Implementing International Environmental Agreements: The Case of the Wadden Sea

It has been a feature of the past 30 years or so that individual sovereign states have been increasingly willing to partially set aside their own interests in favour of international treaties on pollution control and wildlife protection. It is the political will of the government signatories to such agreements that is the key to successful implementation as that political will provides the legitimate enforceable authority that is necessary to ensure compliance. This paper examines a trilateral agreement made by the Governments of Denmark, Germany and Holland for the protection and management of the Wadden Sea—one of Europe's most important wildlife sites. The examination of that agreement explores the key mechanisms used for its implementation and, in the case of the Wadden Sea, those mechanisms include the operation of key European Union environmental Directives. The paper finds major differences in approach and application of the Birds, Habitats and Environmental Impact Assessment Directives across the Wadden Sea region and argues that these differences undermine the trilateral agreements made by the three governments.     

The European contribution to global environmental governance

The European Union has become an increasingly central player in international environmental politics. Its role, especially as a protagonist to the United States, has been highlighted by the way in which it successfully led the campaign for ratification of the Kyoto Protocol. The 2005 UK presidency has made climate change one of its twin priorities along with African development, and it is with this in mind that the article discusses the way in which the Union can be considered an international environmental actor in its own right and the various contributions that it makes to global environmental governance. While the EU is well known as a trade actor the complexities of its role as an environmental actor, operating under shared competence between the member states and the Community, are less well understood. Despite the inherent difficulties it has been surprisingly effective, although in areas such as climate change there is a need for strong presidential leadership.
The EU's most evident field of activity has concerned the many multilateral environmental agreements in which it has come to play a leading role. However, this does not exhaust its contribution to global environmental governance that extends to the dissemination of norms and the incorporation of partners in its accession and neighbourhood policies. Sustainable development is also a key area of internal and external Union endeavour at the WTO and elsewhere, although there are continuing contradictions arising from its agricultural and fisheries policies. Finally, the Union's credibility will rest upon its ability to implement its environmental commitments and this is nowhere more evident than in its new emissions trading system. This is the centrepiece of the EU's commitment to the Kyoto Protocol and it is the need to co-ordinate the Union's diplomacy in the extension of the climate change regime, to include the United States and the developing countries, that the UK presidency must address.     

The environmental aspects of reterritorialization: Environmental facets of Israeli–Arab agreements

Reterritorialization processes change the demarcation and function of boundaries and create new realms of authority. As political and natural boundaries rarely coincide, such processes increase the discrepancies between spheres of control and natural systems, thereby increasing the externalization of environmental problems and raising the transaction costs of addressing them. The actual environmental implications of reterritorialization processes are a function of both the direct barrier effects of boundaries and the role of boundaries as separators between management regimes. In contrast to environmental agreements, which focus on a very limited set of issues, agreements that are negotiated as part of reterritorialization processes may address a wide array of environmental issues. This paper asks which environmental issues are addressed in such agreements, and what are the factors that affect the range of issues that are addressed, and the extent to which they are addressed. To this end, the three agreements signed between Israel and her neighbors, Egypt, Jordan and the Palestinians, are analyzed. This analysis shows that the issues that tend to be addressed are either high profile issues (such as water in the Middle East) or those that do not impinge on ‘high politics’. This finding suggests that there is a latent contradiction between political and environmental considerations in negotiating such agreements. While management regime effects are, arguably, more important than direct barrier effects from an environmental perspective, they are largely viewed as internal issues, and hence they are not likely to be addressed in such agreements.     

Joint Implementation and Forestry Projects: Conceptual and Operational Fallacies

The Framework Convention on Climate Change addressing the problem of global warming at the international level, was signed in 1992. A protocol to the convention, including emission limitation or reduction commitments, was recently adopted. Joint implementation (JI), in any of its various forms, constitutes one of the mechanisms for reducing overall greenhouse gas emissions. The basic rationale for JI is to achieve the greatest global environmental benefits for the least cost. JI can in principle be a useful instrument in implementing environmental agreements. In this article, the authors argue that JI raises several issues of concern in relation to the realization of different aspects of sustainable development. More specifically, in the forestry sector, JI often seems to conflict with local and global environmental priorities. Moreover, the basic premiss on which JI forestry projects are predicated, namely the carbon sequestration potential, is not borne out by available scientific date. In the long term, such projects have a very limited capacity for carbon sequestration considering that woody biomass eventually decays or burns.     

海外中国公民领事保护的法律依据研究——兼评《领事工作条例》（征求意见稿）

论文分析阐述了海外中国公民领事保护的内涵与法律依据以及目前海外中国公民领事保护的法律依据之缺陷,并对海外中国公民领事保护的法律依据之完善,有针对性地提出了几点建议：修正《维也纳领事关系公约》的名称和序言并专辟＂领事保护＂一章;拟定中外双边领事条约（协定）文本模式并点面结合地拓宽其覆盖面;将海外中国公民权益保护提升至宪法层面并制定统一规范的单行法;从＂界定海外中国公民领事保护、增强条文明确性和可操作性及建立问责制度＂等方面弥补《意见稿》之不足。     

‘An Obstacle,though not a Barrier’: the Role of International Law in Security Planning during the Pax Britannica

This article explores the role of international law in nineteenth-century British security planning, arguing that statesmen believed law could only influence state conduct rather than determine outcomes. As a result, statesmen crafted agreements to exploit the possibilities of international law while recognising its limitations. The article explores the functions of law, providing examples of how diplomats employed law to increase predictability in interstate relations, signal national interests, and strengthen mutual interests between countries. However, the role of war in the international legal system exposed flawed assumptions about the future of war, limiting the effectiveness of law.     

Contestability ‘theory’, its links with Australia’s competition policy,and recent international trade and investment agreements

This article examines how contestable market theory (contestability) has come to reconfigure the economic and regulatory concept of competition in order to enhance the compatibility of Australia’s economy with international trade and investment agreements. Australia has recently negotiated and signed a raft of bilateral, plurilateral and regional agreements, including the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement and the Australia–China Free Trade Agreement. In order to ensure that Australia meets its obligations and commitments to these agreements, two key advisory bodies—the Harper Panel on Competition Policy Review and the Financial System Inquiry—made recommendations, the majority of which were accepted by the government, to ready Australia’s competition governance and economic policy for greater global integration. Such impact is dependent on, among other things, how domestic competition policy meshes with the free market ideology underpinning such international agreements, which favours the breakdown of barriers to markets. Less well known is the role of contestability in radicalising ideology as it countenances monopolisation and privatisation in the guise of market access by justifying the substitution of actual competition with the mere threat of competition. The article concludes that the monopoly power of transnational corporations will be enhanced through the acquiescence of governments to the new governance regime of the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement, which, supported by domestic policy, is set to redraw competition policy in the light of contestability theory.     

Negotiated Agreements,Indigenous Peoples and Extractive Industry in the Salar de Atacama,Chile: When Is an Agreement More than a Contract?

While acknowledging advances in legal recognition of Indigenous rights, much of the research literature positions negotiated agreements between Indigenous peoples and corporations simply as ‘neoliberal technology’ that gives the appearance of Indigenous consent while allowing exploitation to continue. This analysis is flawed in considering agreements as discrete, stand-alone phenomena. It ignores the possibility that Indigenous peoples may use agreements as part of broader strategies to achieve control over extractive industry activity and to secure a share of ‘development’ benefits — strategies that involve selective engagement with the state. This article supports its argument by locating an agreement between the Chilean lithium mining company, Albemarle, and the Council of Atacameño Peoples within a broad and sustained strategy by Atacameño people to address the negative impacts of mining in the Salar de Atacama, Chile, while securing its economic benefits. This strategy includes using the agreement to voice Atacameño territorial claims and environmental concerns to the state, and to insist that the state lives up to its responsibilities. The analysis leads to a fuller appreciation of the agency exercised by Indigenous peoples in dealing with the sustained expansion of extractive activity on their territories, and a more nuanced understanding of negotiated agreements between Indigenous peoples and mining corporations and between Indigenous people and the state.     

Trade,culture and the European Union cultural exception

ABSTRACT

The article examines how the European Union has addressed the ‘trade and culture debate’ in its international trade agreements. From a cultural exception approach based on an attempt to detach culture from trade provisions, the European Union economic agreements seem to evolve to a broader and more holistic position aiming to promote cultural exchanges through cooperation, while still safeguarding policy space in cultural matters through its traditional cultural exception. The article provides an overview of the European positions to defend the specificity of the audio-visual services sector at the multilateral (World Trade Organization Agreements), regional and bilateral levels. It also examines how the implementation of the 2005 UNESCO Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions has led the European Union to negotiate cultural cooperation provisions in parallel to some of its recent bilateral and regional trade agreements and the way this Convention may impact the understanding of the ‘trade and culture debate’.     

Australia's embrace of investor state dispute settlement: a challenge to the social contract ideal?

This paper explores the origins of investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) treaties and their implications for the Australian social contract. This analysis includes how and why ISDS emerged in NAFTA, was rebuffed with the failure of the Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI), and became incorporated into most subsequent bilateral US trade and investment agreements. The paper considers Australia's exposure to ISDS—first through using it in bilateral investment agreements in nations with inadequate governance mechanisms to support the rule of law, then turning against it when a multinational tobacco company tried to use the mechanism to overturn scientifically endorsed, democratically approved and constitutionally validated tobacco plain packaging measures. The paper concludes by exploring the hypothesis that an alternative governance vision can be achieved in which the system of investment arbitration and trade law is made coherent with presumptively more democratically legitimate normative systems such as constitutional and international law.     

Scale, Sovereignty, and Strategy in Environmental Governance

Close examination of the scalar politics of environmental organizations engaged in contesting the terms of neoliberal globalization highlights four limitations of current theorizations of scale in radical geography. First, this body of work has paid little attention to environmental NGOs and movements as important actors in scalar politics. This is not only an empirical gap, but a theoretical one: taking environmental actors and issues into account requires rethinking the ontologies and dynamics in scale theory. Second, recent attention to social reproduction in scale debates must be extended to the reproduction of environmental conditions. Third, sharp analytical distinctions between scalar structuration and the production of nature are untenable and reproduce a culture/nature dualism. Fourth, sharp distinctions between politics within or about established scales, versus politics among scales, are unstable and miss the precise strategies pursued in some politics of scale. These arguments are illustrated and explored via case material drawn from current struggles over efforts to define environmental governance as a form of regulatory expropriation in international trade agreements.     

Voluntary Environmental Programs: A Canadian Perspective

In light of the increasing number of environmental problems necessitating government's attention and the limited scope and budget for addressing these issues, environmental protection has, and continues to evolve as more flexible approaches to regulation are being sought and embraced by governments throughout the world. Voluntary environmental programs (VEPs) are a pragmatic response by both governments and business to find a more flexible way to protect the environment. We discuss the theoretical motivations for firms to adopt VEPs in general and examine Canada's experience with three types of VEPs, public, negotiated, and unilateral agreements, to assess whether the motivating factors are present. We then argue that the institutional, political, and regulatory framework governing environmental policy in Canada does not provide the conditions necessary to effectively promote superior corporate environmental protection across jurisdictions. Despite the lack of government‐directed VEPs, there has been considerable interest by both the private sector and civil society who have taken the lead by developing unilateral agreements. Using existing literature and our current research, we examine the factors that motivate firms in Canada to participate in unilateral agreements and the characteristics of firms with the higher environmental performance and suggest some policy implications.     

全球化时代国际劳务移民治理析论

论文基于联合国、国际劳工组织、国际移民组织等机构的数据,重点从国家、地区及多边三个层面,对国际社会有关劳务移民的国际合作以及移民工人权益保护的治理实践进行考察,并对于未来全球劳务移民治理发展趋向加以展望。在国家层面,各国政府通过建立有关劳务移民的法律框架,推动国家间协议以及参与多边体系治理合作等方式维护移民工人权益。在地区层面,在区域一体化进程中,正式区域性组织和非正式机制,积极推动区域内有关劳务移民问题的对话、协商和合作。在全球层面,国际上有关劳务移民的国际公约及法律文书代表着多边倡议,国际劳工组织也致力于政策制定以实现所有移民工人利益的最大化。全球劳动力的流动是全球化未完成的事业。随着当今国际迁移的性质和组成日益复杂,移民治理过程中的国际合作与移民工人的保护有待进一步加强。     

Environmental science, sustainability and politics

Research evidence and pleas that humans are undermining their own survival on a robust and unforgiving planet seem to be falling on deaf ears. The drive for economic and military security remains more powerful than the evidence that both of these objectives are being undermined by environmental damage, social disruption, unjust treatment and forced migration. Yet the signs are growing that environmentally and socially sound futures may be vital prerequisites for economic and military stability. So, at the heart of multi-nationalism, sustainable development is beginning to be recognized as a crucial element in reliable international agreements. The consequence of all this is that environmental science has become highly political, and geographers need to recognize and work within an expanding political process. Examples of new forms of governing via sustainability science for sustainable futures are offered in the latter part of the paper, especially at local government level. The antagonistic pressures of established power and economic hegemony are never far away. Indeed, the confirmation of these established patterns of power still pervades the politics of environmental science. But it is possible that these antagonistic political frameworks are beginning to be transcended by the more influential aspects of sustainability partnerships incorporating new arrangements between government, private capital and civil associations. These partnerships will not be easy to create, for they criss-cross boundaries of familiarity and rules of operation. But geographers can play a critical role in helping to shape them and assess the best circumstances for ensuring their success.     

USES OF GAME THEORY TO EXPLAIN THE SALT PROCESS

Negotiations in international relations must be analyzed not only in terms of the substance of policy which is of relevance to the negotiating process, but also with regard to the negotiating process itself. This paper focuses on the negotiating process leading up to the SALT I agreements of 1972. Through the insights of game theory we can better understand the difficulties inherent in reaching accords in nuclear arms negotiations.     

Trade unions,the Australian Labor Party and the Trade–Labour Rights Debate

This paper examines the Australian trade union movement's campaign to convince the Australian Labor Party (ALP) to support the inclusion of core labour standards in international trade agreements. Despite historical affiliations, the Australian union movement has been unsuccessful in its attempts to influence the ALP. In contrast, the US union movement has convinced both the Republican Party and the Democratic Party to accept that core labour standards should be a part of the trade negotiating agenda. The reasons for the US unions' success on this issue are examined within the context of the changing relationship between the respective union movements and their traditional parliamentary allies. The need for Australian unions to examine and reassess their strategies by drawing lessons from the US experience, including the possibility of a changed relationship with the ALP, is discussed.     

Water quality in international river basins

The major issue of pollution control in water quality management is too often postponed or neglected in treaties concerning international river basins. Deterioration of transboundary waters cannot be dealt with unilaterally, and is often treated by the affected parties as secondary to the primary goal of economic development, even in settings conducive to high levels of pollution. This frequently results in environmental crises.This paper focuses on the way in which water quality is addressed in seven selected international basin accords. A framework for the structured comparisons of these basins is presented, based on the following four major forces that were found to influence the extent to which pollution issues were encompassed within the accords: flash-points, financial capacities, globalization/regionalization, and political windows of opportunity.The extent to which the above forces were mobilized to influence the water quality aspects of the treaties that have been studied, varies in accordance with: the severity of the water quality problem in relation to the basins' physical and human settings; the level of competitive uses of basin waters; the level of economic development of each riparian and the co-basin states as a whole; the locational setting and political power asymmetry among riparian states; and whether or not the institutions or agreements are basin-wide. The forces identified in this study are meant to provide some guidance to the factors conducive to failure or success.     

Kuwait,Political Violence and the Syrian War

Kuwait’s support of civilians in war-torn Syria has been commended by the international community. In addition, the Gulf state has joined US-led coalitions against the ‘Islamic State’ and affirmed many international agreements designed to choke off international assistance to militias operating in Syria. In 2015, Kuwait paid a heavy price for its involvement, becoming a victim of IS-affiliated terrorism. Whilst this suggests that Kuwait’s position on radical Islamist movements involved in the Syrian conflict is clear cut, this article will argue that Kuwait’s government has had to balance this official position against domestic support for elements of the radical Islamist opposition in Syria. These cross-cutting tensions were underscored by the US designation of the state as the ‘epicentre’ of private fund raising for militias in Syria. To explore these contradictions, this article will analyse Kuwait’s engagement with the Syrian war, its new anti-terror legislation and the tensions between the official and unofficial views on support for foreign militias. This analysis will highlight the challenges the Kuwait government has faced in addressing unofficial Kuwaiti engagement with the radical Islamist opposition in Syria.     

Wildlife trade, sanctions and compliance: lessons from the CITES regime

The international community possesses a powerful tool to control wildlife trade—the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES). For over 20 years it has used trade sanctions as the cornerstone of a unique compliance system that has evolved through practice and secondary rules. This article discusses the mechanisms through which sanctions are imposed and assesses their effectiveness. The CITES compliance system has evolved largely in isolation from other environmental treaties, yet there are lessons that could be learned by other trade-related agreements that are in the process of developing their mechanisms to address non-compliance. CITES is particularly dependent on a sanctions-based approach because of the lack of funds to support capacity building. The article demonstrates through the national legislation project how sanctions used to back-up technical assistance can indirectly build capacity to implement the treaty. It concludes by arguing that guidelines on compliance currently under negotiation risk undermining the CITES compliance system and eroding the gains of the last three decades.     

Beyond the Australasian Single Aviation Market

This paper notes the emergence of the Single Aviation Market for Australia and New Zealand and considers issues relating to future external relationships facing both countries and their airlines as they move to harmonise their international aviation policies and border controls. In the Asia Pacific region, there is a range of views regarding the shape and pace of liberalisation of bilateral air service agreements. Will other countries follow the Australia-New Zealand move? Will the Australia-New Zealand agreement be widened to include others?