The Roads from Rio: Lessons Learned from Twenty Years of Multilateral Environmental Negotiations ed. by Pamela S. Chasek and Lynn M. Wagner (review)

In The Roads from Rio, reporters for the Earth Negotiations Bulletin (ENB) bring together their expertise to identify two decades of trends in global environmental negotiations. The authors report on official events throughout the life cycle of various global environmental regimes. Their purview includes negotiation of treaties and protocols, as well as conferences and meetings of the parties once those agreements are in place. They do not directly assess state actions, such as compliance behavior, outside of these official discussions. This framework plays into ENB expertise covering both treaty negotiations and subsequent meetings. For those seeking important research questions in global environmental politics, this book provides a wealth of possibilities.

As with most edited volumes, the diverse projects included in this book each deserve an individual assessment, but this review attempts instead to bring them together under one overarching framework. These chapters are bound together by a common effort to describe twenty years of change from the 1992 Rio Earth Summit to the 2012 UN Conference on Sustainable Development. Together the authors chronicle the evolution of negotiating processes, participants, and issues within global environmental regimes. Unlike much work in the field,² this volume does not set out to explain these changes, but rather to carefully describe them. In addition to demonstrating temporal patterns, this book reiterates how useful a resource ENB—many volumes of which are cited in each chapter—can be for empirical research on environmental negotiations. While the book is descriptive in nature, a few explanatory hypotheses are suggested. For example, Deborah Davenport et al. question the conditions under which a range of informal negotiating processes enhance trust and therefore negotiating success. Lynn M. Wagner et al. propose that unstable bargaining coalitions block consensus, and Sikina Jinnah and Alexandra Conliffe identify four motivations for multilateral negotiating bodies to develop linkages with climate change.

Hypothesis-testing is clearly not the main goal of this volume, however, nor do the authors claim to test these explanations. Instead, this book provides an empirical record and leaves causality to future research efforts. As experienced reporters, the authors are well placed to present details of these processes over time and across diverse issue areas. Indeed, their rich description provides a great deal for other scholars to explain in the coming years. Each of the trends they observe, from increased negotiation to shifting implementation mechanisms, may explain other regime outcomes. For instance, the authors elucidate the wide variety of possible scientific, bureaucratic, and NGO participation frameworks that may affect negotiation outcomes.

Similarly, the issues section avoids simply presenting topics that have received attention in new multilateral environmental agreements (MEAs). Instead, these chapters point toward shifts within the existing regimes. The extensive overlap between MEAs and issues of trade and climate receives special attention. Definitional disputes and varied implementation processes are also considered as sources of complexity that may slow negotiations. In addition to their influence on global environmental politics in general, each of these shifts is also worthy of being explained in its own right. As such, this book also provides a series of dependent variables (e.g., linkage decisions, secretariat involvement) that could greatly expand the study of international institutions more generally.

At least thirteen different negotiating processes are covered in this volume. This diversity is the book’s greatest strength as well as its one minor flaw. Coverage of all these topics provides an opportunity for comparative analysis and categorization. For those who are not familiar enough with these processes after their introduction in the main text, the appendix provides a brief summary of each agreement. This step, along with only limited use of jargon, makes the volume accessible even for those without experience in this field.

On the other hand, only the Convention on Biological Diversity is addressed in every empirical chapter, and each of its protocols represents a separate negotiating process with different...