The tension between trade liberalization and environmental protection has received remarkable attention since the establishment of the WTO. It has been the subject of a wide-ranging debate, and was one of the central themes of the anti-globalization movement. This book explores this debate. It argues that by focusing on the WTO, this debate failed to understand the institutional and discursive complexity in which the trade-environment conflict is embedded. A legal investigation of this nexus requires a framework of inquiry, which is capable of elucidating this complexity - a model of global legal pluralism. This book develops such a model. This pluralistic viewpoint portrays the trade and environment conflict as the product of multiple dilemmas, constituted and negotiated by a myriad of institutional and discursive networks. As such, this conflict cannot be analyzed or understood through one-dimensional models. Viewing the trade-environment conflict through pluralistic lenses yields important practical insights. It means that this conflict cannot be resolved by uniform economic or legal formulas. Dealing with this conflict requires, rather, polycentric and contextual strategy. The empirical part of the book explicates this thesis by examining several global legal domains, ranging from the WTO to "private" transnational regimes such as transnational litigation and the field of international financial law.
"The tension between trade liberalisation and environmental protection has received remarkable attention since the establishment of the WTO. It has been the subject of a wide-ranging debate, and is one of the central themes of the anti-globalisation movement. This book explores that debate. It argues that by focusing on the WTO, the debate has failed to recognise the institutional and discursive complexity in which the trade-environment conflict is embedded. A legal investigation of this nexus requires a framework of inquiry, in which this complexity can be elucidated - a model of global legal pluralism. The first theoretical part of the book (Chapters One and Two) responds to this challenge by developing a pluralistic model, which recognises the trade and environment conflict as the product of multiple dilemmas, constituted and negotiated by a myriad of institutional and discursive networks. As such, this conflict cannot be understood or addressed through one-dimensional models. Viewing the trade-environment conflict through a pluralistic perspective yields important practical insights. It means that this conflict cannot be resolved by uniform economic or legal formulae. Dealing with this conflict requires, rather, polycentric and contextual strategy. The empirical part of the book (Chapters Three to Seven) explicates this thesis by examining several global legal domains, ranging from the WTO to 'private' transnational regimes such as transnational litigation, international construction law and international financial law. This part demonstrates how the different discursive and institutional structures of these domains have influenced the contours of the trade-environment conflict, and considers the policy implications of this diversity from a pro-environmental perspective."--Bloomsbury Publishing.
The tension between trade liberalisation and environmental protection has received remarkable attention since the establishment of the WTO. It has been the subject of a wide-ranging debate, and is one of the central themes of the anti-globalisation movement. This book explores that debate. It argues that by focusing on the WTO, the debate has failed to recognise the institutional and discursive complexity in which the trade-environment conflict is embedded. A legal investigation of this nexus requires a framework of inquiry, in which this complexity can be elucidated - a model of global legal pluralism. The first theoretical part of the book (Chapters One and Two) responds to this challenge by developing a pluralistic model, which recognises the trade and environment conflict as the product of multiple dilemmas, constituted and negotiated by a myriad of institutional and discursive networks. As such, this conflict cannot be understood or addressed through one-dimensional models. Viewing the trade-environment conflict through a pluralistic perspective yields important practical insights. It means that this conflict cannot be resolved by uniform economic or legal formulae. Dealing with this conflict requires, rather, polycentric and contextual strategy. The empirical part of the book (Chapters Three to Seven) explicates this thesis by examining several global legal domains, ranging from the WTO to 'private' transnational regimes such as transnational litigation, international construction law and international financial law. This part demonstrates how the different discursive and institutional structures of these domains have influenced the contours of the trade-environment conflict, and considers the policy implications of this diversity from a pro-environmental perspective.
ÔThis book is a novel, sophisticated, broad ranging and insightful study of the idea of global environmental governance but from a legal dimension and perspective. While recognising that concepts and ideas used to describe governance are generally abstract, vague and slippery, this project brings clarity to the field by being theoretically informed, contextually sensitive and pragmatically circumscribed. Its conclusions and arguments open up a field of inquiry that has to be genuinely interdisciplinary and in that sense has great potential to contribute to a better understanding of environmental themes and issues. This book is destined to become a landmark for legal academics who will write about environmental governance in that its concern is with the global governance of nature rather than a text that uses the environment as a pretext for understanding governance. It is well written, easy and enjoyable to read and while it traverses through diverse bodies of literature it manages to effectively communicate with a variety of scholarly communities.Õ Ð Afshin Akhtarkhavari, Griffith Law School, Australia ÔFourth generation global environmental regulation attempts to address the complex realities of an interconnected environment, global environmental problems and collective regulatory responses. It merits conceptual clarity. Louis KotzŽ reveals the legal contours and content of global environmental governance by chipping away such parts of the conceptual marble block as are not needed. For the environmental lawyer, it is a welcome Ð and much needed Ð process of elimination. This book provides a toolkit for lawyers to engage critically with the extra-legal concept of environmental governance. Its scrutiny and careful analysis contribute meaningfully to the environmental discourse.Õ Ð Christine Voigt, University of Oslo, Norway ÔGlobal Environmental Governance is a truly important book. Drawing on a multitude of disciplines, award-winning environmental law Professor Louis KotzŽ masterfully explains the emerging concept of Òglobal environmental governanceÓ and its elements of globalism, environmental law, regulation, and governance theory. He makes a compelling case that the world has outgrown the ÒsustainabilityÓ model and moved toward this more all-encompassing approach to environmental regulation. This admirable book makes global environmental governance theory understandable and pertinent so environmental leaders, lawyers, and regulators can engage comfortably with this new vision for an ecologically and economically healthy world.Õ Ð George (Rock) Pring, University of Denver Sturm College of Law, US ÔThis book, in examining the relationship between global environmental governance and environmental law, provides an important and timely contribution to the quest to fashion a more viable approach to regulating the relationship between humanity and the environment. While the term ÒgovernanceÓ is much employed in international environmental law scholarship, its conceptual underpinnings have not, on the whole, been adequately addressed in the legal sphere and understanding of the symbiotic relationship between the two areas has suffered as a result. This book makes a welcome start to tackling these issues and, it is to be hoped, will trigger renewed vigour in this socially and legally vital area of inquiry.Õ Ð Karen Morrow, University of Swansea, Wales, UK ÔFor years, scholars of international law and international relations have developed parallel literatures. In Global Environmental Governance, Louis KotzŽ offers a common conceptual, theoretical, and normative ground in the global environmental field. As a skillful lawyer, he dissects terminology, explains core assumptions, and constructs causal chains. But he does not stop there. His shrewd analysis of power and authority, individual incentives and collective action, management and regulation builds a bridge between law and politics as disciplines concerned about what global environmental governance is and how it can be improved.Õ Ð Maria Ivanova, University of Massachusetts, US ÔIn search of shelter from the buffeting blasts of climate change, biodiversity loss, resource depletion, famine and disease, states and public agencies, community representatives, resource users, advocacy networks and citizens huddle together under the vast and varied institutional umbrellas of environmental governance. Louis KotzŽÕs innovative study systematically describes the role of environmental law as the springs, stretchers, ribs and handles of the decision-making umbrellas we so desperately hope will hold firm when they are opened up in times of need.Õ Ð Jamie Benidickson, University of Ottawa, Canada ÔThe concept of Òglobal environmental governanceÓ has been part of the lexicon in accounts of global environmental politics for some time. Yet to date it has escaped comprehensive assessment from a legal perspective. This groundbreaking work fills this gap in the literature. It offers a masterful analysis of the theoretical underpinnings of the environmental governance, and highlights the critical importance of environmental regulation in ensuring that environmental governance lives up to its promise as a means for achieving truly ecologically sustainable development.Õ Ð Tim Stephens, University of Sydney, Australia This timely book brings much-needed clarity to the concept of Ôenvironmental governanceÕ as manifested in the global regulatory domain. The author argues that despite being used as a fashionable term by many Ð including economists, political scientists, environmentalists and, increasingly, lawyers Ð its theoretical contours and conceptual content remain unclear, incoherent, and inconsistent. In addressing this problem, the book begins by describing globalization as a general context of governance. It comprehensively interrogates and clarifies both the governance and global governance concepts, and then explains aspects and components of global environmental governance. Finally it investigates the role of law in global environmental governance. Providing a much-needed definition of environmental governance and global environmental governance, this comprehensive study will appeal to academics and researchers, post-graduate and under-graduate students, intergovernmental organizations such as UNEP, WTO, IUCN, as well as governments and governmental agencies involved with environmental regulation.
Climate Change and the Law is the first scholarly effort to systematically address doctrinal issues related to climate law as an emergent legal discipline. It assembles some of the most recognized experts in the field to identify relevant trends and common themes from a variety of geographic and professional perspectives. In a remarkably short time span, climate change has become deeply embedded in important areas of the law. As a global challenge calling for collective action, climate change has elicited substantial rulemaking at the international plane, percolating through the broader legal system to the regional, national and local levels. More than other areas of law, the normative and practical framework dedicated to climate change has embraced new instruments and softened traditional boundaries between formal and informal, public and private, substantive and procedural; so ubiquitous is the reach of relevant rules nowadays that scholars routinely devote attention to the intersection of climate change and more established fields of legal study, such as international trade law. Climate Change and the Law explores the rich diversity of international, regional, national, sub-national and transnational legal responses to climate change. Is climate law emerging as a new legal discipline? If so, what shared objectives and concepts define it? How does climate law relate to other areas of law? Such questions lie at the heart of this new book, whose thirty chapters cover doctrinal questions as well as a range of thematic and regional case studies. As Christiana Figueres, Executive Secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), states in her preface, these chapters collectively provide a “review of the emergence of a new discipline, its core principles and legal techniques, and its relationship and potential interaction with other disciplines.”
This new and fully updated edition of Principles of International Environmental Law offers a comprehensive and critical account of one of the fastest growing areas of international law: the principles and rules relating to environmental protection. Introducing the reader to the key foundational principles, governance structures and regulatory techniques, Principles of International Environmental Law explores each of the major areas of international environmental regulation through substantive chapters, including climate change, atmospheric protection, oceans and freshwater, biodiversity, chemicals and waste regulation. The ever-increasing overlap with other areas of international law is also explored through examination of the inter-linkages between international environmental law and other areas of international regulation, such as trade, human rights, humanitarian law and investment law. Incorporating the latest developments in treaty and case law for key areas of environmental regulation, this text is an essential reference and textbook for advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students, academics and practitioners of international environmental law.
In international negotiations, the question of the design and the legal form of the negotiated instrument is as complex as it is often controversial. Intended as a read for both practitioners and academics, this book provides a comprehensive treatise of the characteristics, the potential and the limits of nonbinding instruments in international environmental law and governance. An extensive overview and typology of nonbinding instruments as well as several case studies from the areas of fisheries (FAO), hazardous substances (UNEP/FAO) and corporate social responsibility (OECD) provide the material for an in-depth analysis of the role of nonbinding instruments on all levels of governance. The book demonstrates the potential but also highlights the limits of nonbinding instruments in the interplay with customary and treaty law (e.g. UNCLOS, WTO) as bases for interinstitutional linkages and as tools to shape the behaviour of states and private actors. Legitimacy challenges arising from this form of exercise of authority are then discussed in the final chapter, alongside with remedies to address possible concerns.
Tensions between economic interests and environmental protection have assumed crisis proportions in awareness at every level of society. In particular, the World Trade Organization has become entangled in controversies related to legitimacy, democracy, environmental protection, and fragmentation of international law, fuelling a contentious debate on the use (or abuse) of environmental norms at the WTO. To a greater degree than any comparable treatment, this book focuses on the role of the WTO dispute settlement system in addressing trade-environment conflicts. Highlighting the ways in which environmental issues challenge the legitimacy of WTO jurisprudence, it considers such relevant core issues as the following: challenges posed to the WTO by so-called and"linkageand" issues, such as environmental protection, labour, and investment; to what extent the WTO can apply rules of international law (e.g., environmental ones) that are not contained in the WTO agreements; and concerns over the Dispute Settlement System's lack of democratic accountability in matters of great public interest. The study analyses in detail the role of international environmental law in three key WTO cases, namely the Shrimp-Turtle, Hormones and Biotech disputes. This deeply informed and thoughtful book is of special importance for its proposals on how the WTO dispute settlement system can improve its legitimacy while respecting the limits of its mandate. It will be welcomed by international trade attorneys, environmental lawyers, concerned academics and students, and government officials in both trade and environmental policy.
This yearbook contains articles from an international team of contributors. Each section of essays covers a topical subject, focusing mainly on environmental law, and the year-in-review section offers a round-up of world-wide legal developments.
