Nordal Akerman - Maintaining a Satisfactory Environment: An Agenda for International Environmental Policy

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Maintaining a Satisfactory Environment

Published in cooperation with The Swedish Institute of International Affairs

Maintaining a Satisfactory Environment

An Agenda for International Environmental Policy

Edited by
Nordal kerman

First published 1990 by Westview Press, Inc.

Published 2018 by Routledge
52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

Copyright 1990 Taylor & Francis

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.

Notice:
Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Maintaining a satisfactory environment: an agenda for
international environmental policy / edited by
Nordal kerman
p. cm.--(Westview special studies in West European
politics and society)
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 0-8133-7914-8
1. Environmental policy--International cooperation. I.
kerman, Nordal, 1941- .
HC79.E5M3344 1990 90-46945
363.7--dc20 CIP

ISBN 13: 978-0-367-01463-6 (hbk)

Contents

, Volker von Prittwitz

, Lutz Wicke

, Lars Bergman

, Michel Potier

1. ii

Guide

The background to this book needs little elaboration. Every day now as you open a newspaper you will be hit by at least one report of a new disaster concerning the environment. Incidents of a frightening nature that threaten our health and well-being abound. Cities, countries, and vrtiole regions are promised to be faced with ecological catastrophies in the near future.

Environmental problems have over the last few years come to dominate the political scene, and not too soon either. It seems safe to predict that this will be the issue of the 90s. A manifestly growing awareness that all nations will have to face up to agonizing decisions if the world is to remain reasonably habitable is pushing policies in the direction of international cooperation.

As never before, nations will be forced, by public opinion and by the state of affairs as such, to seek common solutions in order to reduce or remove hazards now threatening virtually every human being. Old formulae of productivity and profits are no longer valid in the face of the real costs of environmental destruction. Thus, the interrelations between natural zones of economic activity on the one hand and national and supranational political organizations on the other need redefining. This will entail foreign policy reorientations that could have interesting consequences.

In recent years much thought has been given to the suitability of creating incentives and disincentives as a means of using the market for protection of the environment. Putting price tags on pollution has belatedly been accepted in most countries. Fixing a value on less tangible factors, a road first travelled in Sweden by professor Erik Dahmn in the late 60s, is still difficult and controversial, nevertheless quite necessary if the price of maintaining a satisfactory environment is to be properly set.

When environmental experts from the two Europes, East and West, gathered at the Swedish Institute of International Affairs in June 1988 to discuss an agenda for saving the environment of the continent there was a series of techniques to consider: regulations versus disincentives; a widened calculation to also cover aspects of culture and aesthetics; market tools such as the bubble concept; environmental investments by one country in another; abatement strategies for acidic depositions; debt-for-nature swaps (like the Wisla project); case studies where special methods are called for; and the need to restructure regional bodies to serve as vehicles for cooperation.

Out of this seminar came a number of interesting papers, five of which have been edited and revised for publication here. Their approach is practical, but they are also quite technical--a factor which is unavoidable as environmental policies deal with complex phenomena. I certainly think that they make a valuable contribution to an ongoing debate and that they will help shape a strategy for politicians to use.

The seminar formed part of the celebrations of the 50th anniversary of the Institute. In choosing the topic of environment we wanted to demonstrate that foreign policy today is a much wider arena than before and that this subject will be of vital concern for any foreign policy institute in the future.

Nordal kerman
Director 1985-88
The Swedish Institute
of International Affairs

1
Several Approaches to the Analysis of International Environmental Policy

Volker von Prittwitz

Introduction

Foreign policy and international relations have traditionally focused on issues such as military force, political power, and economic relations. Facing rapid technological change, new risks and an alteration of value-patterns, we are experiencing the rise of a new issue of international politics: environmental affairs. The systematic analysis of this issue is based on certain approaches, that is, the analysis refers to certain concepts, formulates questions in a systematic way, produces certain criteria for choice of variables and estimation, and forms certain hypotheses. There are six approaches which I consider to be particularly relevant:

• * the discussion about the optimal institutional level of action (levels approach),
• * the foreign environmental policy,
• * the environmental mediation,
• * the international regimes,
• * the structural system, and
• * the global commons approaches.

I will briefly describe these approaches and outline some of their implications for practical environmental policy. The final section contains considerations about how the approaches are interrelated along with conclusions for further research.

The Search for the Optimal Institutional Level of Environmental Policy

The political process always occurs on one car more institutional levels, such as local, regional, national, supranational and global levels. The question is on which level environmental policy should be established and enforced and how environmental activities on different levels can be optimally linked to one another.

The starting point of this discussion is to establish that environmental problems are transnational in nature. This has been emphasized in many studies in which the global dimension and increasing importance of the environmental crisis is stressed. Well-known examples of this "global view" literature are Dennis L. Meadow' Limits to Growth (1972) and the Global 2000 Report to the U.S. President (Council on Environmental Quality 1980). Other early work of this kind stems from Harold and Margaret Sprout (1965) and Lynthon Keith Caldwell (1972, 1973). The establishment that "environmental problems don't stop at national boundaries" has meanwhile become a standard formula in the environmental discussion.

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