SIDS and environmental governance in the Anthropocene -- Thematic foundations of Caribbean environmental governance -- Sustainable tourism governance and Caribbean SIDS -- Climate change governance and Caribbean SIDS -- Global marine and ocean governance, and Caribbean SIDS -- Renewable energy and energy security, and Caribbean SIDS -- Caribbean cultural and natural heritage governance -- The global trade-environment nexus and Caribbean environmental governance -- Key issues and emerging trends in Caribbean environmental governance and earth system governance research.
AbstractSmall Island Developing States (SIDS) ambitiously pursue their development agendas while facing resource and governance constraints. Global processes like the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) include governance norms with the potential to influence national institutional arrangements and policy. National implementation processes are dynamic and contest, reinterpret, and/or apply external norms in varied ways. Although much of the success in SDG implementation depends on understanding these dynamic processes, surprisingly, the question has received little scholarly attention. This study explores the power of SDGs to act as a broker for sustainability governance. First, I construct a framework of five governance norms with nine implementation pathways that characterise the SDG governance. Second, using national reports to the United Nations, I provide evidence of how SIDS applied this framework in the years immediately following the launch of the Agenda 2030. In most cases, although recognising their value, states had not incorporated the implementation pathways. The findings suggest that greater attention should be given to governance capacity‐building to support SIDS‐led sustainable development national agendas. This study contributes to discourses on the ability of global processes to improve national governance, to the constructivists' norm penetration debates, and to debates and policy on SDGs and governance.
AbstractGlobal environmental architectures have the potential to reduce inequalities, however, legal, and political procedures and structures may also increase injustices and disempowerment. Multilateral environmental agreements create large regimes over some of the most expansive planetary systems. Contracting states list the purposes, motivations and considerations that led them to conclude legally binding agreements in treaty preambles that are an interpretive tool, a declaration of context, motivation, and intent of the contracting states or parties. This study produces an environmental justice conceptual framework that references the scholarship on environmental justice and environmental governance, outlines the elements required to introduce environmental justice debates into treaty preambles, and gives an example of its application to determine whether the preambles include justice concepts. The preambles selected are from treaties with broad geographic and subject matter scope: they regulate oceans, climate, and biodiversity, the transport of waste, mercury pollution, migratory and endangered species, and wetlands. Using the environmental justice conceptual framework, the study found a justice gap between how justice is addressed in justice debates and literatures and the stated intent of the contracting parties in the preambles. The conclusions support the literature that argues that multilateral environmental agreements (MEAs) are ahistorical as regards the moral responsibility that lies at the heart of the definitions of justice.
Not all international and regional courts survive the test of time. There is more literature on those that did as compared with those that failed. The Caribbean Court of Justice (CCJ) created in 2001 is today at a juncture where the usefulness and longevity of the Court sometimes comes into question by legal theorists and legal practitioners given the apparent lentitude of political adhesion to its appellate jurisdiction by some regional states. There has been substantial debate in the region over the readiness of the region to embrace the Court's appellate jurisdiction, it centres on perceptions and debates around legitimacy, representativeness, bias, independence and indigenous jurisprudence. To understand and contextualise the apparent difficulties that this young court faces, this article puts these debates within the wider international relations contexts of regionalism and the growth and demise of regional and international courts. Within this context, four factors contribute to our understanding of the value and success, or lack thereof, of regional courts: the nature of their historical evolution; adverse public opinion on their legitimacy; the extent to which powerful states do not feel threatened by them and allow their development and the economic and political contexts within which they develop.
Accountability is part of the good governance of institutions and regimes. The subject of this paper is nature of accountability in the climate change governance relationships. Context matters for understanding related governance dynamics and this paper presents the findings of research on accountability in climate governance in Caribbean SIDS over the last 18 years. It identified the Caribbean climate governance agents at the regional and local scales. It created an accountability framework that examined two levels (internal/external accountability); four accountability relationships (normative, relational, decision and behavioural) and four accountability mechanisms or processes: certification, monitoring, participation by stakeholders in the overseeing of projects and self-reporting. It analysed how far accountability was appreciated and applied within institutions and in relationships between regional institutions, international partners, government agencies, non-governmental organisations and the private sector to manage climate change adaptation and mitigation. The study found that accountability was valued as a good governance principle but the mechanisms to operationalise accountability were lacking in practice. The absence of structured processes was attributed to the economic and governance contexts of these SIDS. Governance actors had limited resources for governance safeguards. The study recommends processes to strengthen the "culture of governance" within the Caribbean as a whole and specifically within state agencies and civil society.
The Institute of International Relations (IIR) held the SIDS +20 Forum in June 2013. In keeping with the Institute's mandate and vision, it brought together regional academics, non governmental organisations and policy makers to discuss the issues relevant to Small Island Developing States in the context of the regional preparations for the Third International Conference on SIDS (SIDS+20) then taking place in the three SIDS regions: Pacific, Caribbean and Atlantic and Indian Oceans, Mediterranean and South China Seas (AIMS) regions. The SIDS +20 Conference will be held in Samoa in September 2014. It marks an evolution in the international understanding of and engagement with the issues of small states and offers a unique opportunity to SIDS to chart their own development course and the way in which the global community can engage with these islands in the medium and long term.New partnerships, the new focus on their large marine space and the value of unique marine ecosystems and a need to move away from dependence on dwindling development aid are more recent additions to the traditional SIDS debates on development and vulnerability. This piece traces the evolution of the international agenda on SIDS from the First International Conference held in Barbados in 1994 right up to the International Conference on Sustainable Development of 2012 which had as one important outcome the call for the 2014 Third SIDS Conference. This paper sets the context for a selection of papers presented at the IIR Forum which follow and ends with a reflection on whether this latest international conference and attempt to elicit international support for these weak states will go farther than earlier attempts on the same theme.
Abstract The structural elements of global environmental governance are notoriously difficult to change and align with the needs of a rapidly deteriorating earth system. This, however, only increases the need to focus on the role of agency in this context. This paper does so by taking stock of what we know about agency in relation to International Environmental Agreements (IEAs) and suggests directions for future research. We contribute a conceptual framework to enable the mapping of research on agency related to IEAs and advance more systematic study of agency in this context. The framework differentiates between the negotiation of IEAs, their implementation and outcomes, and includes agency-related and context-related drivers of agency in these processes. We subsequently review articles published between 2003 and 2020 in the journal International Environmental Agreements (as one of the few journals exclusively focusing on IEAs) dealing with actors' agency and analyse how these articles address agency in the context of IEAs. We conclude firstly by identifying avenues for how further research can fill important gaps, including a need for increased transparency on the methods and theories used in articles, and more comparative research particularly on agency dynamics in implementation; and secondly by highlighting important pointers for policy-makers including the need to re-evaluate the role of national sovereignty and address the forces that counteract equality and justice. Key lessons include the need to improve global south countries' capacity to influence IEA negotiations (input legitimacy), the central role of public and peer pressure on countries to implement commitments, the impact of multilevel governance dynamics and the importance of ensuring that IEAs benefit local communities (output legitimacy).
AbstractThe structural elements of global environmental governance are notoriously difficult to change and align with the needs of a rapidly deteriorating earth system. This, however, only increases the need to focus on the role of agency in this context. This paper does so by taking stock of what we know about agency in relation to International Environmental Agreements (IEAs) and suggests directions for future research. We contribute a conceptual framework to enable the mapping of research on agency related to IEAs and advance more systematic study of agency in this context. The framework differentiates between the negotiation of IEAs, their implementation and outcomes, and includes agency-related and context-related drivers of agency in these processes. We subsequently review articles published between 2003 and 2020 in the journal International Environmental Agreements (as one of the few journals exclusively focusing on IEAs) dealing with actors' agency and analyse how these articles address agency in the context of IEAs. We conclude firstly by identifying avenues for how further research can fill important gaps, including a need for increased transparency on the methods and theories used in articles, and more comparative research particularly on agency dynamics in implementation; and secondly by highlighting important pointers for policy-makers including the need to re-evaluate the role of national sovereignty and address the forces that counteract equality and justice. Key lessons include the need to improve global south countries' capacity to influence IEA negotiations (input legitimacy), the central role of public and peer pressure on countries to implement commitments, the impact of multilevel governance dynamics and the importance of ensuring that IEAs benefit local communities (output legitimacy).
− The role of the state as an agent of earth system governance has become more complex, contingent, and interdependent. − Although participatory and collaborative processes have contributed to more effective, equitable, and legitimate environmental governance outcomes in some instances, analyses of these processes should be situated within a broader governance perspective, which recasts questions of policy change around questions of power and justice. −The complexity and normative aspects of agency in earth system governance requires new forms of policy evaluation that account for social impacts and the ability of governance systems to adapt. − Many of the core analytical concepts in ESG–Agency scholarship, such as agency, power, authority, and accountability, remain under-theorized. In addition, some types of actors, including women, labor, non-human agents, those who work against earth system governance, and many voices from the Global South, remain largely hidden. − ESG–Agency scholars need to develop research projects and collaborations in understudied regions while also recruiting and supporting scholars in those regions to engage with this research agenda.
Solar geoengineering is gaining prominence in climate change debates as an issue worth studying; for some it is even a potential future policy option. We argue here against this increasing normalization of solar geoengineering as a speculative part of the climate policy portfolio. We contend, in particular, that solar geoengineering at planetary scale is not governable in a globally inclusive and just manner within the current international political system. We therefore call upon governments and the United Nations to take immediate and effective political control over the development of solar geoengineering technologies.Specifically, we advocate for an International Non-Use Agreement on Solar Geoengineering and outline the core elements of this proposal.
− Agency is one of five core analytical problems in the Earth System Governance (ESG) Project's research framework, which offers a unique approach to the study of environmental governance. − Agency in Earth System Governance draws lessons from ESG–Agency research through a systematic review of 322 peer-reviewed journal articles published between 2008 and 2016 and contained in the ESG–Agency Harvesting Database.− ESG–Agency research draws on diverse disciplinary perspectives with distinct clusters of scholars rooted in the fields of global environmental politics, policy studies, and socio-ecological systems. − Collectively, the chapters in Agency in Earth System Governance provide an accessible synthesis of some of the field's major questions and debates and a state-of-the-art understanding of how diverse actors engage with and exercise authority in environmental governance.
