocol, a regional agreement, and the Stockholm Convention, which is global in scope, complicated the transfer of certain elements of POPs governance from one venue to the other (p. 175). Is this finding about the importance of overlapping membership something we should expect systematically?
The metropolitan fragmentation literature offers other potentially useful hypotheses. For an individual stakeholder, institutional fragmentation should increase the cost of monitoring policy activity across the multiple venues, but at the same time it should improve the stakeholder's ability to articulate complex sets of preferences. In other words, if a country seeks differential levels of regulation in different areas of chemicals policy, the fragmentation of venues may make it easier for the country to pursue this outcome. Selin notes the cost of monitoring (p. 168), but he offers little insight about whether this cost has a differential impact on actors with varying resource levels. Moreover, is there evidence that horizontal fragmentation allows articulation of complex preferences? Canada seems to be an example: It is allied with the United States and Japan in resisting a ban on hazardous waste transports from industrialized to developing countries, but it has taken a more aggressive approach toward controlling the long-range transport of POPs emissions, which have contributed to environmental contamination in the Arctic and health risks for indigenous populations. Are complex preferences such as these more tenable in a horizontally fragmented governance system, and what are the consequences for coalition maintenance?
Another area ripe for systematic theorizing is in the policy consequences of diffusion. Fragmentation facilitates the diffusion of regime components from one venue to another, increasing policy consistency, but it also allows conflict and political differences to carry across venues. On some issues, according to Selin, “political stalemates permeate across policy forums” (p. 13). In the interest of generalizing beyond this case, I sought more careful treatment of the conditions under which we see synergy or disruption. Does the experience in chemicals governance tell us anything that might help predict more or less productive linkages in other issue areas?
These critiques center mostly on trying to organize this book's findings into testable propositions that can be exported to other governance issues, and it is a testament to Selin's good research that I am so eager to do so. Through careful treatment of the hazardous chemicals regime, the author has dissected how institutional fragmentation affects the strategies of actors, which then shape the contents of the regime. Participants are defining the rules by which they will play in the future as the regime continues to evolve to address new chemicals and management challenges. Thus, the testable propositions may also be useful for future analysis of the chemicals regime itself.
