1. INTRODUCTION
This research note reflects on the challenges experienced and lessons learnt during a five-year interdisciplinary and multi-site research project to investigate fair and equitable benefit sharing from a global environmental law perspective.Footnote 1 We understand global environmental law as a subset of transnational environmental law: namely, as legal phenomena that not only transcend national frontiers but also have a global justification.Footnote 2 This is the case, for example, of an international environmental treaty objective (fair and equitable benefit sharing) the realization of which relies on various legal orders.Footnote 3 Benefit sharing, while enshrined in a variety of international treaties,Footnote 4 in effect relies for its further development and implementation on a dynamic web of national laws, contractual arrangements and the customary laws of indigenous and local communities.Footnote 5 A global environmental law perspective thus prompts the study of environmental law at the international, regional, national and subnational levels as a set of interrelated and mutually influencing systems, through an analysis of the cumulative impacts of the practice of a variety of non-state actors.Footnote 6 It seeks to ‘gauge incipient trends and identify future projections, in an iterative process of mapping, scanning, schematizing and (re)framing normative patterns, with a view to understanding the capacity of law … to recast the ways in which it addresses some of the problems of an interconnected world’.Footnote 7
Our focus here is on research methods, as our experience revealed the intricate links between methods for local community-based research and questions of research ethics which have not been discussed in the incipient literature on global environmental law. We distinguish methods from methodologyFootnote 8 – which is also occasionally lacking in the debate on environmental legal scholarshipFootnote 9 – in line with the literature on political and social research design. We understand methodology as a ‘toolbox’ that can be filled with various tools, which are the research methods.Footnote 10 Methodology flows from ontological, epistemological and theoretical framework decisions that derive from the research interests of the researcher. In that sense, methodological discussions answer questions about the best overall way of acquiring knowledge about a research question. According to this view, methods are not the automatic outcomes of any one particular methodology; a constructivist piece of research may draw on quantitative methods, just as a positivist piece of research may use qualitative methods.Footnote 11 The mixture of traditional legal methods and of quantitative and qualitative social scientific methods used in our project illustrates this.Footnote 12 Methodology (and preceding questions of ontology and epistemology) also raise ethical considerations. Because this is already covered in a great deal of literature at the stage of research design,Footnote 13 we focus on the less discussed area of ethical decision making as research unfolds.
We thus first provide an overview of the research design process and describe the moves from the initial ontological standpoint through to methodology. This serves to explain the choice of common social science methods that we used to study benefit sharing at different levels and at different sites (Section 2). We then discuss the importance of an explicit discussion of, and of an iterative approach to, methods in the study of global environmental law (Section 3). On that basis, we link the choice of research methods to ethical questions (Section 4). We finally discuss how our iterative view of methods and ethics fed back into methodological considerations and produced new research questions (Section 5).
2. RESEARCH DESIGN: FROM METHODOLOGY TO METHODS
The ontological starting point for our project is constructivist: we see meaning as socially constructed in interactions between different actors. This applies to the arenas where international environmental law is made and successively interpreted by state and non-state actors. Such actors include representatives of local communities operating at the global level, and the communities and other actors that apply international environmental legal norms in a local context. We believe this is a reasonable starting point for fair and equitable benefit sharing for two reasons. Firstly, benefit sharing is a legal concept that is still subject to progressive development at both international and local levels. Secondly, benefit sharing, as progressively articulated in international environmental law, arguably supports equitable partnership building among state and non-state actors across different sectors (bio-prospecting, conservation, natural resource use and the production of knowledge).Footnote 14
As our interest was in a specific concept of international environmental law and its development at multiple levels, a constructivist view allowed us to pay attention to the negotiation of meaning. This led us in turn to an interpretivist epistemology. In this vein, we understand relevant knowledge about fair and equitable benefit sharing to exist not only in sources of law but also in real-life applications and actors’ viewpoints.
To respond to these ontological and epistemological premises, we drew on theories of norm diffusion from law, international relations, and political sociology. We considered how each of these approaches contributes to illuminate different ways of constructing the meaning of benefit sharing in different sites – that is, how the law lives and evolves over time by travelling across sites.Footnote 15 The existing literature from these three social scientific disciplines underlines that politics and law play crucial roles in how norms diffuse. It shows equally how norms are framed or adjusted for different social and cultural contexts.
This interdisciplinary theoretical approach underpinned our choice of a comparative case study methodology to consider both legal sources and the social and political worlds associated with fair and equitable benefit sharing, and its application or discussion at different levels. This choice was also motivated by the fact that the bulk of the literature on benefit sharing focuses either on single local-level cases or sectors, or on negotiation and application via international instruments. Starting our exploration of the meanings constructed around benefit sharing at the local level, we chose a ‘most different systems’ comparative case study methodology so that any common traits arising from the comparison would be more robust, albeit not capable of being generalized. We decided that a total of five case studies was feasible to allow enough space for variation and comparison, yet still yield in-depth knowledge.Footnote 16
The choice of the individual case studies was driven by our constructivist viewpoint: to unravel how benefit sharing was framed. That is, we sought to uncover how its meaning was constructed in different regions and domestic legal systems (Greece, South Africa, Namibia, Malaysia, and Argentina); in different sectors that raise different environmental concerns (pastoralism, traditional medicine, protected areas, traditional agriculture, and mining); and within communities with varying degrees of access to power at different levels.Footnote 17
We selected local communities that were discussing community protocols (although not all had drafted or adopted them), taking this to signal the presence of discussions about benefit sharing in a broad sense. Community protocols are ‘documents developed by local communities to record, among other things, information on their practices, institutions, customary law, rights and visions of development’.Footnote 18 They are drafted, usually with external support, to set out a community's position on how it expects any external actor to seek to access traditional lands, resources, and knowledge. Discussions around community protocols are likely to highlight what a community might expect or demand in building a relationship with outside actors, as a starting point for any potential future discussions on benefit sharing.
2.1. Trade-offs in Research Design Choices
A comparative case study methodology involves some common trade-offs linked to the choice between depth and breadth. This underpinned the decision to work with non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that were, in turn, working closely with local communities. Ideally, we would have developed our own relationships with communities over time in an ethnographic, participatory approach. However, in order to cover five cases in five years, we relied on NGOs to help us in identifying communities that were discussing issues around benefit sharing (guaranteeing the variation discussed earlier). The NGOs helped us to learn about those communities and take informed decisions on how to approach them respectfully prior to our research visits. They also assisted in selecting the most appropriate research methods and consent processes.
The decision to work with NGOs produced knock-on effects: working with other actors to identify and carry out research meant that our views on communities were necessarily shaped by, and filtered through, the relationship between community and NGO. On the one hand, a substantial body of literature on civil society notes that NGOs may become (albeit unwittingly) actors in the expansion of neoliberal systems that are seen as damaging to many communities – for example, by allowing states to avoid providing vital services, or by creating dependencies between communities and NGOs.Footnote 19 On the other hand, not enough research has focused on the role of NGOs as facilitators of negotiations on community protocols and their role in influencing the meaning of benefit sharing in local contexts through that support. We thus sought out NGOs that were involved closely with communities in long-term projects and relationships aimed at local empowerment rather than service provision. These NGOs were aware of the potential for civil society groups to create dependencies and better placed to advise us about how to feed into ongoing community support (as discussed in more depth later).Footnote 20 The NGO partners made preliminary investigations on our behalf to determine whether communities would be potentially interested in participating in the research. We also decided to include two visits to each local community in order to build in a feedback loop, which would allow us to reflect on the evolving relationship between the NGO and the community over time.
3. REFLECTIONS ON METHODS FOR STUDYING GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL LAW
Our interdisciplinary theoretical framework informed the methods – that is, the tools for carrying out a comparative case study methodology – which we employed to study global environmental law within local community discussions around benefit sharing. Our methods, in turn, shaped research in the project within different disciplines.Footnote 21 They enriched more traditional (doctrinal) legal research and gave rise to a political-sociological analysis of international environmental law.Footnote 22
Despite the common use of these methods across social science disciplines, we have seen relatively little literature in the legal field discussing ontological, epistemological, and methodological considerations around the choice of research methods.Footnote 23 More generally, we were also unable to locate literature on practical and ethical aspects of the methods choices when applied in empirical, exploratory research on international law at the local level. Practical issues are discussed in this section, with a view to underscoring the importance of methods choices to limit bias in global environmental research,Footnote 24 and the need for an iterative approach.
Doing empirical research is always a balancing act to some extent. Researchers must juggle practical concerns, faithfulness to research design, and the on the-spot-decision-making that empirical research may demand. These common issues were magnified in our comparative case study methodology as a result of the most-different-systems design. This meant that each case study presented a range of context-specific opportunities and challenges. We anticipated practical difficulties and sought to remain flexible regarding which methods we would use in our comparative case study methodology at the research design stage.Footnote 25 This allowed us to link our choice of methods with discussions with partner NGOs.
We considered a range of qualitative methods that were feasible for gathering data about the meanings attributed to benefit sharing: focus groups, participant observation, and semi- or unstructured interviews.Footnote 26 We reasoned that qualitative methods were the best suited to our research interests, as they are used ‘to make sense of, or to interpret, phenomena in terms of the meanings people bring to them’.Footnote 27 The option of focus groups was discarded after discussions with NGO partners. Despite the many advantages of this method for understanding meaning construction in a dynamic setting, focus groups were simply too complex to set up with often remote communities. They require long run-up periods to organize and explain the purpose of the groups. This highlights a specific trade-off in terms of the methods flowing from our overall research design. Instead, we relied on other common methods – participant observation at community meetings, workshops and festivals, and individual and group interviews (informal conversations or semi-structured interviews).
Participant observation was our preferred method for gathering information about how communities discuss and assign meaning to benefit sharing. This was for several reasons, both practical and epistemological. In terms of the kind of knowledge we wished to gather, participant observation allowed us to observe interactions and conversations over longer time frames than was possible with interviews. In addition, they provided an opportunity to see exchanges between community members that bore a closer resemblance to natural and spontaneous exchange.Footnote 28 Although the presence of the researcher inevitably has some distorting effect, this is arguably less prominent than is the case in interview scenarios.Footnote 29 In our research, in particular, this lower level of researcher distortion was supported by our choice to play a more passive role, without imposing the term ‘benefit sharing’ or our own understanding of it (based mainly on previous study of international environmental law) on community discussions. Our presentations of the research project and benefit sharing were more limited where we used the participant observation method: we relied on the initial contacts made through the partner NGO and briefly presented our research interests orally before requesting communities’ permission to observe meetings. We also relied on our partner NGOs to schedule our research visits to coincide with community events where discussions around benefit sharing were likely to take place.
Overall, we considered that participant observation at meetings or gatherings where community members had already decided to discuss issues linked to benefit sharing would allow us to gain an understanding of how meanings were assigned to this idea, as well as the kinds of issue that were raised around it. This we deemed crucial for understanding local framings of benefit sharing in contrast to those emerging from international environmental law processes. This stance tied into our comparative case study methodology, rooted in turn in a constructivist view of law and social interaction.
Participant observation was not always possible, as not all communities involved in our research project were organized in formal ways or held community meetings. Where these conditions were not in place, we held informal, unstructured interviews with community members, and more formal, semi-structured interviews with community members holding official positions.
Our choice of less structured interviews with community members was guided by our overall constructivist research design. We dispensed with any checklist of areas to be covered, as we wanted to allow views of benefit sharing to emerge in interaction with as little predetermined shaping of the discussion as possible. The latter is also a general point of method. As discussed, distortion of the discussion was something we wished to reduce wherever possible, to limit our bias (based on previous research in international environmental law) of local-level perceptions and framings of benefit sharing. By holding informal interviews more akin to everyday conversations, we hoped to minimize any boundaries placed on the conversation and allow interview partners to tell their own stories. This form of interview minimizes the ‘voice of the researcher’ as much as possible, and brings to the fore the aspects of human agency central to our understanding of the law's meaning as built in social interaction.Footnote 30 From a practical perspective, informal and unstructured interviews also allowed us to be more spontaneous, speaking with local community members as opportunities arose. This was simply common sense in areas where research participants were not easily contactable and whose work meant availability was unpredictable.
Unstructured interviews were less practical for participants working for different authorities or in other organizations with supporting roles in communities or alternative connections of interest. Here, we used semi-structured interviews, as most of these participants had prior knowledge of benefit sharing in relation to their official mandate. This allowed us more leeway in terms of balancing distortion in the conversation and setting boundaries in line with the research questions.Footnote 31
On some occasions we were unable to use any of these methods; yet these also informed our research. For example, in some instances we were asked not to observe meetings or were refused interviews. These refusals were informative about sensitivities and risks around benefit sharing in some of the cases, and ultimately helped us to gain a deeper understanding of the multiple interests of different actors in communities that benefit sharing is expected to address. In Namibia, for example, we observed the presentation of a draft community protocol in various villages. As this was only a draft, however, we withdrew while communities discussed their opinions on the details of the text. This, along with other experiences, drew attention to the importance of community ‘ownership’ over community protocols, and the processes of consensus building involved in their drafting. On many more occasions, meetings simply fell through. This provided us with a first-hand understanding of the challenges faced in many of the communities we visited, ranging from a lack of access to transport to a lack of communication possibilities and the unpredictable nature of work. These barriers are highly relevant to our research interests as access to information, and the possibility to organize as a community, are central factors for the implementation of fair and equitable benefit sharing. Our expectations about cultural and language barriers were also challenged: these were steeper than we imagined in our only European case study in Greece, for example, where few interview partners spoke English, and where pastoralists worked long hours thus making late-night interviews necessary. In other case studies these barriers were less pronounced than we had anticipated.
These reflections serve to highlight that as we carried out our research, unexpected elements resulted in tweaks, adjustments and occasional changes in the methods we had intended to use. Yet we decided that adapting our methods to be as undisruptive, respectful, and ultimately useful to research partners as possible was more important than forcing a neat and uniform approach to facilitate our scholarly comparison. What this means is that the research process in global environmental law is an iterative one, negotiated with research partners in the moment, rather than neatly laid out in prior plans.Footnote 32 Flexibility in the choice of methods, as well as explicit reflection on their respective merits and drawbacks, emerges as an essential element for studying the surprising and unpredictable meanings of benefit sharing constructed at different levels (with various constraints and idiosyncrasies), and by various actors (with different cultural and political sensitivities).
4. ETHICS
Questions of ethics, which we consider to consist of questions of power and consent, should be addressed when specifying the ontological, epistemological, and methodological aspects of a research design. In our experience, however, attention should be paid also to questions of ethics that arise while applying social science methods ‘on the ground’. These are questions that emerge after designing the research and after fulfilling the necessary research ethics procedures applicable in a particular case.
In this section we cover two sets of ethics questions in particular. Firstly, we reflect on power relationships in questions of methods and ethics in research at the local level. In particular, we discuss how we drew on participatory action research (PAR) and its emphasis on power and self-reflexive research approaches, which opened our eyes to the complex webs of power in which communities are embedded, including relationships with supporting NGOs and researchers. Secondly, we reflect on the gap between formal ethics procedures and ethical research on the ground, illustrating the shortcomings of written consent requirements and the need for dialogue-based ethics processes. In both areas, we build upon our earlier reflections on the need to address researcher bias and adopt iterative approaches in the choice of research methods.
4.1. Power
Although PAR inspired our approach to ethics, we do not claim to have carried out this type of research (which involves the co-development of research designs alongside those usually characterized as the ‘researched’). Whether the funding modalities for our project would have allowed such a co-design process in the first place remains an open question. Instead, PAR provided us with a template to consider power relationships in our own research, and to move towards integrating the views of research partners into the aimsFootnote 33 and modalities of the project iteratively as it progressed. Our research became more self-reflexive as it unfolded, drawing on our substantive findings about the importance of the definition of benefits in dialogue with communities, as well as on our iterative approach to methods and the need to address researcher bias. This also ties in with our earlier reflections on the role of partner NGOs in our research design.
In practice, we followed PAR insights at the research planning stage in an effort to build our sensitivity to power imbalances between researchers and participants in dialogue with partner NGOs. During our research, however, the variety of constellations of power we needed to consider proved to be more complex and wide-ranging than we had imagined. We had thought through strategies that might diminish power imbalances between researchers and participants, and opted for less disruptive methods. Doing the research made it clear that these relations were embedded in local, regional, national, and international power relationships in clear everyday ways.
In South Africa, for example, we found that traditional health practitioners were dealing with traditional and municipal authorities, as well as the ministry of health, in an effort to gain recognition. They were also engaged in talks with provincial parks authorities and private landowners about access issues, complicated in turn by ongoing land claims and serious security problems linked to global rhinoceros poaching. Added to this, the national legislative backdrop was shifting with the implementation of international law. In this context, while the researcher-participant power relationship remained important, it was only one among many. Our research approaches and, in particular, our ethics commitments thus needed to be responsive to a range of different contexts within each case study, and were refined in an iterative manner. Our methods choices were thus tailored not only to the levels of organization in local communities, but to sensitivities linked to power constellations. For example, we did not observe entire community meetings in some cases, and held group interviews in others, in an effort to ensure that no community members felt their views were excluded.
This brings our discussion to another important power relationship – that with NGO partners. The decision to work with partner NGOs creates the possibility that working with and through these actors influences research findings, as NGOs are also part of complex contexts of power around communities. NGOs have been thought of as ‘gatekeepers’ in social scientific research, and thus as a potential source of distortion. We addressed this in terms of ethics in two ways: one more and one less intentional. Firstly, we consciously reflected on the role of NGOs in our research and took steps to make this challenge explicit in our findings.Footnote 34 Secondly, and less intentionally, our decision to use discussions of community protocols as an indicator for a community's interest in benefit sharing helped to mitigate the shaping of our results through community-NGO relationships. Open and participatory practices are crucial for the elaboration of community protocols, and the effort and thought our NGO partners put into facilitating community-owned processes was remarkable. Though this is a difficult balancing act,Footnote 35 it meant that the NGO partners with which we worked were aware of their power, reflected upon it, and sought measures to address inequalities, not least through their aim of community empowerment. To do ethical research with these NGOs also meant seeking to protect these relationships aimed at empowerment. We avoided some themes or approaches that NGOs deemed to be risky for those relationships, and contacted some representatives of authorities independently from NGOs for the same reason.
The intractable problem of power can never be entirely resolved, but some steps can be taken. They include working with actors that dedicate time and thought to these issues and being explicit about their existence and possible effects on research results. This can go some way to mitigate, or at least make explicit, some aspects of an unequal relationship, and to contribute to conversations about appropriate new research directions and methods. Recent literature highlights that power must be tackled in reflexive ways in each research encounter.Footnote 36 This view is echoed in literature that discusses ‘gatekeepers’ as more than actors who simply facilitate access, but instead shape and contribute to relationships of power and more, and who are integral to the whole research process.Footnote 37 Thinking of research partners in this way shifts this power relationship into the research ethics domain, and raises the idea that ethical research should also be responsive (where possible) to the needs of research participants. When reflecting on how to shape our research in ways that would respond to the interests of communities, we asked NGO partners – which we considered as part of the power context around communities – if and how we could contribute to their work of supporting and empowering communities, including those beyond the scope of our research. While we were not always able to satisfy all requests – for example, on specific points of national law which were beyond our expertise – we were able to find some ways forward in dialogue. For instance, we identified, in response to community concerns, how international law could be used in the local context to challenge national approaches that did not respond to community views and needs that had been internationally recognized.
Our complex relationships with NGOs and communities also helped us to reflect on the communication of research findings in ways that would, hopefully, be immediately actionable by research partners, even where they addressed their concerns only in part. In some cases, research partners remained sceptical that international law and relevant research findings would be helpful to them. This, too, was an important finding which, without this kind of cooperation, might not have been discovered and contributed to address researcher bias.Footnote 38 In one of our case studies, communities did not wish to discuss benefit sharing as such, as their own conversations focused on environmental impact assessments and consent. Thanks to our flexibility in research methods, we were able to respond to that demand and sharpened the focus of international legal research on the interface between prior assessments, consent, and benefit sharing. Better understanding this interface proved to be a turning point in making a contribution to scholarship in international biodiversity and human rights law.Footnote 39 In addition, this insight contributed to a political sociological research agenda on discursive spaces for local issues in the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD),Footnote 40 as well as reflections on the potential role of community protocols in local empowerment.Footnote 41
Overall, the complexity of power relationships that may affect and shape research in different ways remains difficult to foresee at the research planning or bidding stage, even where due attention is paid to risk and contingency plans.Footnote 42 An explicit and iterative engagement with questions of power, in dialogue with research participants, enables the adjustment of research questions, knowledge exchange approaches, and research methods. Such adjustments, in turn, support research ethics and shape research findings and outreach in ways that might be useful to all research partners.
4.2. Consent
A final practical issue in dealing with power in our research stemmed from the gap that persists between formal institutional ethics procedures and the kinds of iterative ethical decision that need to be taken in empirical research. This is clear from the example of funders’ requirements on written consent, including requirements for benefit sharing from academic research.Footnote 43 Little attention, however, had been paid to benefit sharing from non-commercial research in international law prior to our research.Footnote 44
We did obtain written consent from all our research participants and strongly believe that meaningful consent should be a central part of a conversation where all involved in the research negotiate benefits, methods, and matters around consent, including anonymity.Footnote 45 However, the suitability of a ‘one size fits all’ approach of information pamphlets and consent forms that have obtained prior approval from ethics committees deserves some discussion in light of the iterative ethics considerations we experienced in our research. These considerations include researchers’ evolving understanding of the concrete needs and demands for sharing benefits arising from their research through an ongoing dialogue with all research partners. This led to the realization that such a dialogue should include ethics committees.
The pre-approved forms and information pamphlets, developed in line with funders’ ethical guidance and specific advice, were perfectly suited to some participants, most often representatives of various authorities. This was not always true in community settings, as is revealed in the application of our research methods. Where our method was participant observation, we supplemented this pre-approved approach with oral presentations of our project, followed by time for the community to discuss and decide whether to allow us to observe their meetings as a group. Where we held interviews with individuals, the consent forms and pamphlets often proved off-putting for participants and we again supplemented with dialogue. In some cases, we added new information pamphlets when research partners and other advisers found the language we used inaccessible – our comparative approach was the origin of this challenge as this limited our opportunities to co-develop forms with local actors.Footnote 46
Our experiences with consent forms and the need to place these within a more holistic approach to ethical research also overlapped with the findings of our project on global environmental law. International guidance stresses the iterative nature of seeking consent and its intertwining with benefit sharing.Footnote 47 The second trip to each research site offered important opportunities in that sense, as it allowed us to share interim research results with interested communities and to seek guidance on preferred outputs and formats.Footnote 48 This aligned with the preferred way to share benefits from our own research. We received some positive feedback in this regard. Nevertheless, it was difficult for us to remain in touch in an effective manner with communities in between and after trips, which was another limitation of the research. We relied mainly on partner NGOs as a channel both for ongoing communications with communities and as a guarantor that communities could always get hold of us if needed, which gave more meaning to the right to withdraw from the project. It remains to be seen if this is a viable way to continue the research relationship beyond the life of the project.
Our main finding in attempting to apply the spirit of PAR in a research project involving many different research partners in five different cases is thus that ethical considerations at the research design stage are unlikely to cover all the questions that will arise during actual research. This cannot, in practice, be separated from the application of (and need to adapt) the chosen research methods. These interlinkages draw into question predetermined practices for seeking consent and sharing benefits from academic research, or predetermined research directions. An iterative approach instead is needed to allow researchers to better understand and negotiate these matters in a dialogue with all research partners. Ethics committees and research funders should thus also be involved in, or at least factor into their procedures the need for, these iterative dialogic practices.
5. A SUMMARY OF EXPERIENCES AND REFLECTIONS
The interlinkages between research methods and ethics have not surfaced in the extant literature on global environmental law. Researchers, however, need to be alert to multiple and possibly interconnected power imbalances when legal concepts travel across different levels and sites, as well as to the possible impacts of their own research (and their own biases) on those imbalances.Footnote 49 The central point arising from our experience is the need for iterative approaches to the choice of research methods and ethics, particularly in the context of research at the local level. Not all questions can be answered in prior research designs and formal ethics procedures. An iterative approach can strengthen research design by providing opportunities to enrich and fine-tune research directions and research design to the needs of research participants.
Each research project is unique and will necessarily encounter different obstacles, issues, and opportunities. Our reflections, however, may be of use to other researchers who are considering comparative interdisciplinary approaches for the study of global environmental law. We would thus like to draw attention to what might be termed the living research process.Footnote 50 Equally we would like to underscore the need to discuss trade-offs in designing research in global environmental law, particularly when it is comparative, externally funded, or subject to one-off research ethics advice.
In sum, as scholarship continues to evolve on transnational and global environmental law in particular, this short note recommends explicit reflection on the need for iterative research methods and a critical consideration of research ethics. Such reflection can further enrich the already debated substantive questions about the nature and content of global environmental law and its methodologies.
