The Global Environment and World Politics (review)

In this well-written second edition of her book, Elizabeth DeSombre presents a broad but focused analysis of the ways in which global environmental politics and policy interact with and alter the larger system of world politics. While anchored in international relations (IR) theory, the book draws in four aspects that are central to the intersection between these two systems or regimes: international environmental cooperation; the issues of science, uncertainty, and risk; the experience of developing states in global environmental negotiations; and the role of non-state actors. These variables constitute DeSombre’s working framework for examining each of her empirical chapter-length case studies on ozone depletion and global climate change, the politics of whaling, the protection of Amazonian biodiversity, and acid rain in Europe and elsewhere.

The audience is not specified, but the book appears to be aimed at students taking a basic course in global environmental issues grounded in international relations, and as a result, it is not theoretically adventurous. DeSombre’s coverage of the four case studies is sound and well-informed, but her overall conclusions and the arguments she advances are relatively straightforward and are also expressed in other basic books in this burgeoning field of political and policy analysis. Thus she argues that “environmental politics poses challenges to a lot of traditional thinking about international relations” (p. 5), including the idea of sovereignty, the role of cooperation, and the role of non-state actors, compared to state-centric, security-dominated approaches. But she also cautions the reader not to forget the lessons that traditional IR theory can provide. There is of course nothing inherently wrong or unimportant about these now-familiar lines of argument. But not surprisingly in this kind of basic book—even for the audience it seems aimed at—some aspects of global environmental politics are underplayed when they need not be. The discussion of global environmental cooperation is basically good, but it fails to provide a compact account of stages that environmental protocol-setting goes through or a sense of how many agreements are now in play, and of the growing interconnections in managing them.

The analysis of science, uncertainty, and risk covers some of the basics quite well, but it lacks even a brief discussion about the conflicts between the norms of sound science preferred in the international trade regime compared to the broader norms that anchor the environmental regime. The relative roles of normal R&D compared to so-called “related science activities” (science for monitoring and regulatory governance) need some mention as well as the dilemmas now faced increasingly by NGOs regarding where they get their science from. The growing level of complexity of science (trans-science and interdisciplinary science) across the four case studies also needs more explicit discussion.

A final dilemma warrants mention. This book is anchored in international relations theory, which tends to focus initially on nation-states. But global environmental governance quintessentially and increasingly involves multilevel governance and multilevel regulation and complex regulatory regimes. In increasingly explicit ways, it requires action by, and diverse kinds of “global” politics involving, subnational jurisdictions (states, provinces), local governments (especially big cities), and specially created spatial institutions that do not obey traditional notions of political boundaries. Even though there are glimpses of this in DeSombre’s case studies, these dimensions need to be elevated as a more explicit element, both by the readers of this book and by the author when the time comes for a third edition.