2015 Conference

Full Presentation Panel

International and domestic environmental policies are inextricably linked in many respects.  Some issues necessarily warrant a global response, such as ozone depletion and climate change.  The causes and impacts of other issues may be contained within national borders, but nevertheless are linked indirectly to other countries through globalization as information, knowledge, technology, and goods flow across borders.  How do international politics and multilateral agreements shape domestic policies?  How do political identities shape how we respond to environmental threats?  Through what mechanisms are policies and norms diffused?  This panel explores these questions through international and domestic policy linkages across a diversity of countries and range of issues, from food security to forest policy, from environmental enforcement to public participation.  Panelists consider the variation across space and time, as well as through different stages of the policy process: what initial conditions influence policy linkages and transfer?  And, what is the role of environmental performance measurement in shaping environmental policy?  Extending beyond the boundaries of environmental policies, panelists also explore the impact of investment, trade, and aid on the environment.

Investments by Gulf Cooperation Council countries in food security programs in the Middle East and Africa: Challenges and opportunities

Remi Piet

This paper analyzes the different food security programs and large scale investments in agricultural production recently
implemented by several Gulf Cooperation Council countries (Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the UAE) in the Middle East and
Africa. It builds on a oneyear long research initiative supported by the United Nations FAO office in Cairo to engage
international institutional actors and encourage the dissemination of efficient crops in the MENA region, such as quinoa. This
paper assesses the compatibility of such agricultural developments with individual GCC national food security initiatives and
focuses on the opportunity they offer for local development through microcredit programs. It also addresses the risks of land
grabbing, the impact on local needs and processes as well as the evolution of traditional societal and economic structures.
Using a comparative approach and a multi case study framework, this paper underlines best practices and the potential for the
mitigation of negative externalities. It also aims at contributing to the sustainable development of the region while answering the
objectives of GCC countries’ food security programs.

Disentangling Siberia's Changing Identities

Matthew Knight

Siberia, Russia’s main frontier, is marked with the distortion of a scaleless spacetime, vast and mostly invisible. A land once dominated by the Tartars and Genghis Khan has seen a population shift from expansionists to those existing on the fringe to a deracinated population forgotten by the Kremlin. As in American frontier regions, outsiders from more densely populated places politically dominate Siberia. The outsiders, treasure hunters in many respects, construct much of its identity because the region’s vastness, inhospitality, and unlimited potential intrigue them. The Siberian frontier has given Russian leaders visions of utter exploitation and near-total domestication. Flexing imperial muscles further constructs the Siberian identity as a place where steely determination subdues a previously unyielding nature.

Taming Siberia has proven almost impossible. As climate change tempers its rigors, how will Russia’s petrocrats treat its possibilities? Will they create a new identity driven by the destiny of reclaiming the land and its resources from nature’s icy grip? What will become of its mostly-urban population, about a quarter of the Russian total? Which regional identities, places, and groups will emerge or dwindle as climate change allows new forms of development, specifically assertive Russian exploitation of Siberia which may put economic pressure on the U.S. and other northern players?

Siberian climate change suggests economic, cultural and possibly military conflict with China, a new world power needing raw materials for its rapid industrialization. Can Russia maintain its current Siberian frontier? Or, will the region revert to its pre-Muscovite state as a place of continual contestation?  Through analysis of the policies of Imperial, Soviet and Republican Russian toward Siberia, I will argue that tracking Siberia’s constructed, political identities will aid in understanding the environmental fate of a globally scaled piece of land set within a nation that confuses its own European and Asian identities.

Linking the global to the national: An application of the international pathways model to examine the influence of international environmental agreements on Cameroon’s forest policy

Richard Mbatu, Ph.D.

Cameroon’s tropical forest cover is one of the largest in the world. It is home to some of the world’s rarest plant and animal species.  However, the country has suffered extensive forest loss for many decades as a result of socio-economic and political factors. The growing global concern for the health of the world’s forests and related global issues has placed pressure on Cameroon to sustainably manage its forests. The intricacies of domestic and international pressures on Cameroon’s forest sector means that policy-makers have to take into consideration the dynamics of the domestic-international nexus in developing the country’s forest policies. The increasingly integrated global governance of the world’s forests – international agreements, protocols and treaties, international program, international institutions, international actors, and international norms – together constitute international policy regimes that have influenced the direction of Cameroon’s forest policy. Employing the international pathways framework model, an analytic model which describes how transnational actors and international institutions affect domestic policies and policy making, this paper examines the extent to which international environmental agreements (IEAs) have influenced the direction of Cameroon’s forest policy and policy-making. The application of the international pathways model facilitated analytic review and allowed for a better understanding of how Cameroon has utilized the complex global forest governance arrangements to enhance its domestic forest policy. 

Environmental Norm Diffusion through Trade Agreements: A New Wave of Environmental Conditionality

Abby Lindsay

This paper is interested in how preferential trade agreements (PTAs) are used to diffuse environmental policies and norms from developed to developing countries. Centrally, we argue that the US uses PTAs as vehicles to coercively diffuse environmental norms and policies that have long been central to US environmental policy making. Specifically, we show how the US used the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA), and the US-Peru Trade Promotion Agreement (TPA) as vehicles to diffuse norms of public participation in environmental policy making, and effective enforcement of environmental laws. We focus on these two norms because we find them consistently across most US PTAs, however we also highlight the agreement-specific environmental norms/policies diffused in each of our three cases. We argue that these provisions represent a second wave of environmental conditionalities –this time through trade rather than aid.  Given the increasingly deep integration on environmental issues the US is pursuing through PTAs and cautionary lessons we have from the literature on conditional aid, it is surprising how little scholarship has examined the expanding scope of environmental governance through PTAs.

Does measurement matter? Assessing policy impact of the Environmental Performance Index

Alisa Zomer

Environmental challenges, just like ecosystems, are not confined to geopolitical borders. The space within and across jurisdictional boundaries, however, can serve as important units to collect data to measure, monitor, and promote improved environmental performance. Synthesizing examples from existing literature and from the experience of the Environmental Performance Index (EPI), a biennial ranking of 178 countries across 20 environmental indicators, the goal of this paper is to critically examine where national environmental performance indicators and composite indices are contributing to national policy and decision-making processes. This article will accomplish this by examining several aspects of national and subnational environmental performance indicators: their relationship with scientific knowledge, role in shaping policy, as well as limits and challenges to their application and utility. To examine evidence of how indicators shape the policy process, we look at case studies where national governments have replicated and adapted the EPI framework at the subnational scale. Despite challenges in constructing national and sub-national indicators that, in some ways, arbitrarily constrain cross-border environmental issues, indicators prove to be useful policy tools for management. We demonstrate that indicators provide an effective method to assess baseline environmental performance, track progress towards policy goals, and reveal gaps and weaknesses in environmental data systems. Furthermore, the integration of indicators, both quantitative and qualitative, into national environmental policies shows efforts to bring scientific rigor to analyzing environmental performance.