Ecoregionalism
This book provides a comprehensive understanding of environmental regionalism at the international level, analyzing the concept and identifying recurring patterns from six in-depth case studies.
While ecoregions or environmental regions are defined on ecological boundaries rather than administrative criteria, ecoregionalism is the idea that regional dynamics should cluster around ecoregions, while ecoregionalization is the tendency of regional dynamics to cluster around ecoregions. Focusing on the international level, this book presents six cases of ecoregional processes from around the world and the regional environmental agreements: two are terrestrial, the Alps and the Andes; two are marine, the Mediterranean Sea and the Baltic Sea; two are related to freshwater ecosystems: the Amu Darya in Central Asia and the Great Lakes in North America. The book analyzes both ecoregional processes focused on the environment, as well as intersectoral ecoregional processes. The case studies are analyzed based on the ecoregional governance framework, developed by the author for this book. Despite the diversity of context, the similarity of the governance system of the six cases is striking. Several recurring patterns have been identified, which may also extend to the subnational level. They are not design principles, but may be taken into consideration for the design or redesign of current and future regional environmental agreements and processes.
This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of environmental politics, natural resource management, spatial planning and international relations.
Jon Marco Church is Associate Professor of Sustainability and Governance at the University of Reims, France. He was previously a Doctoral Fellow at Harvard University, Kennedy School of Government, USA.
Jon Marco Church offers breadth and depth in his critical analysis of regional environmental governance, which is timely given that the majority of international environmental agreements are in fact regional in nature. Building on case studies that appear diverse yet display many common features, Church skillfully combines an interdisciplinary theoretical framework with many years of research and professional involvement in the processes he describes. The design principles offered in his conclusion will provide food for thought to scholars and practitioners alike.
Jrg Balsiger, University of Geneva, Switzerland
Jon Marco Church provides a rich, analytically informed study of the evolving understanding and governance of ecoregions. He conducts 6 comparative focused case studies, and applies Ostroms polyarchy framework to derive design principles for sustainable regional environmental governance.
Peter M. Haas, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, United States
Churchs comparative analysis of the processes and outcomes associated with contemporary ecoregionalism yields myriad insights about the growing number of regional governance arrangements around the globe, through careful examination of 6 case studies, including those focused on seas, mountains, rivers and lakes.
Stacy D. VanDeveer, University of Massachusetts, Boston, United States
This book makes original contributions to scholarly debates about how to define and analyse ecoregions and is essential reading for all those interested in how regional environmental cooperation is structured and functions. Due to the authors thorough and artfully written engagement with core and adjacent literature, the book also serves as an up-to-date critical history on how different disciplines have understood regional politics.
Elana Wilson Rowe, Norwegian Institute of International Affairs, Norway
Until recently, little progress has been made in theorizing or testing questions of scale and scope. Church is one of the few scholars who has been pursuing such work. This book establishes Church at the forefront of the field, extending his ecoregionalism work to encompass a wider array of cases, a richer theoretical framework and a practical bent toward general design principles that can be adapted to particular cases. This is turning into an enormously important focus of scholarship in environmental policy and politics, and Church is ahead of the curve in being there.
William C. Clark, Harvard University, United States
This is a book to return to for many reasons. In marrying a clear and thoughtful conceptual framework with detailed case studies, Jon Marco Church not only makes a valuable contribution to our understanding of how ecoregions are defined, governed and institutionalized, but offers us an approach that has real scale-ability potential for the way we understand both global and local environmental institutional contexts.
Lorraine Elliott, Australian National University, Australia
Ecoregionalism
Analyzing Regional Environmental Agreements and Processes
Jon Marco Church
First published 2020
by Routledge
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Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
2020 Jon Marco Church
The right of Jon Marco Church to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Church, Jon Marco, author.
Title: Ecoregionalism: analyzing regional environmental agreements and processes / Jon Marco Church.
Description: Abingdon, Oxon; New York, NY: Routledge, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2019057198 (print) | LCCN 2019057199 (ebook) | ISBN 9780415711678 (hardback) | ISBN 9781315884448 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Environmental policyInternational cooperation. | RegionalismEnvironmental aspects. | Regional planningEnvironmental aspects.
Classification: LCC GE170 .C488 2020 (print) | LCC GE170 (ebook) | DDC 333.7dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019057198
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019057199
ISBN: 978-0-415-71167-8 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-88444-8 (ebk)
Typeset in Bembo
by Newgen Publishing UK
To Annabelle, the love of my life,
and to Hazel, Emile and Tosca, our beloved children
Contents
PART 1
Identifying ecoregions
PART 2
Analyzing ecoregional governance
PART 3
Comparing ecoregional agreements and processes
As a young graduate in international relations, my first work experience concerned two regional environmental agreements, the Alpine and the Carpathian Conventions. However, despite my studies, not only did I find it challenging to understand what they were about (international treaties? international organizations? large environmental NGOs?), but I also realized that, with all due respect, even my colleagues, who had often worked in this domain for several years, found it difficult to understand this strange phenomenon. I then looked at publications on the subject matter and quickly realized the huge gap there was in the scientific literature. When I enrolled in a doctoral program at the Sorbonne, I initially was reluctant to focus on my professional experience, but Yves Viltard, who supervised my dissertation and to whom I am very grateful, insisted that it was an endeavor worth pursuing. In the meantime, some recent publications contributed to shed some light on the contours and specific aspects of this phenomenon, but an in-depth comprehensive outlook on regional environmental agreements and processes is still missing. So, here I am, several years, a doctoral thesis, and much fieldwork and scholarship later, publishing this overview that, without claiming to be exhaustive, at least presents in a systematic manner what are regional environmental agreements and processes, how they have been studied so far, and what can be considered as significant examples of this phenomenon.
