Global Environmental Organizations Research Articles

Using economics in conservation practice: Insights from a global environmental organization

AbstractIdentifying and implementing successful strategies to conserve nature is a central goal of environmental practitioners. Conservation tools increasingly have an economic rationale to them, expanding the array of means available to trigger environmental actions. Missing is a comprehensive list of economic and financial instruments for conservation practitioners that highlights their current applicability, context, and relative success. To address this gap, we assembled such a list and surveyed units of The Nature Conservancy, a global conservation organization, to understand how these instruments are being used in varied contexts. We find that the majority of respondents have used economic or financial instruments, with the most common types being markets and price premiums, investments and funds, and payments for ecosystem services. A variety of factors influence the choice of instruments, including stakeholder interests, experience, and replication possibilities. Institutional constraints act as a significant barrier to implementation. These findings identify and offer insights on an expanded set of instruments that the non‐profit conservation sector can use, replicate, and develop to meet conservation goals.

A UN Specialized Agency for the Environment

The issue, international organization for the protection of the environment perhaps more than those in any other area of international law, is characterized by the contestation of the policies and aspirations of developing and industrialized countries. The discussions which preceded the 1972 Stockholm Conference concerned partly the type of international institutional arrangement required for addressing the environmental problems. As regards the institutional reforms with respect to international environmental governance (IEG), the main question is whether to focus on the existing global institution, i.e. UNEP, or to create a new functional international organization. After almost five decades of existence, turning UNEP into a ‘specialized agency’ within the UN system is a reasonable move. It would meet the long-felt need to elevate its status and equip it with the necessary competence and financial stability for the demanding task it should have as an efficient global environmental organization.

Opinion And Attitudes Towards Environmental Problems of Environmental Health Pre-License Program’s Students in Turkey

Çevre sorunlarına karşı tutum ve davranışlarını belirlemeye yönelik 21 sorudan oluşan 5’li Likert tipi bir anket kullanılmıştır. Elde edilen tutum puanları ve sorulara verilen cevaplar mezun olduğu okul, yaşadığı yer, ebeveynlerin eğitim durumu, gelir düzeyi ve daha önce çevre ile ilgili ders alıp – almamış olma durumuna bağlı olarak karşılaştırılmıştır. Bu çalışma Türkiye’de Çevre Sağlığı Teknikeri yetiştiren Acıbadem, Adnan Menderes, Hakkâri, Iğdır ve Sinop Üniversitelerine bağlı Sağlık Hizmetleri Meslek Yüksek Okullarında (SHMYO) 2015-2016 öğretim yılında eğitim gören 108’i bayan, 107’si erkek ve bunların 128’i birinci 95’i ikinci sınıf toplam 223 öğrenci ile gerçekleştirilmiştir. Okullardan biri vakıf (Acıbadem SHMYO), diğer dördü devlet üniversitesine bağlı olup; Sinop ve Iğdır SHMYO’larda hem normal öğretim hem de ikinci öğretimde eğitim verilmektedir. Toplam tutum puanı 58- 105 arasında değişmekte olup ortalama tutum puanı 83,96 olarak bulunmuştur. Cinsiyete bağlı tutum puanın bayanlar lehine anlamlı şekilde farklı olduğu (p< ,05) ankete katılan okulların tutum puanı ortalamalarına bakıldığında ise Aydın SHMYO 87.21 ile en yüksek ve ortalamanın üstünde tek okul olduğu belirlenmiştir. Çevre sağlığı teknikerliği öğrencileri ankette yer alan sorunlardan ozon tabakasında meydana gelecek incelmeye bağlı ortaya çıkabilecek sorunlara karşı en yüksek duyarlı tutumu gösterirken; en düşük tutum puanı ortalaması ülkelerin doğal kaynaklarını kullanmaları konusunda küresel çevre örgütleri de dahil hiçbir yabancı kurumun ülkelere müdahale etmesini uygun bulmadıkları şeklindedir.

China’s Indigenous Peoples? How Global Environmentalism Unintentionally Smuggled the Notion of Indigeneity into China

This article explores how global environmental organizations unintentionally fostered the notion of indigenous people and rights in a country that officially opposed these concepts. In the 1990s, Beijing declared itself a supporter of indigenous rights elsewhere, but asserted that, unlike the Americas and Australia, China had no indigenous people. Instead, China described itself as a land of “ethnic minority” groups, not indigenous groups. In some sense, the state’s declaration appeared effective, as none of these ethnic minority groups launched significant grassroots efforts to align themselves with the international indigenous rights movement. At the same time, as international environmental groups increased in number and strength in 1990s China, their policies were undergoing significant transformations to more explicitly support indigenous people. This article examines how this challenging situation arose, and discusses the unintended consequences after a major environmental organization, The Nature Conservancy (TNC), carried out a project using the language of indigeneity in China.

Revitalizing Global Environmental Governance for Climate Change

Whether the December 2009 negotiations in Copenhagen produce or real success (1)--that is to say, merely a foundation for further negotiations or a full-blown new post-Kyoto Protocol climate change agreement--the world seems headed for a period of extraordinary international environmental activity with implications for every nation, community, business, and individual on the planet. The scale, complexity, and potential cost of responding to the threat of climate change make this a policy challenge of unprecedented proportions. And it is becoming increasingly clear that the worldwide effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and mitigate the threat of global warming and related problems, including changed rainfall patterns, melting polar ice, sea-level rise, and increased intensity of windstorms, will not be successful without significant institutional support at the global scale. The existing global environmental governance system, centered on the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) in Nairobi, is by almost all accounts not up to the task of managing the response to climate change. UNEP suffers from a vague mandate, severe budget constraints, limited analytic capacity, and other human resource challenges as well as a lack of political support. UNEP has a record of success in some respects, notably in shepherding the process that led to the Montreal Protocol and a series of subsequent amendments that helped phase out chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) and other chemicals that threatened the world's protective ozone layer. But in recent years, UNEP has not been a major player on climate change. Indeed, fragmentation is one of the fundamental problems of our current regime of global environmental Dozens of organizations have some degree of environmental responsibility, including the UN Commission on Sustainable Development, UN Development Programme (UNDP), the World Bank and other multilateral development banks, and numerous environmental treaty secretariats. But these various entities often do not play well together. There has been little attempt to set consistent priorities, achieve a systematic division of labor, rationalize budgets, or pursue synergies across issues. Moreover, there has been little policy coordination between global-scale economic decisionmaking and parallel efforts at worldwide environmental protection. A successful global response to climate change will therefore require broad-scale revitalization of the global environmental governance regime. (2) In fact, the urgent need for strengthened environmental cooperation across the world in response to climate change offers an opportunity to rethink global governance more broadly. In this regard, now may be the time to launch a Global Environmental Organization (GEO), based on a new international organization model. Rather than a ramped-up UNEP, I envision a GEO that is leaner and more focused, and which subsumes existing environmental treaty secretariats and consolidates within it the UN Commission on Sustainable Development. It would have a small permanent staff in Geneva and a substantial virtual presence, drawing in expertise from around the world in an evolving set of global public policy networks. To be effective, the new international organization would need clear goals, a compelling set of core principles, carefully specified functions and capacities, and a strong commitment to good governance. Goals Any reform of the global environmental governance structure needs to emphasize effectiveness, efficiency, and equity. These goals seem straightforward, yet past international environmental policy cooperation efforts have fallen short on all three of these elements. With a few notable exceptions (such as the Montreal Protocol), the existing regime has produced many meetings and some agreements, but few concrete improvements in environmental performance. Principles Successful international organizations have clear guiding principles. …

The Climate Commons and a Global Environmental Organization

The Climate Commons and a Global Environmental Organization C. Ford Runge (bio) Over the period 2000 to 2008, the United States maintained a largely hostile posture toward multilateralism, ranging from military adventurism to rejection of international norms for human rights and climate change. Its support for the Doha Round of multilateral trade negotiations was undercut by a failure to live up to global commitments to foreign assistance (the Millennium Challenge) and protectionist and retrograde 2008 agricultural legislation. If this experience shows America anything, it is that renouncing its role as a constructive multilateral leader (dating to 1945) has been a disaster for its foreign policy and the esteem in which it is held. This desultory period is now at an end, and a fresh start can be imagined in which U.S. leadership over multilateralism returns. One of the most pressing challenges relates to global climate change and atmospheric carbon emissions. This issue is emblematic of environmental challenges that are transboundary in nature, in which sovereign nations must coordinate effective interventions with one another. These issues of global commons, of which the climate commons may be the most urgent, may provide an opportunity to push forward an agenda of institutional change. The specific change considered here is the creation of a Global Environmental Organization (GEO), which can give authority and responsibility to multilateral climate negotiations. My argument is that the creation of new multilateral institutions responding to global environmental challenges such as climate change is imperative. Fortunately, though these institutions would be new, their rationale and even their structure can be guided by experience with multilateral trade and commercial transactions, notably the World Trade Organization (WTO) and General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) system and the International Labor Organization (ILO).1 Just as the GATT/WTO emerged from the postwar conferences [End Page 139] as a rules-based response to global commercial interdependence, and an earlier ILO from global labor solidarity, so multilateral responses to environmental challenges reflect a growing recognition of nations' ecological interdependence, and a need for rules to coordinate their responses to these global challenges. This chapter is organized in five sections. First is a brief review of the trade-environment nexus and the rationale for global environmental rules over climate that can coexist with trade regimes. Second is a specific proposal for a GEO, a major responsibility of which would be to coordinate nations' responses to climate change. Third is an appraisal of the implementation of a GEO. Fourth is special consideration of the role of developing countries. A final section offers conclusions. The Trade-Environment Nexus In the last two decades, strident criticisms have been leveled at multilateral institutions such as the WTO, describing them as faceless international bureaucracies with programs harmful to the environment.2 Although hostile to multilateral institutions, these criticisms raise the question: If not these institutions, then what others? Though many criticisms of the global economy and global institutions may have merit, it is hard to think of a future in which trade and global institutions, or issues of environment, will play little or no part. Accordingly, the task is to redefine objectives in a global economy, and to restructure institutions to meet these objectives, especially the urgent challenge of climate change. The climate change debate has played out, like many other transboundary environmental issues, as a multilateral negotiation over a protocol agreement, the Kyoto Protocol of the Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC) adopted December 11, 1997, which entered into force in February 2005. As of May 2008, 182 parties had ratified the protocol, including 36 developed and 137 developing countries (the United States is the only developed country not to have ratified it). Kyoto commits countries to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide and five other greenhouse gases (GHGs) or to engage in emissions trading to offset such commitments. Partly due to a failure of leadership by the United States, and partly due to exemptions written into the agreement for developing countries, especially large GHG emitters such as China, the protocol has been roundly criticized. [End Page 140] This chapter argues that successful multilateral environmental agreements on climate change, as well as many other transboundary environmental issues, may require...

A language perspective to environmental management and corporate responsibility

AbstractFew environmental management scholars have applied a research approach that focuses on analysing the language use through which managers and other societal actors come to describe, explain or otherwise account for environmental and social problems. This article discusses some of the important benefits that treating linguistic materials as ‘sites of language use’ offers for studying corporate responsibilities in various societal challenges such as climate change, biodiversity loss and poverty. Findings from a longitudinal discourse analysis of the debate between a leading global forest industry company (Stora Enso) and a global environmental organization (Greenpeace) demonstrate the utility of a research approach that focuses on the discussants' language use. The article shows how the application of a language perspective opens up new avenues for understanding how certain ways of talking about corporate responsibilities may hinder or facilitate our efforts to steer corporate actions into a more balanced relationship with nature and society. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.

The Unintended Consequences of Clarification: Development, Disputing, and the Dynamics of Community in Ranongga, Solomon Islands

Outside agencies working in the Solomon Islands—whether a postwar land commission or a late-twentieth-century global environmental organization—have consistently called for the clarification of property rights as the necessary starting point for any form of economic development. Many residents of Ranongga, a small mountainous island in the Western Solomons, are eager to have their territorial rights recognized by national and international organizations and by other islanders. Yet transforming complex, crosscutting, localized relationships into abstract rights that are commensurable, predictable, and knowable to outsiders raises major political and ethical dilemmas for Ranonggan leaders. As in other Oceanic polities, the true people of the land are supposed to generously welcome foreigners. Aggressively claiming exclusive rights for oneself or one's group would effectively alienate those others who are necessary for a properly functioning polity. Clarification—however necessary for the workings of a capitalist economy—thus threatens to undermine the tenuous achievement of unity that Ranonggans see as the prerequisite to peace, prosperity, and (as they understand it) development.

The Innovative North American Commission for Environmental Cooperation

The North American Commission for Environmental Cooperation (the NACEC or CEC) is an innovative international environmental institution in three important ways. It is the first international organization created to address the environmental aspects of economic integration. It is a regional environmental institution with powerful tools and almost unlimited jurisdiction. And it provides unprecedented opportunities for participation by civil society at the international level. In each of these respects, the Commission addresses critical international concerns. The effort to reconcile environmental protection and economic integration has become one of the flashpoints of international discourse; although rarely raised before 1990, since then environmental objections to trade and investment agreements have nearly prevented ratification of the North American Free Trade Agreement, contributed to the abandonment of talks aimed at a Multilateral Agreement on Investment, and helped lead to the 1999 Seattle riots that accompanied the failed effort to begin a new round of World Trade Organization negotiations. At the same time, the international community has become more aware of the interdependence of ecological systems and the need for international institutions to protect the environment. Despite the proliferation of environment policies effectively and the handful of regional environmental organizations are relatively powerless. With respect to economic integration and environmental protection, as well as many other areas of international cooperation, nations are struggling to respond to the demands of their citizens to participate in the development and implementation of international policies that affect them. The Commission is important because it provides creative answers to each of these issues. Its answers may or may not prove satisfactory but, either way, the lessons to be drawn from its experience should be of great value to all those trying to reconcile environmental protection and economic integration, to promote stronger regional and global environmental organizations, and to find ways for civil society to participate in international policy. The agreement creating the CEC has already been used as a model for bilateral agreements between Canada and Chile and between the United States and Jordan. Surprisingly, however, the Commission has received relatively little scholarly attention. Although political scientists and lawyers have described its relationship to NAFTA and have analyzed its submissions procedure, there are few comprehensive analyses of how it is fulfilling, or failing to fulfill, its mandates. This book is intended to fill that gap.

The Environmental Movement and the Modes of Political Action

There have been widely differing claims about how environmental groups attempt to reform environmental policy—from those who see the movement as challenging the prevailing social paradigm through confrontation and violence, to those who lament the movement's reliance on conventional styles of political persuasion. This article uses data from the 1998 Global Environmental Organizations Survey (GEOS) to map the political activities used by environmental groups across the globe and to determine what best accounts for these patterns of action. The authors examine the responses of 248 environmental groups in the GEOS; these data allow the authors to compare environmental group behaviors across 59 nations and 5 continents. They find that most environmental groups engage in a mixture of political methods and activities. Although there is little evidence that institutional structures influence participation, the mix of organizational resources and ideology are potent influences on participation patterns. The results help to explain the role that environmental groups play in contemporary politics and the factors that affect this role.

The Case Against a New International Environmental Organization

[World Organizations] are credited with an importance they do not possess; they are blamed for not doing what they are not given the means to do; faults that are often imaginary are ascribed to them, while their real faults go unnoticed; mythical explanations are invented to explain their ineffectiveness; and finally, there is very little recognition of the few significant results that they do achieve. (1) --Maurice Bertrand The premise of this article is that the current debate about global environmental governance with its still dominant focus on establishing a superorganization for the environment represents a serious misdiagnosis of the issues, is unfair to the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), and is likely to distract attention from other more important challenges of global environmental governance. This is not to suggest that there is no crisis of global environmental governance. The crisis, however, is one of governance, of which organizational structure is but one element and, in this case, a relatively small element at that. (2) By coopting the larger discussions on global environmental governance, the discourse on organizational tinkering-under whatever grandiose name such proposals are advertised--are distracting from the more important and immediate challenges of global environmental governance that we face as the Rio compact on environment and development crumbles around us. The thought that any of the competing plans for a World, or Global, Environmental Organization (WEO or GEO) that are being peddled might actually be taken seriously by the world's governments--as it sometimes seems possible--is even more disturbing. (3) Not only do they show very little promise of actually doing much good to the cause of improved global environmental governance, but some could actually do harm by distracting international attention from more pressing issues. It is not the purpose of this article to reexamine, or critique, the details of different schemes for organizational restructuring. Critiques are available elsewhere in the larger literature. (4) Moreover, to do so would be to cede to the premise on which such proposals are based, and it is that very premise that needs to be questioned. It should be noted, however, that there is a certain variety in the proposals--ranging from Daniel C. Esty's GEO, which would focus only on global issues; (5) to Frank Biermann's WEO, which would also incorporate more local concerns; (6) to John Whalley and Ben Zissimos's desire to create a global bargaining-based entity; (7) to David L. Downie and Marc A. Levy's notion of a super-UNEP. (8) However, all such schemes share a strong supposition that the problem of global environmental governance can largely be reduced to, and resolved by, playing around with the design of global environmental organizations. It is the fundamental flaws of this premise, and the dangers of taking it too seriously, that I focus on in this article. The Dangers of Confusing Institutions and Organizations Although the WEO/GEO literature routinely refers to its enterprise in terms of institutions, it tends to use the term as if it were the plural of organization. (9) The distinction, of course, is not merely semantic; it is well established in the literature and is absolutely critical to this context. (10) Institutions, as Konrad von Moltke reminds us, are social conventions or 'rules of the game,' in the sense that marriage is an institution, or property, markets, research, transparency or participation. (11) Therefore, institutions need not necessarily have a physical existence. Organizations, on the other hand, are much more circumscribed; according to Oran Young, they are material entities, possessing physical locations (or seats), offices, personnel, equipment, and budgets. (12) The WEO/GEO discourse is clearly preoccupied with organizations and often ignores fundamental questions about why environmental degradation happens, or why global cooperation founders, or even why global environmental governance is a good idea. …

Bioprospecting: from theory to practice (and back again)

This paper critically assesses the theory and practice of biodiversity prospecting in the developing world. Taking the case of perhaps the most famous bioprospecting broker – Costa Rica's National Institute of Biodiversity – rival theoretical discourses on the ‘selling nature to save it’ approach to environmental conservation are unpacked. This approach, currently de rigueur in mainstream global environmental organizations, is touted by its advocates in the academic and policy world as an effective tool for ‘green developmentalism’. For a cohort of university‐based left critics, however, bioprospecting is one more troubling example of ‘post‐modern ecological capital’ in action, representing the further commodification of nature for profit purposes. By treating the rival theoretical discourses on bioprospecting produced by differently situated knowledge communities as objects of analysis, the paper asks fundamental questions about the grounds on which evaluations of bioprospecting might be made. It is argued that the radical critique buys its logical and moral power at the expense of its practical relevance, while advocates of selling biodiversity have made their case with only limited empirical persuasiveness. On the basis of a heuristic distinction between immanent and external critique, the paper seeks to put the evaluation of bioprospecting in particular, and green developmentalism more generally, on a new cognitive and normative footing. In so doing it impinges on recent debates over the wider relevance of ‘critical’ thinking in human geography and cognate fields in the current conjuncture.

Organizing for Effective Environmental Cooperation

ffective environmental protection requires both formulation of rules and policy commitments that encourage behavior improving envi JL?^ronmental quality and implementation of what is agreed. Either by itself will not suffice: complete implementation of poorly conceived rules and policies yields little or no environmental benefit, while fitful action vitiates the effect of well-formulated directives. Thus, securing effective environmental protection requires development of institutional mecha nisms to identify weaknesses in implementation by encouraging better ef forts, reviewing how well the rules and policy commitments are actually serving the overall goal of environmental protection, and revising to im prove them. The international conditions?both systemwide and sectoral or issue specific?that affect the success of international cooperation and the shape of intergovernmental organizations have been the subject of a growing body of scholarly literature. The continuing decentralization of governance in the international system, best symbolized in the principle of state sovereignty, establishes the need for cooperation. The ecological, infor mational, and economic interconnections among states create incentives for cooperation. And the strong deference accorded to scientific modes of reasoning in comprehending environmental problems provides a common language for discussing them.1 The ease of obtaining cooperation and the exact form it takes depend heavily on sectoral or issue-specific conditions?the nature of the cooper ation required (in particular, coordination or collaboration); the shape of the distributions of gains and losses accruing to individual actors involved in the cooperative effort; the number and types of actors involved; the available information about preferences, behavior, and relevant world con ditions; and the relative rate of change in world conditions. All these con ditions influence when cooperation will be attempted and what institu tional forms will be adopted to help maintain it.2 Several experienced policymakers and scholarly observers have advo cated creating a single global environmental organization to address every environmental issue through all phases of the policy process.3 Their pro posals have not yet won broad support, however. Several factors account for

95/05322 Greening the GATT - trade, environment, and the future

There is growing consensus that new international rules and principles are needed to reconcile conflicts, and promote complementarities, between trade and environmental goals. The issue is especially acute for very poor countries striving for rapid economic growth. Esty, a former Environmental Protection Agency official with extensive experience in trade and environmental negotiations, examines the vital connections between trade, environment and development. He argues that current international trade rules and institutions must be significantly reformed to address environmental concerns while still promoting economic growth and development. Esty offers new international rules and principles to help make trade and environmental policies work together to better achieve sustainable economic progress. He concludes with recommendations for a Global Environmental Organization (GEO) to promote simultaneous achievement of trade environmental goals.