A World Environment Organization: Solution or Threat for Effective International Environmental Governance? (review)

The possibility of a World Environmental Organization (WEO) has been a hot topic recently among scholars of global environmental politics. Arguments both for and against a fundamental reorganization of the institutional structure of international environmental governance, by both scholars and practitioners, have appeared in a variety of venues, including this journal. The self-proclaimed goal of Biermann and Bauer's A World Environmental Organization is to make both sides of this debate available in one volume, rather than add new arguments to those already on the table. In this goal, the volume succeeds admirably. It makes both the arguments for both sides, and the historical and institutional context of those arguments, available to the reader in one place.

The volume is organized in three parts. The first is designed to put the debate into a broader institutional and historical context. First the editors review the academic debate on the topic. The second chapter, by Lorraine Elliot, provides a history of the development of the institutional structure of international environmental governance. The third, by Joyeeta Gupta, examines the question specifically from the perspective of the global South. It makes the argument that the South must create a united negotiating front across all structures of global governance. Whatever the merits of this argument in its own terms, it does not, as all the other chapters do, focus specifically on the question of a world environmental organization.

The second part of the volume makes the case for a world environmental organization. Steve Charnovitz argues that a WEO is necessary as an institutional competitor to major international organizations in other issue-areas, particularly the World Trade Organization (WTO). Frank Biermann makes the case for promoting UNEP from its current status as a program within the UN to a specialized agency, politically and financially independent of the UN. This, he argues, would give it broader capabilities, akin to those of the WTO, the World Health Organization (WHO), or the International Labour Organization (ILO). John Kirton suggests that this is the wrong model, that in fact the global North should create an international organization modeled on the Commission for Environmental Cooperation (CEC) of the North American Free Trade Area, rather than on the global specialized agencies.

All three of these chapters use existing organizations as models, without adequately addressing the question of whether they are appropriate models. Charnovitz asks why trade has a single organization, the WTO, whereas the environment does not. But one might argue that the appropriate equivalent to the environment is the economy generally, rather than trade specifically, and the economy is represented by a plethora of international organizations, organized in a wide variety of ways in response to the varying needs of different issue-areas within the realm of international economic governance. Biermann sees the WHO and ILO as examples of successful specialized agencies, but does not even attempt to make the case that international governance is superior in health and labor than in environmental issues. And Kirton holds up as a model the CEC, without addressing arguments that the successes of the CEC have been quite modest.

The third part of the book presents three arguments against a WEO. Konrad von Moltke argues that environmental issues are different enough from each other that having one organization to oversee all of them does not make sense. He proposes "clustering" of existing structures rather than the creation of new ones. Sebastian Oberthür and Thomas Gehring point to some of the disadvantages of large bureaucratic structures, and the advantages of bureaucratic competition. And Adil Najam suggests that what he calls "organizational tinkering" misses the point, that the problem is one of political will rather than organizational structure.

There are a number of themes that appear in this volume that do not neatly covary with the pro- and anti-WEO divide. One of these is the question of whether the problem in international environmental governance is essentially bureaucratic or political. Both Biermann and...