Suchergebnisse

Despite growing international environmental interdependence, the international system lacks a central authority to foster environmental protection. As a consequence, countries have adopted different policies to reduce international environmental problems. More specifically, costly regulations are not universally supported. In order to explain the success and failure of international environmental regulation, it is necessary to systematically focus on the factors that shape the environmental foreign policy of sovereign states. Since such an approach is missing from the literature, we develop an interest-based explanation of support for international environmental regulation and postulate what impact it should have on state preferences for international environmental regulation. Specifically we apply our framework to two prominent cases of negotiations on atmospheric pollution control, namely, efforts to protect the stratospheric ozone layer and the regulation of transboundary acidification ("acid rain") in Europe.

The theoretical work on supranational authority & democracy tends to treat supranational sites as institutionally similar, but it is argued here that there is wide variation across these sites & such variation poses challenges to democracy. The variation is due not only to the different degrees by which globalization has infiltrated issues areas, but from the relative importance of four challenges to democracy: the poor fit of economic & cultural boundaries with political ones; the increased presence of private authority; the increased importance of technical authority; & the unequal distribution of power across states. David Held's (1995) path-breaking book on cosmopolitan democracy, Democracy and the Global Order, is critiqued for not addressing these challenges to democracy in narrow issue areas. Six alternative criteria for democracy that can be applied to different supranational institutions (transparency, openness to direct participation, quality of discourse, representation, effectiveness, & fairness) are developed & applied to the issue areas of global finance & agriculture. These issue areas exhibit the four challenges to democracy in different ways, but the criteria for assessing democracy are applicable to both. M. Pflum

One of the central concerns of International Relations (IR), as well as International History (IH), is to explain how a given event came to occur. However, the importance and effectiveness of narrative as explanation is often neglected in IR. By focusing on the structure and role of narrative causal accounts, this article argues that drawing a distinction between IR and IH on the basis of their treatment of narrative is senseless. In the course of the discussion, a number of standard philosophical distinctions underpinning mainstream IR are challenged: in particular, reasons and causes, understanding and explanation, history and social science, and history and theory. It contends that the historical mode of knowledge production is indispensable to IR in addressing its substantive issues. However, it also warns that if IR is to take advantage of history in this way, it should also take seriously the epistemological and political critique of history and the narrative mode of representation. It ends by taking a critical glance at the works of Hollis and Smith, Lebow, and Edkins, and identifies a number of important meta-historical questions that need to be addressed in order to deepen our understanding of our ways of knowing world politics.

In an increasingly integrated world where political and economic issues are deeply intertwined, the regulation of international business activity raises complex problems in international law. The existence of the multinational corporation, which is possessed of multiple identities and therefore subject to the jurisdiction of both "home" nations, where it is headquartered, and "host" nations, where its subsidiaries are located, makes the potentiality of jurisdictional disputes among nations particularly acute. While attempts to apply United States law to American foreign subsidiaries virtually ensures conflicts among jurisdictions, excusing subsidiaries from compliance with domestic law could seriously undermine comprehensive regulatory activity. It could also provide a substantial incentive for companies to shift operations abroad so as to escape U.S. jurisdiction altogether.

AbstractThe continuous transfer of authority from the national sphere to inter-governmental organizations gives rise to an increasing risk that States may be mandated by their obligations under these organizations to take measures that are inconsistent with their obligations under International Human Rights Law. Drawing on the approaches of various international, regional and national jurisdictions, this article explores two possible models for restructuring International Law that could ensure that human rights obligations remain effective. The 'international constitutional' approach would ensure that human rights are enshrined within the 'constitutional' instruments of IGOs, preventing incompatible rules from emerging. The 'parochial' approach would ensure that human rights as protected at the national or regional level would take precedence over conflicting international obligations.

This article relates the effectiveness of the European Union's (EU) effectiveness to its international actorness in negotiations on international food standards taking place in the Codex Alimentarius Commission (CAC). Actorness is taken to result from EU competence, preference homogeneity and processes of socialisation among EU Member State representatives. In the 2009 negotiations on growth promoters for livestock, whose use the EU opposes, the Commission took the lead. It was trusted and supported by the EU Member States, but its dominant role resulted in them being rather passive. As a result, the EU's potential to negotiate effectively in the CAC was not used in its full potential.

Complex adaptive systems are a special kind of self-organizing system with emergent properties and adaptive capacity in response to changing external conditions. In this article, we investigate the proposition that international environmental law, as a network of treaties and institutions, exhibits some key characteristics of a complex adaptive system. This proposition is premised on the scientific understanding that the Earth system displays properties of a complex adaptive system. If so, international environmental law, as a control system, may benefit from the insights gained and from being modelled in ways more appropriately aligned with the functioning of the Earth system itself. In this exploratory review, we found evidence suggesting that international environmental law is a complex system where treaties and institutions self-organize and exhibit emergent properties. Furthermore, we contend that international environmental law as a whole is adapting to exogenous changes through an institutional process akin to natural selection in biological evolution. However, the adequacy of the direction and rate of adaptation for the purpose of safeguarding the integrity of Earth's life-support system is questioned. This paper concludes with an emphasis on the need for system-level interventions to steer the direction of self-organization while maintaining institutional diversity. This recommendation stands in contrast to the reductionist approach to institutional fragmentation and aims at embracing the existing complexity in international environmental law. Adapted from the source document.